The Pentagon's Brain (49 page)

The Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, or MAARS robot kills human targets from almost two miles away. MAARS robots have motion detectors, acoustic sensors, siren and speaker systems, non-lethal laser dazzlers, less-than-lethal grenades, and encryption technology to make the robotic killer “extremely safe and tamper proof,” says DARPA. (U.S. Army)

DARPA Headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, bears no identifying signs and maintains a “force protection environment,” for security purposes. (Author’s collection)

The Pentagon. (U.S. Department of Defense, photo by Senior Airman Perry Aston)

The Pentagon’s Brain
begins in 1954 with defense scientists who worked on the hydrogen bomb and ends in 2015 with defense scientists who work on robots, cyborgs, and biohybrids. In researching a book about extreme science, one very human nonscientific story stands out. Richard “Rip” Jacobs shared it with me during an interview. Jacobs was a member of the VO-67 Navy squadron whose job it was to lay down military sensors on the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. I write about the experiences of Jacobs and his fellow airmen from Crew Seven earlier in this book; they were shot down over enemy territory on February 27, 1968. Two were killed, the rest of them—somewhat miraculously—survived.

Forty-two years later, in 2010, sixty-six-year-old Rip Jacobs had just finished playing golf and was walking back to his car, parked in the Lake Hefner Golf Club parking lot in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, when he spotted a bumper sticker on a nearby car. In an instant, billions of neurons fired in his brain as memory flooded back. The bumper sticker contained the logo of the Jolly Green Giants, the helicopter search and rescue squadrons from the Vietnam War.

Rip Jacobs stared at the image. As his neurons sparked he remembered being tangled up in a tree in the jungle canopy over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, forty-two years earlier. After parachuting
out of a crashing aircraft, Jacobs had landed in the trees with his parachute’s lanyards wrapped around him in a way that made it impossible for him to wriggle free. Everything hurt. He was covered in blood. Immobile, and with his senses heightened, he remembered hearing the dreaded sounds of small arms fire on the ground as Vietcong searched for him. In his memory, Rip Jacobs recalled the internal panic he felt decades before over whether or not he’d set off his locator button. If he had, there was a chance that a Jolly Green helicopter might be able to locate and rescue him. If he hadn’t, surely he’d die. And then he remembered hearing the whap-whap-whap of the Jolly Green helicopter blades and knowing that his fellow Americans were coming to rescue him. Forty-two years had passed, but as Rip Jacobs stood there in the golf club parking lot, he could almost see the little seat come out of the helicopter, see the two arms that reached out for him back on February 27, 1968. Then the memory was gone.

“I found a pen and paper and I left a note on the windshield of the car,” Rip Jacobs recalls. “In the note I said something like, ‘if you know anything about the Jolly Green Giants in Vietnam, please call me.’ I signed my name.”

That night the phone rang.

The person on the telephone line introduced himself as Chief Master Sergeant Clarence Robert Boles Jr. “He said he was eighty-six years old,” Jacobs remembers. “He said I’d left a note on his car.”

Rip Jacobs asked Clarence Boles if he knew anything about the Jolly Greens in Vietnam. Boles said, “I was with one of the Jolly Greens working out of Nakhon Phanom, Thailand.” Then Boles said something astounding. “In fact,” Bole said, “I recognize your name. I was the guy that rescued you out of that tree.”

How could that be?

Clarence Boles drove over to Rip Jacobs’s house. The local television news channel came too. The reporters filmed a segment on the amazing, chance reunion of the two former Vietnam veterans,
after forty-two years. Back during the Vietnam War, when Rip Jacobs was in the rescue helicopter, after Boles had cut his parachute lanyards with his knife, Jacobs never said a word. He was in shock. But Clarence Boles kept a list of the names of every person his Jolly Green team rescued that day and all the other days. And for decades, Boles had been telling the story of the person he’d rescued from the tree. Boles never imagined he’d meet the man he rescued again and he didn’t particularly feel the need to search him out. It was a story from the past, a moment in a war. The incident in the golf club parking lot was an astonishing coincidence that brought the two men together again. And to think that they were living in nearby towns in Oklahoma, just a few dozen miles away from each other.

How could that be? It’s hard to explain some things. Not every answer is found in science. Some of the most mysterious and powerful puzzles are simply about being human.

Researching and reporting this book required the assistance of many individuals who generously shared their wisdom and experiences with me. I wish to thank all the scientists, engineers, government officials, defense contractors, academics, soldiers, sailors, and warfighters who spoke to me on the record and all those who spoke on background and asked not to be named. I thank Joan Dulles Talley, Murph Goldberger, and Michael Goldblatt for allowing me to interview them in their homes. Thank you Garrett Kenyon, Paul Zak, Sue Bryant, and David Gardiner for inviting me into their laboratories. I thank Peter Garretson for arranging for Gale Anne Hurd, Chris Carter, Dori Carter, and me to come to the Pentagon. Thanks to David A. Bray for inviting the four of us to join his group for Chinese food. Thank you Fred Hareland for taking me to China Lake, Damon Northrop for showing me around SpaceX, and Robert Lowell for the visit to JPL. Thank you Dr. Steve Bein for your generosity with the introductions. I thank Finn Aaserud for compiling the Jason scientists’ oral histories in the
1980s; this book benefited greatly as a result. And thank you Richard Van Atta for taking the time to speak with me and for stewarding so much of the historical record on DARPA over the past several decades.

At the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, I would like to thank Richard Peuser, David Fort, and Eric Van Slander. At the National Archives at Riverside, thank you Matthew Law and Aaron Prah. Thank you Aaron Graves, Major Eric D. Badger, and Sue Gough in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; Thomas D. Kunkle and Kevin Neil Roark, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Karen Laney, National Nuclear Security Administration; Byron Ristvet, Defense Threat Reduction Agency; Christopher Banks, LBJ Library; Eric J. Butterbaugh, DARPA Public Affairs; Robert Hoback, U.S. Secret Service; Chris Grey, USA Criminal Investigation Command (CID), Quantico, VA; Pamela Patterson, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

I am most grateful to the team. Thank you John Parsley, Jim Hornfischer, Steve Younger, Tiffany Ward, Nicole Dewey, Liz Garriga, Malin von Euler-Hogan, Morgan Moroney, Heather Fain, Michael Noon, Amanda Heller, and Allison Warner. Thank you Alice and Tom Soininen, Kathleen and Geoffrey Silver, Rio and Frank Morse, Marion Wroldsen, Keith Rogers, and John Zagata. And my fellow writers from group: Kirston Mann, Sabrina Weill, Michelle Fiordaliso, Nicole Lucas Haimes, and Annette Murphy.

The only thing that makes me happier than finishing a book is the daily joy I get from Kevin, Finley, and Jett. You guys are my best friends.

1 DARPA as an agency: Inspector general’s report, “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Ethics Program Met Federal Government Standards,” January 24, 2013; “Breakthrough Technologies for National Security,” DARPA 2015.

2 “We are faced”: DARPA press release,“President’s Budget Request for DARPA Aims to Fund Promising Ideas, Help Regain Prior Levels,” March 5, 2014.

3 eighty-seven nations: Interview with Noel Sharkey, August 2013.

1 “an evil thing”: “Minority report,” General Advisory Committee, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, October 30, 1949, LANL.

2 facing an unknown fate: Eyewitness information is from interviews with Alfred O’Donnell, 2009–2013; interviews with Jim Freedman, 2009–2011. See also O’Keefe,
Nuclear Hostages;
Ogle,
Daily Diary, 1954,
LANL; DNA,
Castle Series 1954,
LANL.

3 miniaturized: Principles of the hydrogen bomb were demonstrated two years earlier with Ivy Mike, which was the size of a small factory and weighed eighty-two tons.

4 buried under ten feet of sand: Holmes and Narver photographs, W-102–5, RG 326, Atomic Energy Commission, NAR.

5 scientists running this secret operation: Ogle,
Daily Diary, 1954,
95-99, LANL.

6 “In the bunker”: Quotes are from O’Keefe, 166, 173–175.

7 Out at sea: Quotes are from interview with Jim Freedman; See also
Castle Series 1954
, 123.

8 largest-ever nuclear fireball: Memorandum to Dr. John von Neumann from Lt. Col. N. M. Lulejian, February 23, 1955, LANL; In time, the Soviets’ Tsar Bomba would be larger.

9
weather station: Hansen,
Swords of Armageddon,
IV-285.

10 No one had any idea: Joint Task Force Seven,
Operation Castle,
46–61.

11 wind direction: “The Effects of Castle Detonations Upon the Weather,” Task Force Weather Central, Special Report, October 1954, 3–7, LANL; Hansen,
Swords of Armageddon,
IV-289–290.

12 “The explosion”: Quotes are from O’Keefe,
Nuclear Hostages
, 178.

13 scientist in charge: John C. Clark, “We Were Trapped by Radioactive Fallout,”
Saturday Evening Post,
July 20, 1957.

14 mystical apparition: Lapp, 28.

15 unprecedented destruction:
Castle Series 1954
, 182–185. It would take Atomic Energy Commission historians thirty-four years to acknowledge that technical success was a veil and “just behind it were the frightening problems—some that threatened human existence itself.”

16 news blackout: Memorandum from Brigadier General K. E. Fields to Alvin Graves, March 4, 1954, LANL.

17 “very inconsequential”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The President’s News Conference,” March 10, 1954, UCSB.

18 “routine atomic test”: Memorandum from Brigadier General K. E. Fields, director of Military Application, USAEC to CJTF 7, March 15, 1954, LANL; Hansen,
Swords of Armageddon,
IV-298.

19 fallout pattern: RG 326 Atomic Energy Commission, “Distance From GZ, Statute Miles, Off-site dose rate contours in r/hr at H+1 hour,” Document 410526, figures 148–150, NAR.

20 roentgens: Hewlett and Holl, 182.

21 “exterminating civilian populations”: Memorandum, General Advisory Committee, October 25, 1949, LANL. Secrecy elements are discussed in York,
Advisors,
51.

22 fierce competition: “Race for the Superbomb,”
American Experience,
PBS, January 1999.

23 “We must know more”: Quotes are from York,
Advisors,
60-65.

24 “taking profit out of war”: Ernest Lawrence, transcript, Bohemian Club Speech, February 8, 1951, York Papers, Geisel.

25 “horse laughs”: York,
Advisors,
134.

26 Castle series: Ogle,
Daily Diary, 1954,
LANL. A total of 22.5 megatons would be detonated.

27 “weapons obsolete”: Minutes, Forty-first Meeting of the General Advisory Committee (GAC), U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, July 12–15, 1954, 12–24, LANL; Fehner and Gosling, 116.

28 only surviving record: Ibid.

29 “quantitative advantage”: York,
Making Weapons,
77.