Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins Read online

  Truck kills were assessed by similarly esoteric methods, even though year after year the Vietnamese still seemed to have the necessary number of trucks on hand to supply their armies in the South. Partisans of the electronic fence explained this away by suggesting that North Vietnam simply replaced lost trucks with imports from Russia and other communist allies. As the same air force historian pointed out, “estimates of North Vietnamese truck imports tended to keep pace with the claims of trucks killed and disabled.”

  Finally, in April 1972, the North Vietnamese launched a devastating offensive using hundreds of tanks and thousands of trucks that had passed down the trail completely unnoticed. When General Lucius Clay, commander of the Pacific Air Force, asked how this mass of vehicles and weapons had totally escaped Igloo White scrutiny, he was told that the matériel must have come by routes “we don’t know about.” In fact, for much of the war, the North Vietnamese had moved a considerable portion of their supplies by sea via the Cambodian port of Sihanoukeville, thus avoiding the Ho Chi Minh Trail altogether. A CIA analyst’s suggestion that people be recruited simply to watch comings and goings at the port was rejected in accordance with the officially accepted understanding that the enemy was entirely dependent on the trail.

  Ironically, although the project had proved less than effective in defeating the communist enemy, it came to serve as a global symbol of the soulless but deadly American war machine. The Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the war leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, contained a detailed account of the original Jason deliberations, including those cerebral ruminations on the relative lethal merits of cluster bombs and other munitions. Amid the general horrors of the war, the specter of an automated battlefield, in which targets were selected and struck by remote control, touched a sensitive public nerve, just as drone attacks unleashed by the Obama administration forty years later ignited similar debate. At scientific conferences in Europe, venerable Nobel Prize winners confronted by angry demonstrators had to be rescued by riot police. Other Jasons received death threats at home. An antiwar tract published by dissident scientists at Berkeley in 1972 cited the electronic battlefield as “an especially clear instance of Jason’s intervention contributing decisively to the prolongation of the Indochina war.” At a public meeting in Boston of the antiwar Winter Soldier movement, an embittered veteran, Eric Herter, testified eloquently and presciently about “the new forms of war that are to replace the unpopular struggle of infantry and patrol against guerrilla bands … This new war will not produce My Lais. It will be a war not of men at arms, but of computers and weapons systems against whole populations. Even the tortured bond of humanity between enemies at war will be eliminated. Under its auspices, the people of the villages have gone from being ‘gooks’ and ‘dinks’ to being grid-coordinates, blips on scan screens, dots of light on infrared film. They are never seen, never known, never even hated … It is hard to feel responsible for this type of war, even for those who were close to it. There is little personal involvement. The atrocity is the result of a chain of events in which no man plays a single decisive part.”

  Less emotional but more formidable opposition to Task Force Alpha was building up elsewhere. By 1972, a faction at the highest levels of the U.S. Air Force was becoming increasingly disenchanted at having to shell out a billion dollars a year for no appreciable return on a system that had not really been their idea in the first place. But even though the dissidents, including General Clay, were powerful four-star generals, there were also potent forces maneuvering to keep the system operating, even if peace broke out. These latter included John Foster’s directorate of defense research and engineering, along with other interested military and corporate parties, including IBM. Clearly the generals had to tread carefully in disposing of the unwanted project. Fortunately, they had someone on hand they were confident could accomplish the mission. “Someone very senior was fed up with the idiocy [of Task Force Alpha],” remembers Tom Christie, a former high-ranking Pentagon official. “They knew what they were doing when they sent John.”

  “John” was Colonel John Boyd, a legendary fighter pilot known as Forty-Second Boyd, thanks to his standing $40 bet that he could beat any pilot in a mock dogfight in forty seconds. He never lost. As fearless and skillful in bureaucratic combat as he was at the controls of a jet fighter, with no inhibitions about speaking truth to power (once, gesturing emphatically with his habitual cigar during an argument with a general, he burned a hole in the latter’s tie), Boyd could be counted on to cut through the technological pretensions of the electronic barrier. His superiors had already used him to shoot down a project foisted on them by civilian overseers in the Pentagon, in this case a joint fighter development project with the Germans. Boyd had accomplished this by touring Luftwaffe bases and explaining how they would be shot down in droves if the proposed fighter ever saw action.

  In April 1972, just after fleets of enemy tanks and artillery had unexpectedly emerged from the trail for that year’s devastating spring offensive, Boyd arrived at Nakhon Phanom, assigned as the new base commander. By that time the huge base displayed many features emblematic of the disintegrating American war effort in Southeast Asia. Packs of wild dogs roamed unmolested across the secret base. Racial tension was so high that black and white servicemen dared not venture near each other’s quarters. Behind the double razor-wire fence and the armed guards surrounding the Infiltration Surveillance Center, the heart of Task Force Alpha, the mess hall provided metal forks and knives but only plastic spoons; all the metal spoons had been stolen by heroin-addicted personnel to use in cooking up their fix.

  After giving orders to shoot the dogs, Boyd set to work researching the truth behind the system’s reported successes. One suggestion actively touted by an air force research base, the Rome Air Development Center, closely linked to IBM, had been to use the system to pinpoint enemy artillery in South Vietnam from the sound of its guns. Seven hundred sensors were accordingly dropped around the battlefield in a precise pattern decreed by the technologists. Boyd made an on-the-spot inspection and immediately saw that the idea could never work because the sound of enemy guns was inevitably drowned by the noise of friendly artillery. Bypassing intervening layers of command, he sent word to his sponsors in Washington that the scheme had been an utter failure. Other initiatives by barrier partisans, such as an attempt to locate antiaircraft missile batteries, or to monitor possible peace accords, proved no more successful. “They sent me to close it down,” Boyd told me before he died in 1997, “and I closed it down.”

  The war that had begun with such promise for American technology was ending in futile retreat, but not before the air force’s mightiest bombers, the B-52s, were sent out on one last campaign of destruction into the heart of Hanoi itself, the enemy capital previously off-limits. Rex Rivolo, the fighter pilot whose high-tech navigation aid had led him to bomb the American base at Da Nang, was assigned to fly escort on the first raid, December 18, 1972.

  “I wasn’t worried,” he told me years later. “We were briefed that the B-52s would be using their most secret ‘war mode’ electronic counter-measures, previously reserved for World War III with the Soviets, that would easily blind the Vietnamese SAM missiles. I knew the counter-measures in my plane didn’t work, but I believed the B-52s had secret, magic stuff that would make them invulnerable. So I thought everything would be OK. That was until three SAMs flew right by me and then hit a B-52 high above. The magic boxes didn’t work.” Rivolo watched in amazement as the giant plane cracked open “like an egg” and slowly turned over. Burning jet fuel streamed out in a wave that split into two and then four in vast cascading sheets of flame. “The sky,” he told me, recalling the vivid scene in every detail after forty years, “was raining fire.” Fourteen more B-52s were to go down before the raids were called off eleven days later. By that time, Rivolo’s previously unquestioning faith in the promises of the technologists had disappeared forever. “I had really believed all that hype,” he told me.
“And then I realized it was all bullshit. None of it worked.” That searing moment of truth would cause a lot of trouble in Washington later on.

  Task Force Alpha was finally switched off on December 31, 1972. Out in the jungle, the last sensors went on faithfully broadcasting sounds, movements, and smells that no one would hear, until their batteries ran down. Once the last raid on Laos had flown home—an average of one planeload of bombs had landed on that country every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day, for nine years—the surviving So Tri emerged from the hidden dugouts where they had waited out the cataclysm and returned to rebuild their ruined villages amid the countless craters. They did not teach their children about the war.

  Among the items shipped home from the giant base on the banks of the Mekong was a tape recording. For years afterward it was a highlight at Christmas parties on air force fighter bases across the country, featuring as it did the unmistakable sound of someone out on the Ho Chi Minh Trail standing over an acoustic sensor and subjecting it to a long and leisurely piss.

  Given that the roughly $6 billion spent on the barrier overall (no one could ever agree on the exact total) had failed to achieve its purpose, that tape might have served as the final epitaph for the dream of war by remote control. But such was not the case. Its best days were yet to come.

  3

  TURNING PEOPLE INTO NODES

  “Don’t knock the war that feeds you” read a sign on the wall of a Lockheed plant in California in the late 1960s. The bitter struggle in Southeast Asia may have killed millions of people, including 58,000 Americans, but it had been very good for business. It therefore stood to reason that with the outbreak of peace and the withdrawal of the huge U.S. expeditionary force from Vietnam, Pentagon weapons spending would inevitably decline. But that was not what happened. Money authorized for buying weapons and developing new ones ballooned from $26 billion in 1975, as the last shots were fired in Indochina, to $40 billion three years later. Defense-industry profits marched in tandem. In 1976, McDonnell Douglas, then the largest contractor, announced that its profits had grown 75 percent in a year.

  The inspiration for the rearmament drive no longer came from third world peasants lurking under the jungle canopy but from something more ominous: the enormous forces of the mighty Soviet Union, supposedly ready, able, and eager to confront the United States across the globe. Intelligence reappraisals of Soviet intentions and capabilities smoothed the way for a readjustment of U.S. defense priorities. In this scenario, the specter of a Soviet blitzkrieg smashing into outnumbered NATO forces in central Europe occupied a central role. The Fulda Gap in the mountains of central Germany, the presumed route of a Soviet invasion, may have been a long way from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but the dream of remote-controlled warfare, which inevitably led to the drone strikes of the twenty-first century, never died. Five years after closing Task Force Alpha, the Pentagon began planning another electronic barrier.

  The project was publicly justified by the assumption that Soviet forces vastly outnumbered NATO defenders, whose only hope supposedly lay in “force-multiplier” high-technology weapons. The military bookkeeping was in truth highly suspect: readily available evidence showed that the numbers were almost even, while Soviet troop and weapons quality was far inferior. Nevertheless the defense lobby effortlessly ignored such discordant notes right up until the day that the USSR finally crumbled, laying bare the sorry state of its vaunted military.

  The new barrier fostered by the Pentagon’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in conjunction with the air force and army, was called Assault Breaker. There were no carpets of sensors strewn among the trees this time, but the basic idea was faithful to General Westmoreland’s promise in 1969 of “surveillance devices that can continually track the enemy” and “first round kill probabilities approaching certainty.” Instead of the sensors, airborne radar would peer far behind enemy lines and detect suspicious movements of Soviet “second-echelon” reinforcements moving up behind the front line. An on-board computer would process the information and sort out which signals revealed a genuine target. On the basis of this information, missiles would be launched in the general direction of the enemy. At ten thousand feet above the targeted armored formations, the missiles would burst open and dispense a carpet of self-guiding bombs equipped with heat seekers and tiny radars that would drop down and then search out their armored targets. A variant added a further layer of complexity with “skeet” projectiles that would fly off from the bomb canisters at speed to impact on the tanks. Proponents claimed Assault Breaker could destroy “in a few hours” sufficient vehicles in (Soviet) reinforcement divisions “to prevent their exploiting a breakthrough of NATO defenses,” without—and this was an important selling point—anyone having to resort to nuclear weapons, all for a bargain price of $5.3 billion.

  Task Force Alpha had used powerful software programs to try and distinguish trucks from elephants, soldiers from peasants. Assault Breaker followed the same concept: ambiguous sensor signals were processed into coherence by massive computing power, thereby discriminating a tank army from traffic on the autobahn, tanks from East German tractors, and armored personnel carriers from Volkswagens. Even the bombs homing in on the final targets had to be able to decide if a hot spot was really a tank or a smoking bomb crater or some other distraction. Everything depended on recognizing preset patterns. A tank, for example, would be expected to have a distinctive pattern of hot spots to distinguish it from some other heat-emitting object, such as a bus. To disorient the weapon, an enemy merely needed to rearrange the pattern, just as General Nguyen had hung buckets of urine on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  Presiding over the entire operation was a man destined to exert a potent influence on U.S. defense for decades to come. In 1977 President Carter appointed William J. Perry, an affable Californian defense contractor, to John Foster’s old job overseeing all Pentagon research and development. (Foster had moved to defense contractor TRW Inc. in 1973.) Like Foster before him, Perry loved esoteric weapons projects, and he outmatched his predecessor in his ability to charm all comers. He was soon a popular figure in Washington, conveying an air of deeply considered expertise in the mysteries of defense technology that served him well in selling his agenda while dispensing billions of dollars on development programs that might, if actually put into production, yield contracts worth multiples of the development money. Politicians appreciated his gentlemanly and patient explanations of technological mysteries. The military, though occasionally irritated by his interference in their prerogatives, appreciated his ability to extract money from the politicians. Liberals warmed to his unmilitaristic demeanor, not least his support for strategic nuclear arms limitation agreements.

  Before entering government, Perry had spent his career exclusively in the defense-electronics industry, initially for a firm deeply involved in the highly classified ballistic-missile early-warning system. In 1964, he founded Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory (ESL), Incorporated. Located close to Stanford University, the firm grew and prospered in the business of processing digital information from sources such as sensors, radars, and reconnaissance pictures for the U.S. military and National Security Agency.

  Perry thus arrived in office with an enduring interest in the ability of technology to cut through the fog of war. “The objective of our precision guided weapon systems is to give us the following capabilities: to be able to see all high value targets on the battlefield at any time; to be able to make a direct hit on any target we can see, and to be able to destroy any target we can hit,” he told a senate committee in 1978. Pentagon officials began referring to Assault Breaker as “Bill Perry’s wet dream.” Comprehensive testing was deferred on the grounds that the system was urgently required in the field. On the few occasions individual components were tested, they tended to fail, and the whole system, with its many steps, was never tested all at once. The General Accounting Office, the watchdog agency that monitors government programs on behalf of Congress, r
eported in 1981 not only that the system could not tell the difference between armored vehicles and “lower value targets” (trucks or automobiles) but also that these distinctions were “not designed into the advanced development radar and is not part of DARPA’s planned testing.” In other words, the interests behind the program appeared not to care whether it actually worked.

  Assault Breaker was formally canceled in 1984, felled by a combination of ballooning costs, failed tests, and bad publicity. But in its dying days it garnered powerful endorsement from a gilt-edged source. “Precision weapons, smart shells, electronic reconnaissance systems,” commented a Soviet military writer in a Pravda article about Assault Breaker in February 1984, “could enable NATO to destroy a potential enemy which is still in its rear staging area.” The Soviets even coined a helpful catchphrase to describe this claimed ability to see everything, strike anything—the “military technical revolution”—and proclaimed their intention of producing their own versions. In no time, talk of this revolution was gathering momentum in U.S. military commentaries, largely thanks to assiduous promotion by an already legendary Pentagon official, Andrew Marshall. Trained as an economist, Marshall had spent his early career at the Rand Corporation, the famed Santa Monica–based think tank staffed with brilliant minds devising nuclear war strategies for the U.S. Air Force, which financed the undertaking. In retrospect it is clear that Rand’s core mission was to devise strategies justifying and whenever possible enhancing the air force budget. When, for example, the navy’s development of invulnerable ballistic-missile submarines threatened the air force’s strategic nuclear monopoly in the early 1960s, Rand quickly served up a rationale for a “counterforce” strategy. According to this theory, the Soviets could be deterred only by precisely targeted nuclear warheads, which would necessitate a crash air force program for new intercontinental missiles with an accuracy that the navy could not deliver.