Conversations [inaudible conversations] there should be a couple of seats grab them if you can. Welcome to the exam. Im the historian and curator and i would like to welcome you to a author program. We appreciate you coming out tonight. We are pleased to have the investigative journalist and bestselling author that National Security and government secrecy not to mention intelligence. Her 2011 nonfiction bestseller of americas Top Secret Military base has been published in five languages as have the 2014 nonfiction bestseller operation paperclip that Intelligence Program that brought nazi scientists to america. They chose operation paperclip is one of the best of 2014. The newest book, the pentagon brain americas top agency was published on tuesday. After reading im sure it wont take long before they joined the other bestseller. Tesco is the folly of okay. One thing that we always want to do when we have the authors here especially considering they had to write about a field that is not necessarily the most conducive information and documents. The idea is about writing about this and how in the world to find the sources necessary to write the full sized book. They dont necessarily want historians to know about. Guest for starters i want to think some thank some of the forces. Thank you for coming and those of you in the back thank you. The way that i got the idea for writing the pentagons brain came as most of my books do on the tail end of the last book and when i was learning about 58 i was surprised to learn he was going to be the first director of the new agency at the pentagon and we have one stipulation that we wanted to bring 12 former colleagues with him and that didnt fly at the pentagon because they looked elsewhere for the director but what a spicy way to start out an agency with controversy and secrecy and back story so i immediately looked into it and when i learned how little has been written, i really thought this is going to be a great book. Host as a science geek somebody that has known about this for some time, we will talk for those of you that dont know what he should say for claritys sake at one point it is darpa to keep it consistent and as we will talk about tonight there are some innovations we use in our everyday lives that is a result of the proper research, so when the book came out there has to be a book about dark and there hasnt been major work on this level i wanted to go to the order and why it really comes about and a little bit about what it is in the organization so its different than a lot of the other military Research Organizations in that the military Research Organization in this sense doesnt really do Scientific Research and we talk little bit about how it is formulated. Theres approximately 120 Program Managers and almost its entire existence working with a 3 billiondollar budget and yet these individuals themselves are scientists, engineers at the top of their game so they go out into the field yet academic laboratories or other military laboratories and they put together teams that bring forth this incredible science and technology and that creates an entire industry. We will talk about those because they are incredibly important. You said 1958, and i think that as he is dorian there is a significant reason that was formed. What caused the United States government and the agency like this . Ive been up to the scene of the explosion of the thermonuclear bomb in the Marshall Islands this massive 15megaton explosion. Four years before this forum but i do think its important to know the reason why darpa was formed and that was initially to defend against this weapon in essence which there is no defense against and that brings us to the heart of the idea of the militaryindustrial complex and the idea that we must always be supreme we must have these incredible weapons to stay ahead of the enemy and yet at the same time as the knowledge the end it would have that same technology and so we must be on to the next and that is to give and take that we are talking about. Specifically when sputnik was launched and that whatever was launched, that longrange longrange missile could carry a Nuclear Warhead to the United States and that gave birth to darpa. The idea is we must never again be taken by technological surprise and it is amazing that in all the years since, darpa has always kept america in the physician, kept us the strongest. There has never been an undertaking of American Science and technology in terms of weaponry. There may be some in the audience that are of more wise age but remember the fear of nuclear war that during the 1950s and the fear that even tripled out into the seismic world. This is a period where they help build the american atomic bomb because they speak out against the Hydrogen Bomb into the idea that the soviets could overtake just about any day the missile gaps and Everything Else when in many ways you have to stay ahead technologically. Heres an interesting detail one of the first things he did as the director was determined and i dont think that this had been reported before i founded and the file actually was that they had been calculated the exact number of seconds to get from the soviet union to washington, d. C. Its an astonishingly short time and it is 1,600 seconds, thats it. That hasnt changed and so in essence of the threats that were there that are still there now. So enter a person most people havent heard of who was the secretary defends, very important secretary of defense but before that you do a great job of laying out his personality and a little bit. Those like mcnamara come from the academia statisticians were those like paul. He wasnt in this role before he became secretary of defense. You even try to lay him out as a pr guru that understood how to do brand management. Talk little bit about that. She was a leading guy in the Advertising Department and he was in charge of those competing with one another and they thought how are we going to sell more . At play during the soap operas and then he became secretary of defense in a very powerful one at that. That comes in handy because one of the first things you have to do it isnt something thats very power doubled the military agencies and Atomic Energy commissions and other organizations. There was serious pushback from the military agencies into some of these old documents. They would meet with the individual heads to convince them that it was a great idea. They said that specifically stated the moon is just Higher Ground and then the admirals in the navy were saying no, no it should be our territory because where the notions and become a space start and so everybody had a reason why they wanted to control space which is how it came to be. What fascinates me about this time. Though is that even sometimes the scientists dont know what theyve created. It was a much larger explosion than was expected and i focus on the Manhattan Project they had no idea whatsoever that it was going to work and they were taking bets and and what it sets the atmosphere on fire and not work at all and the great story you talk about here. This is an anecdote that is wonderful. At the top of the world near the air force base about 15 miles north. We can watch for the Ballistic Missile radar Early Warning site there was a fellow named jean who was an Electronics Technician and believe that the way that he described it to me is the job was 90 boredom and a 10 terror. One of the first things that happened, the site had only been open a few days. The site is connected directly and there was this idea of level number one, level number two, number three, number five. But it started if you were to get a notice that something was detected and into the little one and they would usually go away but the notice came in on level number three and by the time the operator was on the phone with the joint chiefs of staff it had escalated to level number five which meant 99. 9 certainty we were under attack by a thousand. Someone picked up the phone and what was determined into the reason i think its important to talk a lot about humans versus computers because these were very Early Computers and one of them in the mix said wait a minute. Someone said hes in new york city banging his shoe at the un and then there was the moment where everyone said it must be a mistake and in fact there was a mistake and what someone at the site said lets someone look outside and of course there was a giant moon coming up over norway and so this radar system actually worked better. It was supposed to detect the missiles up to 3,000 feet and actually read the reflection of the new the moon accorded a million moon accorded a million miles away and bounced back and forth so many times those were the thousands that were not coming. Here we focus on the aspects of intelligence. Darpa was in the intelligence satellites that were put into space because one of the fundamental jobs was the early Satellite Program and some people may know about it as the First American satellite that was inherited from the air force and remember we saw that program to fruition. And the idea of the imagery satellites. And ucd is you see these starting to leak into the world a little bit. Im i am not going to screw up the acronym of the Satellite Program that this is the first true. He was so amazed and by that time they had inherited that Satellite Program that they started but these were these amazing images i think 79 days only they were very shortlived and it took Something Like 23,000 photographs of the earth of the earth and in a world where we always see so much, imagine back at idea that these were the first image is and they were beautiful and eisenhower spoke about and i write about he said what it looked like over egypt and over the st. Lawrence river he could see the whole world in these paragraphs and he spoke to the nation about it for a great pride and then they became a National Geographic spread but it was a really interesting time and not that long ago in the big picture of things when we could first see things from space. You mentioned in the very beginning of the conversation that the they used the scientists in the country to round up the top people and this started from the very beginning that but have a very particular name because to me this is something that people just dont know about the amount of influence they had over the American Foreign policy still have today over American Foreign policy is pretty extraordinary and the first he invented something very important to it but can you talk about what they do and how their job has continued until today . It began in 1960 as a group referred to by the government handlers as the superman of hard science. They were astrophysicists, they were nuclear physicists. They hand tackled all the hard problems and immediately when it was founded the idea was we need exactly as you said we needed the best guys with the biggest lines in for a while, his only customer i have had the Great Fortune of interviewing a fellow who is the president ial science advisor into the cofounder i write about him in the book but it was interesting hearing his perspective we interviewed in 2013 and like his long lens of history working on these projects going back to the 60s they are so misunderstood as being these kind of some people consider them to be the illuminati in terms of taking up these ideas but i actually found from reading the reports and interviewing some of them that they were very cautious in their work and they were also fulltime academics and part time scientists said they would only gather in the summers and discuss these problems the secretary of defense would put to them and say sort this out. It was the difficult ones nobody else could figure out that they were handed and amazingly the track record is pretty spectacular. The unclassified documents that you can read are one thing thing to the classified documents, some of the names of the documents have been declassified but when you read them you realize i couldnt understand that even if it was declassified. It is such hard science. It comes of age and a lot of ways they are traveled by fire in this respect. And a lot of the things that are looked at him if he is non had gone as being potentially problematic about the war were things they tried to get rid of order that they were the cause in some respects they were the first ones to appreciate the idea of trying to defeat a insurgency with technology that is the was the primary focus was the hightech counterinsurgency strategies. Can you talk about this using the sociology and anthropology . Guest it was interesting time and many things came out of it they were working on as you say soft science programs and they are working on conventional weapons. They lead to Stealth Technology but the one that i found the most impactful is that center technology. The trail was the dreaded problem of the pentagon and all of the fighters and insurgents that come from the north to the south by way of the trail and the secretary of defense cast them with figuring out a way to stop this. They solve is almost like it was a humanity needed to have its arteries severed and the scientists in a lot of the documents spoke about it that way. It was like that was the locus and so they tried, they thought about Nuclear Weapons and that wasnt an option. Then this idea of defense the reasons i write about this and i find it so interesting to explore is because all the technology which by the way have come from the Development Program that you referred to, magnetic sensors, these were incredibly early ideas during the vietnam war and now they make up so much of our existence im sure driving here somebodys windshield wipers just started to work that is essentially technology that goes back the way that i see it to the sensors that they were working on. And the technology is still used in the Intelligence Agency and civilian practice one of us drove over one of the fingers on the ground to determine how fast we are doing and anything else like that. The vietnam is also a time they began to investigate the more questionable technologies. Agent orange is one of these technologies of things that i find very interesting. Some are outside of the box thinking about winning the war through changing the ability of the vietnamese and moving the weapons. They were and continue to be at the cutting edge of science and this is an agency thats working at the problem 25 years. Its spoken of as a pre required research and that takes us back to that idea of the militaryindustrial complex is one of the directors who spoke to congress after the vietnam war when they got into trouble by congress saying you are making weapons we dont need and in this point he called it the chicken and the egg problem and said listen, if the need for the Weapon System comes along and we havent already developed if there is a real problem and that is the chicken and the egg problem. I want to talk about civilian use of some of the technologies developed because this is where the audience that hadnt heard before would say thats where thats from so lets start with who is jc are . Stomaching is referred to as the Johnny Appleseed of the internet. He really is the man who is responsible for what we have today as the Internet Technology used by almost half the people on the planet and that began as in project into the internet was originally called and they came to the pentagon when in 1962 congress decided there was a really Big Technology problem and if you can imagine the idea of a red phone that was the technology that president kennedy and khrushchev have to use to make that clear decision and mindful that their 1600 seconds until doomsday. Imagine wasting 30 seconds trying to dial a rotary phone and so the pentagon said we need a command and control and they came specifically to work on these very hard problems and he was a really eccentric thinker. He was going to have all of these computers that spoke to each other and were tied together and everyone said we are going to command and control the leader of coarse this materialized. People have gone back and looked at some of the writings and essentially heat addicts Cloud Computing in his earliest writings. Again this is similar to talking about artificial intelligence. Its hard not to talk about this not only for the internet that computer model pioneer in how a lot of the data systems are used to create models for everything from the wargames in weather patterns in Everything Else. Can you talk a little bit about that as well . Guest any people do not know that about him and he did have i often wonder what his intentions were. But at the same time he was involved in one of the more controversial programs in the vietnam war that have to do with behavior modeling with computers and so the new Computer Systems over in thailand at the Information Centers were gathering information based on these ideas. The idea that down the road we could attract these individuals and find them and follow them and see how they wound up and this gets into very awkward territory i think for the pentagon today having to deal with surveillance programs because they do link to one another. We have mea