The author was interviewed by the spy Museum Curator vince hogan. This is an hour. There should be a couple seats around. Welcome to the international, i am vince hoyton, the curator here at spy. This is a rare friday night and we appreciate you coming out tonight. I think it has a lot to do with who we have. We are pleased to have Annie Jacobsen at the spy museum. She is an investigative journalist and bestselling author who writes books about war, weapons, u. S. National security and government secrecy and intelligence. Her 2011, nonfiction best seller, area 51; an uncensored history of americas base has won awards. The boston globeand itunes have selected her book for the best book of the year. Here newest book, the pentagons brain an uncensored history of darpa, americas topsecret military research agency, was published on tuesday. After reading it, i am sure it will not take along before joining her other two books as a bestseller. Thank you for coming. Do you have copies of your books in all five languages . I actually do. The chinese one in particular. That is not on my card but i had to ask that. One thing we always want to do why have authors here, especially considering what all authors tend to write about a field that is not necessarily the most conducive to getting information and documents. It is a secret world of intelligence. It is a twopart question. How did you come across the idea of writing a book about darpa and how in the world do you find the sources necessary to write a full size Nonfiction Book about a top secret agency that does things they dont necessarily want historians to know about. Well, for starters, i want to thank some sources paul, neal, and folks in the back, thank you. The way i got the idea for writing the pentagons brain came as most of my books do on the tail end of the last book. When i was learning about what brown was doing in 58 i was surprised to learn that he was going to be the first director of this new agency at the pentagon called darpa. He wanted to be the director however he had one stipulation and that was he wanted to bring 12 of his former nazi colleagues with him and that did not fly at the pentagon. I thought, what a spicy way to do this. I thought this was going to be a great book. Darpa is something i have known about for a long time afo those that dont know it is the Pentagons Defense Advanced Research project agency and for clarity sake we will call it darpa to keep it it consistent. As we will talk about tonight, there is major innovations we use in our every day lives that is a result of darpa research. When the book came out, and the idea there might be a book about darpa, and there hasnt been a major work of this level, but what you last said is a great segue. I want to talk about the origins of darpa. A little bit about what it is as an organization. I think darpa is different than a lot of the other military Research Organizations in that it is not really a military Research Organization in a sense it doesnt do scientific research. Can you talk about how darpa is formulated . Well, darpa has approximately 120 Program Managers and has all of its entire existence working with a three billion budget. These individuals themselves are scientist, engineers at the top of their game. So they go out into the field, be it academic laboratories, or military laboratories, and they put together teams that bring forth this incredible science and technology and in essence create entire industries. We will talk about the intus dustries because they are important. You said it was formed in 1958. There is a real significant reason darpa was formed in 1958. It follows in the footsteps of monumental event in world history. Can you talk about what caused the United States government to think they needed an agency like this. I look to the book with the explosion of the capital bravo nuclear bomb in the marshall islands. This massive 15 megaton explosion four years before darpa is born is where i start and i do that because it is important to know why darpa was formed and that was initially to defend against this weapon that in essence there is nothing to do fend against. That brings the ideas we must be supreme and have these weapons to stay ahead of the enemy and there is a technology builtin that enemy must have that technology and we must be on to the next. Specifically sputnik was lunched and that idea that whatever laufshed that soviet longrange missile could carry a Nuclear War Head to the United States gave birth to darpa and the idea is we must never be taken by technical surprise and in all years since darpa has kept america in the core position, kept us the strongest. There has never been an undertaking in terms of weaponry. In the scientific world, robert alenhiemer helped build the atomic bomb and he is stripped of his security clearance and stigmatized. And the idea they could overtake us was in many ways the idea of you have to stay ahead technologically. Here is an interesting detail. The first thing the director of darpa did was determine, and i dont think this was reported yet, i found it in files, but was he had darpa scientist calculate the exact number of seconds it took for a soviet icbm to get from the soviet union to washington. It is 1,602nd seconds. That hasnt changed. That threat there is there then is there now. You do a great job playing out the secretary of defenses background. He wasnt in the defense world before becoming secretary. You said he was a guru who understood brand management. He invented the concept of the soap opera. He was a leading guy in the Advertising Department at png and in charge of soaps. He had four soaps and he said how will be sell them and he did during soap operas. That is handy because the first thing you have to do is the idea of darpa is not liked by the organizations he is competing with and he had to convince them this an idea worth doing. There was serious push back from the military agencies. In the old documents, i found mackelroy would meet with the heads to convince them darpa is a great idea. The army said it should be our territory, military science and research. They said the moon is just higher ground. The admirals in the navy were saying space is our territory because where the oceans end space starts. Everybody had a reason why they wanted to control space which was really how arpa came to be. In this period, sometimes the scientist dont know what they created. Cas o bravo was a larger explosion and the Manhattan Project is something i focus on and they had no idea. They were taking bets. The great story we talk about are the bmuse. The early Missile Warning system and how that almost started world war iii. Can you please lay it out. They setup a facility at the top of the world near the air force base, 15 miles north, and the idea was it was called jade site and it was going to be the place where we could watch for, it was a Ballistic Missile radar Early Warning site. I interviewed a fellow trying to tell stories through individuals who were there. A fellow name gene was electronic commissioner, and he said it was 90 boredom and 10 terror. The site had had only been open a few days. It was oct1960 and it was connected directly to noah. There was this idea of level one, level two, level three, and level five was endgame. But if you were to get a notice something was detected it would be level one and usually go away. The notice came in at three and it escalated to level five which means with 99 certainty we were under attack. Someone picked up the phone, and the reason i think this is important, is it talks about humans versus computers. These were early computers. One of the humans said where is christian and they said he is in new york city. There was this moment when everyone said there must be a mistake. And in fact there was a mistake. Someone looked outside and there was this giant moon coming up over norway. This radar system worked better than expected. It was supposed to detect missiles up to 2,000 feet and read the reflection of the moon a quarter of a million miles away and bounced back and forth so many times those were the thousand icbms that were not coming. Imagery intelligence is something you talk about. Darpa had a big influence in the first Imagery Intelligence satellites put in space. That was one of the fundamental jobs in the early days. The first real american satellite was inherited by darpa from the air force and they saw that program to fruition. And the idea of these satellites leaking into the civilian world a little bit. I am not going to screw up the acronym, but the television observation Satellite Program was the first weather satellite. Eisenhower loved that program and nasa inherited that program by then. These were these amazing images. It was in space for, i think, 79 days only. It took 23,000 photographs above the earth of the earth. Imagine in the world where we see with big perspective, imagine the idea these were the first images of weather coming from space. They were beautiful and eisenhower wrote about what it looked like over egypt, the Saint Lawrence river. He could see the whole world in these photographs and talked to the nation about it. They became a big National Geographic spread after that. It wasnt that long ago in the big picture where we could first see things from space. You mentioned in the beginning of the conversation darpa uses smarter scientist in the country. It rounds up the top people and this started from the beginning. I want to talk about this. One of these assembled scientist who had a particular name the jasons. People dont know about the amount of influence the jasons had over foreign policy, still have today, is extraordinary. They were assembled after darpa and led by a man named charles towns who invented something very important to us. Can you talk about the jasons, what they do and how their job continues. The jasons began in 1960s as a group they were referred to as the super men of hard science. They were Nuclear Physicist and handled all of the hard problems. Immediately when darpa was founded, the idea was we need exactly as you said, we need the best guys with the biggest minds. For a while, jasons only customer was darpa. I was able to interview a president ial science advisor and the cofounder of the jasons, and write about him in the book. He just passed. It was interesting hearing his perspective and his long lens of history working on these projecks going back to the 60s. The jasons were misunderstand and some people consider them to be part of the alum naughty. They would gather in the summers and discuss problems the secretary of defense put to them and said sort it out. It wasnt the easy problems. It was the difficult ones and nobody else could figure it out. We have no idea what to do. You fix it. And their track record is spectacular. I will tell you the unclassified documents that you can read that i read are one thing. But the classified documents, some of the names of the documents have been declassified, only the names, but when you read them, you realize i could not understand that even if it was declassified. Darpa comes of age during the vietnam war. You know, in a lot of the things that are you know, looked at in vietnam as being problemtic were things that darpa tried to get rid of or were the cause of in some respects. They were the first ones to really appreciate the idea of trying to defeat an insurgency with technology. Maybe not the first to think of it but that was the primary focus during vietnam was these high tech encounter insurgency strategies. Can you take about this. Things like psychological operations and social. Vietnam was a very interesting time. Many different programs came out of it. They were working on as you say soft science, anthropology, conventi conventional weapons like the m16, there were early gliders that led to selftechnology. The one i found the most impactimpact full was the insurgeants coming from the north to the south and the secretary of defense cast the jason scientist with figure a way to stop this. They thought of it as a human who needed to have its artery severed. A lot of documents spoke about it that way. It was like that is the locus. They tried, thought about nuclear weapons, that was not an option. It was discussed. Then this idea of an electronic fence which the reason i write about it and find it interesting to really explore was because all of this censor technology, you know, seismic censors which came from the program you referred to, audio censors, magnetic censors, these were incredibly early ideas during the vietnam war and now they make up so much of our existence. I am sure driving here somebodys windshield wipers just started to work at the drop of rain. Well that is essentially technology that goes back, the way i see it, to that vietnam war to the censors the jasons were working on. Massive technology that is used throughout the Intelligence Agency and civilian. I am sure one of us drove over a censor on the ground to determine how fast we were going. Vietnam is a time when darpa invested in questionable technologies. Agent orange is certainly one of these. Things i find interesting is Weather Modification technology. More devius things but outside the box and thinking about winning the war by causing man soons or changing the availability of the people of vietnam from growing food. They were and continue to be always at the cutting edge of science and darpa is an agency that is looking at the problem 25 years out. It is spoken of as prequirement research. That takes back the idea of inmilitary Industrial Complex that was one of the darpas directors who spoke after the vietnam war when darpa was in trouble saying you are making weap weapon we dont need. And it was said this is a chicken and egg problem. If a need for a Weapon System comes along and we have not developed it there is a real problem. And that is the chicken and the egg problem. I want to talk about civilian use of the technologies developed my darpa. This is where the audience, will go that is where that is from. Who is is lick lieder . He is the Johnny Appleseed of the internet. He is responsible for the internet we have today and the Technology Used by almost half the people on the planet. That began as an darpa project. Lick lieder came to the pentagon when the 1962, when congress decided there was a really Big Technology problem. If you can imagine the idea of a lead phone that was the Technology President kennedy had to use to make that dreaded nogo Nuclear Decision and mindful there is 1602nds until doomsday. Imagine wasting 30 seconds to dial a rotary phone. The pentagon said we need command and control. And the glider came to darpa to work on the problem. This very hard problem. He was an eccentric thinker and he talked about the idea of an intergalactical network. And everyone said work on the command and control problem. But that materializes later and it becomes what is now the internet. Computer scientist have gone back and looked at the wry writings and he predicts the cloud and this is similar to adam turing talking about Artificial Intelligence that is nowhere near created today back during that time. You know, it is hard not to talk about him not only for the internet but a commuter modeling pioneer and how data systems are used to create models for everything from war games to weather patterns and everything else. Can you talk about that . Yes, and many people dont know that. He did have, and i wonder and write it in the book what his intentions, he was very liberal in this thinking and transparent and obviously he had this idea of sharing everything. But at the same time, he was involved in one of the more controversial programs of the vietnam which has to deal with behavioral modeling with computers. So the new Computer Systems in thailand at the Information Center were gathering information based on his ideas of behavioral modeling. So, for example, we would keep track of what certain viliage vilagers were doing with the idea we could track them and find them and see how they wound up. This gets into awkward territory for the pentagon today having to do with surveillance programs. They do yes, yes. Who is jack thorpe . We have neal cosby here today who was working with jack thorpe after this idea came around that computers were incredibly helpful and they could be used as a training tool. Jack thorp had this idea of creating a system, instead of using an old sand table to have generals make idea, it could be computerized. Wired magazine referred to jack thorp as the father of cyber space because that civilian technology that everyone knows today and everyones children in the audience works and plays these games, the giant systems finds their origins in the things thorp and cosby made for people who wanted to play the games at the pentagon and throw in stealth. I was in the army as a tanker and i worked with thousands around the country with others. Are there other civilian technologies like gps which is a brain child of the darpa. And Technology Used for s. W. A. T. Team as we. I think we can close out the conversation with civilian use with those technologies. Gps is an amazing one. One thing darpa does so well and this comes from the scientist and engineers i spoke with, so many of them, almost all of them are incredibly gung ho and talk about how darpa finds the solutions to things to darpa allows science to push scientist in a way that maybe their industry bosses wouldnt allow them to, darpa thinking of the future, darpa likes to say darpa makes the future happen. But another thing they do, and this is in the spirit of how eisenhower created this initial idea and that is cutting out interservice rivalry with gps being an example of that. They launched satellites and in