Guest thanks for being on booktv. Is there a Nonfiction Author or balky would like to see featured on booktv . Send us an email, but tv cspan. Org, tweet us at booktv or post a comment on our wall, facebook. Com booktv. [inaudible conversations] there should be a couple seats around, grab them if you can. Welcome to the International SpyMuseum Design the historian and curator here at spots. Welcome to one of our author debriefing programs on a rare friday night. We are appreciative of you coming out tonight. It has a lot to do with who we have here with us. We are pleased to have annie jacobsen, an investigative journalist and bestselling author who writes about war, weapons, National Security and government secrecy not to mention intelligence. Her 2011 nonfiction bestseller area 51 an incentive history of americas Top Secret Military base has been published in five languages as hazard 2014 nonfiction bestseller operation paper clip the secret Intelligence Program that brought nazi scientists to america. The boston globe and apple itunes showed that as one of the best books of 2014. Turn newest book, the pentagons brain an uncensored history of darpa, americas Top Secret MilitaryResearch Agency was published on tuesday. After reading that i am fairly sure it wont take long before jointer other two books as a best seller. Thank you for coming to the internationals by museum. I wanted to ask as we get going, deal have on your bookshelf at home copies of your books in all five languages . Is the volume okay . Copies of your books in all five languages . I actually do. They are really cool. The chinese one in particular. Host that is not on my car. One thing we always want to do when we have doctors here especially considering all authors had to write about a field that is not necessarily the most conducive to getting information, the secret world of intelligence, it is a two part question. How did you come across the idea of writing a book about darpa and how do you find sources necessary to write a full size Nonfiction Book about a very topsecret agency that does things you dont necessarily want to know about. I think those sources, folks in the back, thank you. The way i got the idea to write the the pentagons brain came on the tail end of the last book and when i was learning what bonbon was doing in 1958 i was surprised to learn that he was going to be the first director of this new agency at the pentagon called are the anti wanted to be the director but you had one stipulation which was he wanted to bring 12 of his former nazi colleagues with him. That did not fly at the pentagon so they looked elsewhere for director. That iraq was heard york but what a spicy way to start an agency, with controversy, secrecy, back story, so i immediately look into it and when i learned how little has been written about darpa, this is going to be a great. Host as a science geek, and byzantine isnt the guy and about for quite some time. Maybe we should say it is the Defense Advanced Research projects agency, get that out of the way. For clarity at stake was called our but at one point. We will call it darpa to keep it consistent. Might as well talk about tonight, there is some dangerous innovations we use in everyday lives that other result of darpa research. When your book came out, there had to have been a book about darpa but there has not been a major work of this level. I want to talk about the origins of darpa and why it comes about and a little about what is as an organization. Darpa is different from a lot of military Research Organizations in that it is not really a military research organization, doesnt really do scientific research. Talk a little bit about how it is formulated. Host darpa has 120 Program Managers and has almost its entire existence working with the 3 billion budget and yet these individuals themselves are scientists, engineers at the top of their game so they go out into the field, academic, laboratories or other military laboratories and put together teams that bring forth this incredible science and technology and in essence create entire industries. Host we will talk about a couple of those industries because they are incredibly important. You talk about why it was formed from a 1958. As the historian, there was a real significant reason darpa was formed in 1958. That puts some monumental events in world history, talk about what caused the United States government to fix a on an agency like this. Guest the explosion of the thermonuclear bomb in the marshall islands, this massive 15 megaton explosion four years before darpa is formed. It is important to know the reason why darpa was formed which was initially to defend against this weapon. In essence there is no defense against. That brings us to the heart of the idea of the militaryindustrial complex, the idea we must always be supreme, have these incredible weapons to stay ahead of the enemy and yet at the same time the knowledge built in that the enemy will eventually have the same technology and so we must be on to the next. That is the giveandtake that eisenhower talked about the specifically when sputnik was launched and the idea that whatever lofted sputnik, the soviet longrange missile could carry a Nuclear Warhead in its nose cone to the United States. That gave birth to darpa. We must never be taken by technological surprise and it is amazing that in all the years since that has always cast america at, kept us the strongest. There has never been an ever taking the American Science and technology in terms of weaponry. Host were too young to remember this time. But there may be some in the audience of more wise age, the fear of nuclear war in the 1915s that even trickle down into the scientific world, this was a period where Robert Oppenheimer who helped build the american atomic bomb because he speaks out against the hydrogen bomb, a security clearance is stigmatized, the idea that the soviets could overtake us any date, the missile gap and Everything Else, led in many ways to i have to stay ahead technologically. Guest one of the first thing herbert york did as the director of the darpa was determined, i found it in his files, he had darpa scientists calculate the exact number of seconds for soviet icbm to get from the soviet union to washington d. C. An astonishingly short time, 1,600 seconds. That is it. That has not changed. In essence the threat that was there is still known. Host enter a person most people havent heard of, mcelroy, very important secretary of defense. You do great job laying out, mcnamara from bohemia, he wasnt in the defense role before he became secretary of defense. You may have known as the p r do, someone who understood how brand management, how to talk about mcelroy. Guest he invented the concept of the soap opera and was a leading guy in that Advertising Department and was in charge of soap, four soaps were competing with one another, how will we sell more soaps . Lets play during these soap operas and he became the secretary of defense and a powerful one at that. Host that comes in handy because one of the first you do, this idea of darpa is not palatable to the military agencies. He has to convince all of them that this is an idea worth doing. Guest their mysterious pushback from the military agency. One of these old darpa documents, mcelroy would meet with the individual heads trying to convince them darpa was a great idea. It should be our territory, military science specifically states the moon is just Higher Ground and the admirals in the navy said space should be our territory because where the oceans end space starts. Everybody had a reason they wanted to control space which was really why darpa came to be. Host what fascinates me about this time is, you talkedabout the much larger explosion. I focus on the Manhattan Project, and said the atmosphere on fire, would it not work at all. The great story you talk about. And started world war iii. Caller at the top of the world knew the to the air force base. It was going to be the place where we could watch for it was a Ballistic Missile radar earlywarning sites. I interviewed a fellow, tell my story is to individual people who were is fair, there was a fellow named jeanne mcmanus, an electronics technician. He said our job was 90 boredom and 10 sheer terror. One of the first things that happened, the site had only been open a few days, the jay site was connected directly to novak and level 1, little 2, level 3, level 5 was end game, and it would usually go away but the notice came in, level 40. The operator in Cheyenne Mountain was on the phone with the joint chiefs of staff, it has escalated to level 5 which meant with 99. 9 certainty we were under attack by thousands icbms. Someone picked up the phone and the reason this story is important is it talks a lot about about humans versus computers. These were very early computers. One of the siemens said wait hu minute, where is crucial. He is in new york city. Someone said there must be a mistake. There was the mistake. Someone said lets go outside and of course there was the giant moon coming up over norway so this radar system had actually worked better than expected, supposed to detect missiles up to 3,000 feet and actually read the reception 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 disaster was averted by a human. Host Early Technology is always tricky. We focus on the technological aspects of intelligence and one of these darpa was probably influential in being the first intelligence satellite put into space, one of the fundamental jobs of darpa was the early Satellite Program and corot know which some people may know about as the First American satellite, was inherited by darpa for the air force, they saw that program to fruition. The idea of a military satellite, you see these begin to the civilian world a little bit. I am not going to screw up the acronym of television in for read operation Satellite Program, this is the first true whether satellite. Guest eisenhower loved that program. He was so amazed. Nasa had inherited that Satellite Program darpa started. These were these amazing images in space for 79 nasally, they were very shortlived and it took Something Like 23,000 photographs above the earth of the earth. In this world where we always see sell much from such big perspective in that unbacked, that idea that these were the first images of the weather seen from space and they were beautiful. And eisenhower spoke of that and i write about it. He saw what it looked like over egypt, over the st. Lawrence river. He could see the whole world in each photograph and spoke to the nation about it with great pride. They became as National Geographic said it was a really interesting time and thought that long ago in the big picture of things when we could first see things from space. Host you mentioned in the beginning of your conversation that darpa essential uses art and science, round up the top people and this started in the beginning. One of these assembled scientists had a particular name, jason, because to me this is something people just dont know about. The amount of influence they had over American Foreign policy, still have today over American Foreign policy is pretty extraordinary. They were assembled after darpa was assembled led by a man you may or may not know who charlestowns is, very important to us, talk a little bit about the jason and what they do. Guest jason began in 1960 as a group, they were referred to by their government handlers as the supermen of hard science. They were astrophysicist, nuclear physicists, they handled, tackled all the hard problems and immediately when darpa was founded the idea was windy as deadly as you said, we need the best guys with the biggest minds. For awhile jasons only customer was darpa. I had the Great Fortune of interviewing a fellow named marvin goldberger, president ial science adviser and but cofounder of the jason. I write about him, he just passed, interesting hearing his perspective. We interviewed in 2015. His long lens of history working on these projects going back to the 60s, the jasons are some isnt this the being the isnt people consider them up there with the of lanai in terms of these guys cooking of these ideas but i found, from reading their unclassified report in interviewing some of them, they were very cautious in their work and they were fulltime academics and parttime defense scientists. They would only gather in the summer and discuss these big problems the secretary of defense would put to them and say sort this out. Host it wasnt the easy part, it was the difficult part nobody could figure out, we have no idea what to do with its, you fix it and amazingly their track record is pretty spectacular. Host the unclassified documents are one thing but the classified documents, some of the names of the documents have been declassified, only the names but when you read the new realize i couldnt understand that even if it was declassified. Such literally hard science. Host darpa comes of age during the vietnam war. A lot of travel by fire in many respects. A lot of the things that are looked at in vietnam as being potentially problematic about the war were things that darpa either tried to get rid of or were the the first ones to appreciate the idea of trying to defeat an insurgency with technology. Maybe not the first one. The primary focus was hightech counterinsurgency strategy. Talk about the extent of things like technological operations. Guest vietnam was an interesting time for darpa, many different they were working on anthropology programs and conventional weapons, the ar15 was darpa weapon that is now the n 16. Early gliders which kind of lead to sell technology. The one that i found the most impact will was lot idea of Sensor Technology. The coach team in trail was sort of the dreaded problem of the pentagon. All of the fighters, insurgents would come from the north to the south by way of this trail and the secretary of defense figuring out a way to stop this. They saw it almost like it was the human and needed to have a starter reese severed. Jason scientists and documents. They thought about nuclearweapons, that was not an option. This feature of an electronic fence. The reason i found it so interesting to explore was because all the Sensor Technology, seismic sensors which come from the program you referred to, audio sensors, magnetic sensors, these were incredibly early ideas during the vietnam war and now they make up so much of our existence, i am sure driving hear someones lynch yield wipers started to work as a drop of rain, this to the sense is they were working on. Host the technology is used throughout the intelligence agency. I am sure one of us drove over one of the sensors on the ground to determine how fast we are going, things like that. Vietnam was also a time they began to and vesting more professional technology. Agent orange is one of these technologies that i find very interesting, Weather Modification technology. More devious things, more outside the box thinking about winning of the war through causing monsoons or changing the ability of the vietnamese to grow food. They werent continue to be always at the cutting edge of science and darpa is an Agency Looking at the problem 20 years, 25 years, spoken of as free requirement research and it takes the idea of the militaryindustrial complex. Was one of the darpa directors who spoke to congress after the vietnam war when darpa got into trouble, you are making weapons we dont need and he called it the chicken and egg problem, saying listen, if a need for a weapons system comes along and we havent already developed it there is a real problem. That is the chicken and egg problem. Host unwanted talk about cymbeline use of Technology Developed by darpa would give the audience hasnt heard of this agency they go that is where this is from. Lets start with j. C. Light. Guest the Johnny Appleseed of the internet. He is the man responsible for what we have today as the internet, the Technology Used by almost all the technology on the planet. That began as the darpa project, the internet was originally called darpanet and bank later came to the pentagon to darpa in 1962 when congress decided there was a Big Technology problem and if you can imagine the idea of a red phone, that was the Technology President kennedy and khrushchev had to use to make that dreaded go no go nuclear decision. And mindful there are 1600 seconds till doomsday, imagine wasting thirtysecond trying to dial a rotary phone so the pentagon said we need commandandcontrol. They lukelighter came to darpa to work on this very hard problem and in his early memos he talked about this idea of intergalactic network. These computers spoke to each other and were tied together and everyone said yes, work on command and control but later of course that materializes in a very big way and becomes the darpanet and then the internet. Host computer scientists look at his writings he essentially predict Cloud Computing and this was in the 1960s. Alan tearing talking about Artificial Intelligence which we are nowhere near today, back during that time. It is hard not to talk abo