By Lee Cullum, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – What could be more weird than turning to traders on the Internet to track the futures of terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups? What could be more odd than seeking out speculators to determine where Osama bin Laden will strike next or whether someone will eliminate Yasir Arafat? Actually Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas is a more likely target, but that doesn't matter to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as DARPA, which came up with the idea in an effort to anticipate trouble and head it off. But the plan headed by Admiral John Poindexter - best known for his role in Irangate under Ronald Reagan - is capitalism carried to its outermost limits, where the market is seen not as an efficient way of allocating capital but as the answer to everything.
What Poindexter and the people at DARPA failed to see is this: just because the market is a credible predictor of commodity prices (and even elections) does not mean that it can fathom the mind of a terrorist. Even Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was astonished. "It sounds like maybe they got too imaginative in this area," he said. But the problem is they weren't nearly imaginative enough. They fell back on that old saw, the market, never realizing that terrorism is an entirely different organism from pork bellies and pork barrels.
Far more effective would be a gathering of eccentrics like those at Bletchley Park, north of London, during World War II. They broke one Nazi code after another and turned the fabled Enigma machine into a tool for Allied victory.
As Michael Smith explained in his book, "Station X: Decoding Nazi Secrets," the idea was to assemble off-beat people, far from the disciplines of government or the military, to bring fresh thinking to the codes of war.
One was from King's College Cambridge. At 24 he had divined "the basic principles behind the modern computer." He would ride his bicycle to work wearing a gas mask to keep pollens from aggravating his hay fever. Another was a Greek scholar and Egyptologist who much preferred papyrus and hieroglyphics to technology. He was known to get so absorbed in what he was doing that he would stuff his pipe with sandwiches instead of tobacco, and he believed that like Alice in Wonderland, he had to imagine himself inside the Enigma and think as the machine itself would do.
Later, in 1943, came the Americans, including Lewis Powell, who one day would be a justice on the Supreme Court, Al Friendly, a future managing editor of the Washington Post, and Bill Bundy, for whom foreign relations would become a life work. The Americans amazed their British hosts with their capacity for liquor, but together those Yanks and Brits broke German codes, deciphered German plans and in the view of Winston Churchill shortened the war by at least three years.
The thing, said a young mathematician, was to put yourself in the place of a German soldier. Was he lazy? In a terrible hurry? Did he simply use the first letters that popped up that day as the basis of his code? The answer was yes. It was a pivotal breakthrough.
This is what the brilliant eccentrics of today must do - think like a terrorist. This approach has been proposed by others. Perhaps DARPA is already doing it. If so, I hope John Poindexter is not in charge.
Lee Cullum is a frequent contributor to the Dallas Morning News and to KERA.