This New Ocean, page 34
Space observation, to take another example, would be called “remote sensing” by the civilians and “strategic reconnaissance” by the military. But both systems would perform the same basic function: watching Earth from orbit. The civilians’ mandate to collect weather, geological, nautical, resource, and other data for open use would confound the military’s penchant for cloaking its “spy” satellites, as well as others, in the absolute secrecy of so-called black programs. Geodesy—literally, sizing up Earth—would set the stage for one of the earliest battles, for example, as the military tried to keep the data secret because it related to ballistic missile targeting while civilian scientists wanted to release it to the public for civil engineering, transportation, and other purposes.
Sorting out and delineating the respective roles was all but impossible because they sprang from the same well. Historian Walter A. McDougall described the situation succinctly when he wrote that there was a growing realization “that separation of military and civilian activities was increasingly artificial in an age of scientific warfare and total Cold War.… The space program was a paramilitary operation in the Cold War, no matter who ran it.”83
Finally, there was the matter of creating a new agency or adapting an existing one to the new task. One body of opinion, which included the always conservative Bureau of the Budget, the Pentagon, and the White House, favored expanding the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics to accommodate space activity.
Ironically, NACA’s origin was similar to that of the embryonic space agency; it was conceived and born in a crisis atmosphere. In 1915, with Europe embroiled in a war in the air as well as on land and sea, aviation enthusiasts in the United States were appalled to see that their own country, which had given the world the airplane, was lagging behind other nations in its development. They took this to be both embarrassing and militarily dangerous. And they also worried, with justification, because “birdmen” and “aviatrixes” were getting killed in a large number of accidents. Calbraith P. Rodgers, for example, crashed nineteen times while making the first flight from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 1911 and died in a crash just four months later. There were fatalities in Europe as well, of course. But the Europeans attacked the problem by involving government in directed, applied research. It was an example that the American Aeronautical Society, the spiritual forerunner of the American Rocket Society, successfully lobbied to emulate in the United States.
Legislation creating NACA quietly slipped through Congress attached to a naval appropriation bill in March 1915. From then until the dawn of the space age, it conducted solid, low-profile aerodynamic research for industry and the military. It used wind tunnels to design hundreds of specialized airfoils, or wing cross sections, and other parts of aircraft. Yet by 1958, there was a feeling on the part of many scientists, as well as aircraft manufacturers and military officers themselves, that NACA had withered into a timid bureaucracy that was as afraid of making enemies as it was interested in pursuing research. This resulted, in Newell’s estimation, in an agency that was too narrowly focused and too conservative to function in the seemingly boundless world of space. He cited NACA’s missing out on a number of important aeronautical advances, notably the invention of the jet engine, as examples of its inherent exhaustion.
Its proponents’ arguments notwithstanding, Congress finally decided to abandon NACA altogether because of both its conservatism and its ties to the military. Given the frantic nature of the competition that existed with the Soviet Union at the time, the agency delegated to meet that competition had to be bold and inherently dynamic. NACA did not look as though it could rise to that challenge.
The administration’s space bill was submitted to Congress on April 2, 1958. Debate in both houses’ committees resulted in a number of changes that were acceptable to Eisenhower, who signed the legislation—P. L. 58-568, the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958—into law on July 29. The agency that it mandated to replace NACA, called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because it wanted to make a seamless bond between the atmosphere and the environs above it, would open its doors on October 1. But even before then, it would find itself entangled in its own thicket of political thorns.
* He also knew, but could not say publicly, that plans were under way to arm the nation’s growing fleet of fighter-interceptors with nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles that would be used to stop Soviet bombers hundreds of miles away from U.S. borders. The logical route for those bombers to take would have been over Canada, and everyone in the national command authority agreed that nuking them over Canadian territory was infinitely preferable to, say, losing Chicago or Detroit.
* The highest level was, and remains, information that is compartmented. That is, it is accessible only to those with a so-called “need to know” specific material. “Sensitive Compartmented Information,” or SCI, applies to all data collected by technical intelligence systems and the data themselves. Those who analyze aerial or satellite imagery, for example, are kept ignorant about details relating to the camera’s operation or the working of the satellite. This has the effect of minimizing the damage from a leak, but it also inhibits sharing useful information. An SCI clearance requires more thorough background checks than does “Top Secret” and is more stringently enforced.
* TV-1, consisting only of the Vanguard third stage, was launched at Canaveral by Viking 14 on May 1 to test the separation system. TV-2, a whole Vanguard, successfully tested the first stage on October 23. It was not supposed to reach orbital altitude, and it did not.
* Inadvertent explosions at Cape Canaveral, all of them witnessed by the news media, prompted The New York Times to take the unusual step of urging precisely the sort of secrecy that Medaris demanded. “Would it not be wiser—when malfunction and other obstacles are so likely and so frequent—to let the devoted men who are preparing Vanguard to do their work in quiet? When Vanguard is fired is time enough for the world to know what has happened,” stated an editorial on March 14, 1958 (Assault on the Unknown, p. 92). The Times’ stand flew in the face of frequent charges that the Fourth Estate cared more about running sensational stories, including about catastrophes, than it did about the nation’s welfare.
* The year was 1982. It would never even reach a hundred again. The total for the United States, Japan, and China was twenty. (Johnson, The Soviet Year in Space: 1982, p. 1.)
7
War and Peace in the Third Dimension
There were greasy fireballs, dud upper stages, and large flaming cylinders that confounded their makers by veering off course, tumbling wildly out of control, then plummeting into the Atlantic and disappearing under great geysers like leviathans shot out of the sky by an invisible hunter.
Some rockets took wrong turns. Others refused to ignite. Still others separated prematurely, had a stage cut off too soon, were betrayed by their own amnesic brains, suffered strokes when their fuel or oxidizer blew through their containers’ walls, or had their pumps seize into gummy paralysis. Those that were ornery enough to swerve off their flight path while still intact were destroyed by explosive charges to keep them away from the people who launched them and from the residents of and tourists in Cocoa Beach, Titusville, Melbourne, and other nearby communities who were becoming the new space culture’s first groupies. The errant rockets, blown to pieces by somebody called a range safety officer, would disintegrate before they hit the water. Every potential success carried the seed of its own malfunction and demise. So it was, late in 1957 and throughout 1958, as the launch teams strained to push their technology to its limit east of the Indian River and due south of Mosquito Lagoon.
The score for 1958 was five successes—three Explorers, a Vanguard, and a whole Atlas that broadcast Eisenhower’s Christmas message to the world—and thirteen failures or partial failures, four of which involved desperate, pathetic shots at the Moon by Air Force and Army probes called Pioneers. The name would be temporarily blackened but would survive to see a better day.
Meanwhile, the civilian and military rocket fraternity and those who chronicled what it did looked past Canaveral’s charred launchpads and twisted carcasses, past the bubbling swells that were the Atlantic Missile Range’s grave markers, and saw the future. The miserable launch situation notwithstanding, the fact that the space age had arrived was broadly accepted, and so was the competition that drove it.
Nuking the Moon
There was so much angst at JPL because of the Sputniks and what they seemed to represent that at one point the lab resurrected the idea that had heaped ridicule on poor Goddard in 1919: hitting the lunar surface with something that would go off just to prove that Americans could do it.1 This time, however, the instrument of public relations would not be flash powder. William Pickering and some of his scientists mulled over the possibility of setting off an eleven-kiloton atomic bomb on an Agena upper stage. It was thought that this first ISBM, or Interspatial Ballistic Missile, would “shower the Earth with samples of surface dust” and produce “beneficial psychological results” (one of which would have been to demonstrate to Khrushchev and the rest of the world that American missiles had fifty times the range of their Russian counterparts). The idea was floated to Lee DuBridge, Caltech’s president, and Pickering said that it never came to more than “coffee table talk.” That was not quite the case, however. The idea made its way north to Lockheed’s Missiles and Space Division, which produced the Agena. There, Saunders B. Kramer was given the job of calculating whether the bomb would have time to explode before it was crushed on impact. The young scientist, who thought the idea was “nutty,” found that it would indeed explode.
The idea of atom-bombing the Moon had also flared briefly in Santa Monica even earlier. It had been considered in 1956 by W. W. Kellogg at RAND, who had mentioned it in an unclassified report on observing the lunar surface.
No one took the idea seriously except some Air Force intelligence officers who felt obliged to warn that it would be just like the show-off Communists to try such a stunt. “The possibility of immense propaganda advantages make one event extremely attractive—that of exploding a Soviet atomic bomb on the moon,” the service’s secret Air Intelligence Digest reported in November 1959. “A 20 KT [kiloton] nuclear warhead exploded on or near the surface of the moon would be easily discernible to observers on earth.… From the penthouses of metropolitan areas to the nomadic shepherds of Afghanistan, the evidence would be irrefutable. This feat could demonstrate the Soviet claim to superiority and be supported by the personal experience of every observer.” The article went on to claim that the political advantages would be “immense” before noting that there was not so much as a shred of evidence to indicate that the Kremlin was entertaining such an idea. The wily Khrushchev would certainly have understood that whatever power was demonstrated by being the first nation to spread nuclear weapons to another world, there would also be ignominious consequences.
Scouting the Opposition
Harebrained scenarios aside, the Soviet missile and space programs became the targets of the most massive (and expensive) intelligence operation in history. The reasons were compelling, and ranged from needing to know about Soviet military reconnaissance capability on Earth, to determining whether the enemy could rain nuclear bombs on the West from orbit, to figuring out whether a Soviet space feat was true or false, to calculating how (in the trade’s sanitized technojargon) the Kremlin’s “platforms” and other “assets” could be “negated” by ASATs (anti-satellite weapons) if war broke out.
Writing in the Fall 1961 issue of Studies in Intelligence, a classified CIA quarterly professional journal, veteran Soviet missile and space program analysts Albert D. “Bud” Wheelon and Sidney N. Graybeal drew a classic analogy between their work and that of a football coach:
A college football coach, spurred by a vigilant body of alumni to maintain a winning team, is expected to devote a great deal of energy to what in a more deadly competition would be called intelligence activity. He must scout the opposition before game time and plan his own defense and offense in the light of what he learns. During a game he must diagnose plays as they occur in order to adjust his team’s tactics and give it flexible direction in action. After the game he should be prepared with an appropriate analysis of what happened, both in order that his team may benefit from seeing its experience in clear focus and in order to placate or moderate the Monday-morning quarterbacks. Although both alumni and coach recognize that football has little to do with the true purpose of a college, the coach is under relentless pressure to win games because his team, in some intangible sense, stands for the entire college.
It is much the same in the space race, a game which is similarly characterized by lively competition on the playing field and intense partisan interest among the spectators. In a way which is neither rational nor desirable, our stature as a nation, our culture, our way of life and government are tending to be gauged by our skill in playing this game. Because we should expect to lose as well as win matches in the series, our government must be provided by its intelligence services with reliable foreknowledge of the possibilities for Soviet space attempts and forecasts of probable attempts, with concurrent evaluations of all attempts as they are made, and with detailed reconstructions thereafter.
The notion that American culture would be judged by the world according to its space program, let alone that it would matter, would prove to be dubious. But that is the way it looked from the bench in the stadium as the cold war solidified and Soviet space feats multiplied. The supposed cultural danger from space was a shibboleth, and so was the military threat from that direction during all of Eisenhower’s presidency, as Killian and the other science advisors repeatedly tried to explain to the public. The systems were so unreliable that a shot at Washington could easily have landed in Buenos Aires. ICBMs were another matter, however. A strategic intelligence system that was embryonic when the Korean War began in 1950 had therefore hurriedly been started by the time it ended three years later. And it was growing massively when Sputnik 1 went up.
By the end of 1957, detailed reports were being written about the expansion and improvement of Kapustin Yar and about three hundred or more short- and medium-range missiles that had already been tested there. A report on the top-secret NII 88 missile design bureau, issued in March 1960, credited Korolyov with being “the most talented Soviet engineer-designer” at the facility and noted that he had participated in V-2 firings as early as 1947 and had been a chief designer since 1951. Even in 1947, then, what passed for a U.S. intelligence apparatus was paying close attention to Korolyov and his colleagues. NII 88 itself was described as the principal center for guided missile development. “There is no more important known target of this type in the USSR,” the report added. Presumably, the “target” reference had to do with intelligence collection, not possible obliteration.
The technical collection system used machines instead of agents—tracking radars, signals interception antennas, ships, planes, and eventually satellites—and a cadre of specialists in the military intelligence services, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and in private contracting firms and think tanks to make sense out of what the machines collected. In that capacity, the system depended mostly on cloaks, not daggers; that is, on “techint’s” machines far more than “humint’s” spies and traitors.* Machines were far better than spies (or “operatives” in their own sanitized jargon) for at least three reasons: they could collect infinitely more intelligence; they did not lie, distort, or betray; and, Francis Gary Powers and some other airmen aside, they could not be caught.
Although it was not known to outsiders, including those in government, there were and remain four distinct cultures (or tribes, as one insider called them) at the CIA. There were tweedy scientists and engineers such as Wheelon, Graybeal, and Herbert R. “Pete” Scoville Jr., many with doctorates in physics from places such as Stanford and MIT, who were in the Directorate of Science and Technology and who designed very clever (and staggeringly expensive) machines that looked and listened, and who analyzed what the machines collected. There were the Ivy Leaguers with B.A.’s in literature from Yale, Brown, Princeton, and the rest of the “Ancient Eight” whose patron saint was the OSS’s William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan and who drank straight-up martinis in Georgetown, ran the “dirty tricks” war, and plotted coups and assassinations from Guatemala to Iran.* They were in the ambiguously named Directorate for Plans (later the Directorate of Operations). The scientists and engineers tended to dismiss them as overgrown kids who on some level were acting out cloak-and-dagger movie roles, while the spooks often scorned any technology more complicated than the tiny Minox cameras that were standard issue to agents in those days. A third directorate, Intelligence, attracted Ph.D.’s in disciplines like economics and political science who analyzed what the other two collected and who were convinced that they belonged to a kind of superuniversity. Finally, there were the people who ran the agency as a whole, and who thought of all the others the way a rueful headmaster thinks of chronically untidy and undisciplined schoolboys.
Richard M. Bissell Jr., a Yale man, directed both the highly successful overhead reconnaissance operations and the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion and therefore had a foot in both the technical collection and so-called clandestine camps. So did Allen Welsh Dulles, a Princetonian and an OSS alumnus, who presided over both cultures as director of central intelligence from 1953 to 1961. Dulles never liked the U-2 program and had to be ordered to take it on by his president. Allen’s brother, John Foster, ran the Department of State over in Foggy Bottom.
“Kidnapping” a Soviet Spacecraft
One of the truly notable spy capers occurred in the early 1960s, when American agents “borrowed” a Lunik, thoroughly photographed its interior, and returned it the following morning before it was missed. That brazen, and dangerous, operation happened when the Russians sent their Moon probe and other hardware to a trade fair in Mexico. Having learned to its astonishment that the Lunik was real, not a model, U.S. intelligence decided to see to it that the truck carrying the Moon explorer was the last to leave the fairgrounds on the way to the freight train that was to take it to its next destination. While the vehicle’s driver was treated to a night’s diversion in a local hotel, a substitute driver drove the crated spacecraft to a salvage yard. The crate was then pried open with painstaking care.
