The Wizards of Langley (38 page)

Things did not get off to a smooth start. Many in OSO were not happy with the formation of the SCS and didn’t want to be part of a group that would be managed by an NSA official half the time. Appointed to be the first head of the new service was Roy Burks. From NSA, Bill Black, a senior operations official, was selected to serve as deputy. Neither man, Burks later recalled, was involved in the bitter fighting that preceded the merger, a factor that gave them a better chance to make the new arrangement work.
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According to Burks, there were people on both sides who seemed to want to make things difficult. Among the obstacles SCS faced was getting the CIA to courier documents to its College Park headquarters, forcing Burks to send a cleared secretary. The CIA did not want to send material to College Park because NSA people, at that time, were not polygraphed. Only when NSA began routinely giving polygraphs to its employees did the CIA feel comfortable in sending classified documents to SCS headquarters.
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But by the end of 1983, joint CIA-NSA Special Collection Elements would be present in about a third of U.S. embassies abroad. The teams, which might consist of only two or three people, produced excellent intelligence, particularly if the embassy was located on high ground or near the foreign or defense ministries or other key offices in the capital. The sites were particularly effective in East European capitals.
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The early years of the operational KH-11 program also brought a further infusion of talented people into the development and engineering office, many of whom would go on to serve as senior office or NRO officials. Replacing Dirks as director of the development and engineering office was Donald L. Haas, an OD&E veteran who had been serving as director of ORD. He left in August 1978 to become deputy director of the NRO. Five months later, Haas’s position was filled by Bernard Lubarsky.
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Lubarsky, who knew relatively little about the world of spies before joining it, was recruited from outside the intelligence community because the logical candidates to succeed Haas had left the CIA for jobs in industry and those remaining were not considered ready to assume the directorship. In 1947, after receiving his doctorate in mathematics (his bachelor’s and master’s degrees were in electrical engineering) from Case Institute of Technology, Lubarsky went to work at the National Advisory
Council on Aeronautics (NACA) and became an employee of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) when that agency was created in 1958 and absorbed NACA. While at NASA, he got to know Hans Mark, the director of the space agency’s Ames Research Center. In 1977, Mark became Under Secretary of the Air Force and director of the NRO, and in 1978 he recommended Lubarsky as a possible replacement for Haas. In January 1979, Lubarsky assumed command of the 500-person office.
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His impression of the people who worked for him was that they were “just outstanding . . . no humpty-dumpties.” His deputy, Bert Aschen-brenner, who had served as acting director during part of the period between Haas’s departure and Lubarsky’s arrival, was a “very dedicated guy.” Heading up the office’s two satellite reconnaissance programs were Bob Kohler, who “was very aggressive [and] played hardball,” and managed the KENNAN program, and Julian Caballero Jr., who managed the AQUACADE (née RHYOLITE) program. Ed Nowinski served as Koh-ler’s systems engineering chief. All three eventually became directors of OD&E.
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Many people who worked for Kohler and Caballero would go on to senior positions in the world of reconnaissance. In 1978, Jeffrey K. Harris, a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, transferred from NPIC to OD&E, eventually becoming manager of the KH-11 program and subsequently director of the NRO (1995–1997).
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Dennis Fitzgerald received a master’s from Johns Hopkins University in applied physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, and space technology. He joined the science and technology directorate in 1974 as a member of the OD&E Systems Analysis Group, working on developing new concepts for intelligence collection. In 1980, he became involved in collection systems procurement. Fitzgerald went on to hold senior positions in NPIC and the development and engineering and the research and development offices. In November 1997, he became the head of NRO’s signals intelligence directorate.
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In 1981, David Kier left NASA, where he was responsible for “aeronautic interfaces” with the Defense Department and intelligence community, to join OD&E, where he would work on a highly secret aerial reconnaissance program (discussed in
Chapter 8
). In 1997, he became the NRO’s deputy director.
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Modifications and improvements to the KH-11 and AQUACADE systems were part of the work of the rocket scientists. One proposal, made
sometime early in the Carter administration, to modify the KH-11 system reflected the continuing competition between the Air Force and CIA. In response to a 1979 Air Force proposal to develop a dedicated radar imagery satellite to allow the collection of imagery at night and in the presence of cloud cover, OD&E proposed adding a radar imagery payload to the KH-11. The CIA suggested attaching a radar imagery payload developed by the Air Force, code-named QUILL, and orbited only once—in December 1964. The 1964 version returned its images in a recoverable capsule; the version proposed in 1979 would relay its data back to earth as the KH-11 did. The plan was opposed by Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who objected to placing so many reconnaissance eggs in a single basket. The issue, with Brown and DCI Stansfield Turner on opposite sides, went to President Carter, who sided with Brown.
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But the development wizards did create other improvements and modifications. When problems in the performance of an orbiting KH-11 were discovered, the models still on the ground were modified to avoid a recurrence. Before leaving the CIA, Jeffrey Harris led the successful effort to design an advanced version of the KH-11, which had higher resolution and greater swath width than the original model and thus could perform both high-resolution and area surveillance missions. Harris also oversaw the addition of an infrared imagery capability, code-named DRAGON, to the advanced spy satellite.
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By the beginning of 1979, the TACKSMAN I facility consisted of four major units—a command center built into a hilltop, a radar antenna inside a thirty-foot-high dome, a radio monitoring device atop a steel tower, and a relay station pointed upward for communication with U.S. satellites. The radio monitoring device, built by Scientific Atlanta Inc., was a Pedestal Model 310—a device with four eight-foot-long arms studded with quill-like protrusions. The arms were almost joined at the front and pointed toward the Caspian Sea. Nearby was Scientific Atlanta’s “power with Pedestal Model 300-L,” a dish-shaped device fifteen feet high that pointed upward. There were 100 U.S. technicians who operated the equipment.
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The TACKSMAN II facility at Kabkan, Iran, forty miles east of Meshed, was described by a CIA staff member as a twenty-first-century facility with advanced electronic equipment. The facility itself was in
stark contrast to the surrounding area—a remote mountainous locale inhabited by nomads. However, it was not the local environment that interested the CIA but rather the fact that Kabkan was only 650 miles south of the Tyuratam space center and ICBM test facility and was capable of eavesdropping on the ABM test center at Sary Shagan.
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President Carter considered the sites sufficiently important that he told his ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, that intelligence cooperation between the CIA and Iran should continue despite the Shah’s poor human rights record.
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But in January 1979, the Shah of Iran, in the wake of increasing protests and riots, fled the country he had ruled so autocratically for twenty-five years.

The Shah’s end took the U.S. intelligence community by surprise. A sixty-page CIA study completed in August 1977,
Iran in the 1980s
, had asserted that “there will be no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future” and that “the Shah will be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s.” A year later, a twenty-three-page CIA Intelligence Assessment, “Iran After the Shah,” proclaimed that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a ‘prerevolutionary’ situation.” A month later, the DIA issued an Intelligence Appraisal stating that the Shah “is expected to remain actively in power over the next ten years.”
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From the time the Shah left, Iran became a priority U.S. intelligence target. Among the resources used to gather information were the KEYHOLE satellites. Targets included all of Tehran, Iranian military facilities, and the TACKSMAN sites.
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Photography of the intelligence facilities could tell the United States whether they had been discovered by the new regime.

The CIA apparently had a plan for airlifting equipment and personnel out of the TACKSMAN II site using C-130 aircraft but never got the chance to implement it. Soon the CIA’s prize telemetry intercept sites were in the hands of the ayatollahs. Kabkan was besieged by militiamen, and twenty-two U.S. technicians were captured. Subsequently, they were returned to the United States.
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(The facility’s chief, Richard A. Krueger, later in the year became chief of another CIA SIGINT facility also located in a remote area. However, although Pine Gap’s location in the Australian outback was physically remote, his new assignment was in a considerably less hazardous and friendlier political environment.)
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On January 31, the U.S. technicians at Beshahr abandoned the facility, leaving the equipment running—perhaps because its intercepts were being remotely transmitted to a satellite. Ambassador William Sullivan engaged in negotiations with the authorities in Tehran, which apparently in
cluded payment of ransom, to get the CIA employees out of the country safely.
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Although losing the stations was a serious blow, U.S. officials hoped to avoid compounding the disaster by loss of the equipment to hostile powers. One reason the Iranians did not shut off the electricity when they took over was fear of damaging the equipment and therefore their ability to sell it. An Iranian logistics supervisor at the facility stated, “We don’t know who will get the equipment. Maybe Iran will sell it to someone. Maybe we will use it. It might hurt the machinery if we turned off the electricity.” Thus, the U.S. ambassador to Iran was informed on February 12 that “preventing sensitive military and intelligence equipment from falling into unfriendly hands” was one of two immediate U.S. concerns. In May, a visit by two newspaper correspondents found the Beshahr post “intact and whirring.” The bungalows that had housed U.S. personnel had been sealed, but station employees still mowed the lawns occasionally.
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The loss of the stations was damaging in both an intelligence and a political sense. The Iranian sites had unique capabilities. In 1979, a worst-case view was given by one official:

In addition, coming as it did on the heels of public exposure of Boyce’s sale of RHYOLITE data, the loss further exacerbated concern over U.S. ability to verify the new SALT II Treaty. Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State at the time, noted: “The loss of the collection stations in Iran . . . was a serious setback, both in the sense of temporarily impairing our ability to check Soviet compliance with certain SALT limitations and in its impact on key senators, such as John Glenn, who had become the Senate’s leading expert on verification.”
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Also left behind in Kabkan was a system designated LAZY CAT, which had been only recently installed in reaction to concern expressed by intelligence directorate analysts that the Soviets might be testing an antisatellite laser weapon at Sary Shagan. But neither signals intelligence nor imagery was conclusive. In an attempt to provide answers, the Office of SIGINT Operations installed a system similar to the TEAL AMBER
space surveillance telescope at Malabar, Florida.
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The expectation was that if the Soviets were conducting such tests, the laser signal would “scatter stuff our way” after hitting the target, according to one CIA officer knowledgeable about the project.
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That same official, William “Al” Nance, was dubious about whether the project would have provided any intelligence of value—even assuming the Soviets were conducting such tests and not simply using the laser for tracking. Potential problems included the need for the LAZY CAT system to be looking in the right direction as well as the need for clear air and an absence of cloud cover. Nance assessed the probability of success as “near zero.”
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By the time the Shah was heading off into exile, a replacement for the TACKSMAN sites was in sight. During his secret trip to Beijing in July 1971, national security adviser Henry Kissinger offered Zhou Enlai communications intelligence and high-resolution satellite imagery concerning Soviet forces on China’s border. Zhou accepted. Additional offers were made in October 1971 during another Kissinger trip, in December 1971 at a CIA safehouse in Manhattan, and again in Beijing in November 1973.
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