The Wizards of Langley (11 page)

Nor did McCone and Scoville mesh personally. McCone was new money, Scoville old money. The DCI was also remote and austere. When Scoville called him “John,” McCone flinched. People just didn’t call him by his first name, McMahon recalled, observing that “I don’t think even his wife did.” Further, McCone was a staunch Republican, while Scoville was a liberal Democrat. Scoville was committed to nuclear disarmament and devoted some of his time to chairing an interagency committee on the issue. As a result, McCone felt Scoville was giving less than 100 percent to his job.
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Also, although McCone’s appearance and demeanor helped generate the appearance of a tough and decisive manager, he often wavered and reversed course. Scoville’s deputy Edward Giller recalled that McCone would make instant decisions and then do an about-face, leaving people irritated and requiring deputy DCI Marshall Carter to pick up the pieces.
Albert Wheelon, Scoville’s successor as head of OSI and then as chief of the CIA science and technology effort, later wrote that McCone “was regarded as a great manager. . . . In truth, he was no manager at all. . . . He was reluctant to make and implement organizational decisions.”
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Thus, in a meeting with Charyk on October 1, McCone agreed that the CIA would assume responsibility for all covert contracting—a decision that came less than a month after Scoville had rejected the idea and after McCone had told Scoville of his support.
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Then, when Scoville proved unhelpful, in Charyk’s view, in providing CORONA-experienced personnel for an operational control facility in the Washington, D.C., area, Charyk turned to McCone, who again sided with him despite his initial support for Scoville. Such incidents led Scoville to question Charyk’s willingness to deal with him in good faith, whereas Charyk concluded that he was better off dealing with McCone.
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Those incidents, particularly when added to McCone’s failure to deliver OSI and TSD as promised, convinced Scoville that he could not rely on McCone.

McCone’s indecisiveness manifested itself in a different way in summer and fall 1962. Charyk and Scoville had reached agreement on several issues, mostly minor, only to have the agreements nullified by McCone’s refusal to accept Scoville’s judgment. In each case, Scoville had to contact Charyk and announce his withdrawal from the agreement in question. Charyk, apparently unaware of McCone’s role, took Scoville’s withdrawals as a sign of capriciousness. Charyk believed Scoville to be insincere, and the tone of their exchanges sharpened. The situation was made worse by the shift of U-2 missions to the Air Force during the Cuban missile crisis. By late October, Scoville and Charyk were no longer talking. Written correspondence from one to the other, even of the most formal kind, stopped shortly afterward.
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Adding fuel to the fire was McCone’s mid-November proposal to McNa-mara that he sign a letter to the Director of the Budget recommending the direct release to CIA of all funds required for the conduct of covert satellite projects. Charyk responded by writing Gilpatric that “if the NRO is to function it must be responsible for continuous monitoring of financial and technical program status, must control the release of funds to programs and must be able to reallocate between NRP programs.” McCone’s proposal would have allowed the agency to shift funds among CIA programs and prevented the DNRO from shifting funds between CIA and Air Force programs. Charyk concluded that Scoville had originated the proposal, although it was composed and submitted without his knowledge.
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Although personal hostility may have helped embitter the relationship between Charyk and Scoville, as well as between the CIA and NRO, there were also fundamental institutional viewpoints involved that had nothing to do with personality issues or particular acts of the principals and their subordinates. In the view of an NRO historian, “Scoville was the embodiment of CIA esprit de corps in an organization which—with considerable justification—considered itself uniquely more efficient and effective than any other element of the government.” That view was fueled not only by the success of programs such as CORONA and the U-2 but also by the Air Force’s SAMOS failures and the problems experienced in development of the GAMBIT high-resolution satellite.
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Although the Air Force element of the NRO eventually would oversee the development of a number of valuable reconnaissance satellites, including GAMBIT, at the time success was elusive.

Scoville and others in the CIA equated the NRO with the Air Force and viewed the NRO as a means by which the Air Force was attempting to hijack a highly successful CIA program to substitute for the Air Force’s failed program. As Wheelon would write many years later: “After their initial mistakes in rejecting the U-2 and botching the SAMOS Program, the Air Force knew a good thing when it saw it.”
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Charyk and his staff had a drastically different viewpoint. It took a year and a half and over thirteen launches before CORONA experienced its first success. The overhauled SAMOS program had been in existence only slightly more than two years, and it had not yet had a chance to prove itself. Charyk and the Air Force were confident that it would succeed.
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Of greatest importance, they saw the NRO as “the embodiment of a new spirit in the national defense establishment”—similar to the creation of the National Security Agency a decade earlier and, more recently, a number of centralized defense agencies, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency. Charyk and others in the NRO viewed their organization as a national instrument that only incidentally made use of Air Force resources, and they believed their conception of a national reconnaissance program was much more comprehensive in scope than that of the CIA.
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Many in the CIA saw things differently. After all, the CIA was also a national organization—indeed,
the
national intelligence organization. Its components reported to the Director of Central Intelligence, who was charged by the NSC, via National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 5, with coordinating the collection of intelligence through clandestine means, which included covert reconnaissance.
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In addition, the DCI
was responsible, largely through the CIA, for producing national intelligence for the president and other key decisionmakers—products for which reconnaissance data were essential. If the DCI and CIA agreed to abdicate a major role in directing the national reconnaissance effort, they would be endangering their ability to ensure that the required information was collected.

CIA officials were also not likely to accept the notion of an NRO whose use of Air Force assets was only “incidental”—no matter how strongly Charyk or other NRO officials embraced the idea, and even though there were Air Force officers assigned to the CIA who did not let their military affiliation compromise their work for the CIA. Nor did it matter if the regular Air Force distrusted NRO, or if Air Force officers serving with the NRO were treated as outcasts by the rest of the Air Force. To those in the CIA, blue suits were blue suits.
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In December, Charyk received an offer from the COMSAT Corporation, and by January people knew he would be leaving government shortly. But his imminent departure did not stop him from continuing to address the weaknesses he believed existed in NRO’s charter and to press for a new one.
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A new agreement, he argued in a parting analysis of the NRO situation, should state plainly that the NRO was an operating agency and that its director had full management responsibility for all projects. This meant, Charyk contended, that the NRO director should have authority over the reconnaissance activities of both the CIA and DOD. He should have complete authority in funding matters. And in a flashback to the time when he and Bissell worked together without discord, Charyk observed that appointments must be made so as to ensure that the responsible people “will function as an effective working team rather than as representatives of the DoD and CIA.”
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At the end of February, during his last week in office, he completed a revision of a CIA draft, which had apparently been prepared by McCone’s immediate staff rather than by Scoville or his staff. Charyk took the revision to Roswell Gilpatric. It appears that some CIA-suggested changes were incorporated sometime after Charyk left office. On March 13, Gilpatric signed the slightly modified version on behalf of DOD. It was sent to CIA that day and immediately was approved by McCone.
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The new agreement, though it did not include all the elements Charyk considered important, did substantially strengthen the authority of the NRO and its director—which did not stop McCone from concluding that it would be more “workable” than its predecessor.
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The new agreement
named the Secretary of Defense as the Executive Agent for the NRP. The program would be “developed, managed, and conducted in accordance with policies and guidance jointly agreed to by the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence.”
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A “separate operating agency of the Department of Defense,” the National Reconnaissance Office, would manage the NRP “under the direction, authority, and control of the Secretary of Defense.” The NRO’s director would be selected by the Defense Secretary with the concurrence of the DCI and would report to the Defense Secretary. The agreement also settled one issue of repeated contention between Scoville and Charyk, in Charyk’s favor—by creating a Deputy Director’s position and specifying that its occupant would be selected from CIA personnel. The Deputy Director, the agreement specified, “shall be in the chain of command directly under the Director NRO”—a sharp contrast to Scov-ille’s view that he should be the CIA representative to the NRO. His duties included supervising all NRP tasks assigned to the CIA by the NRO director.
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The NRO director was charged with presenting to the Secretary of Defense “all projects” for intelligence collection and mapping and geodetic information via overflights and the associated budgets; scheduling all overflight missions in the NRP; and supervising engineering analysis to correct problems with collection systems. With regard to technical management, the DNRO was to “assign all project tasks such as technical management, contracting, etc., to appropriate elements of the DoD and the CIA, changing such assignments, and taking any such steps he may determine necessary to the efficient management of the NRP.”
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The charter thus eliminated many of the CIA prerogatives that Charyk and other NRO officials considered impediments to their vision of a truly national reconnaissance program. Absent from the 1963 agreement were earlier provisions that required coordination of missions schedules with the CIA; that gave the CIA supervisory authority for engineering analysis of projects for which it was executive agent; and that gave the CIA responsibility for funding and supporting projects for which it was the executive agent. At the same time, on the other key issues, including technical management and research and development, the NRO director could chose to employ,
or not employ
, CIA resources as he believed best for the NRP.
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The breaking point for Scoville arrived in the person of Brockway McMillan, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Research and Development who assumed the DNRO position on March 1 (he became Un
der Secretary of the Air Force in June). McMillan read the authority given him under the new agreement literally and assumed that he could make impersonal and rational judgments with the unswerving support of both McNamara and McCone.
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Thus, McMillan deemed it completely logical to transfer the CORONA project from the CIA to the Air Force Office of Special Projects and to place authority over its elements in the head of Program A. McMillan took a number of minor but unilateral actions to accomplish the transfer and was shocked when Scoville strongly protested each and every one of them. McMillan’s response was first to prevent two of the Air Force officers working for the CIA on CORONA from communicating with Langley and then to transfer one officer without coordinating the move with the CIA.
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In Los Angeles, the Office of Special Projects was using the Aerospace Corporation to do systems engineering and technical direction for its programs and wished to add CORONA to Aerospace’s responsibilities. The CIA considered this to be another takeover maneuver and bitterly opposed it.
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McMillan also took a strict stance on his review authority over NRP funds in accordance with an April 5 agreement, signed by McCone and Gilpatric, giving the NRO complete authority over all funds supporting the NRP, regardless of source—a change McCone agreed to so that funding for expensive CIA reconnaissance operations would not officially be part of the CIA’s budget. Scoville and others continued to believe that funds marked for CIA-managed projects or studies should come to them automatically. McMillan did not.
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The battles with McMillan left Scoville especially bitter. More than twenty years later, he would describe McMillan as an “incompetent whose only talent was empire-building.”
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Those battles, on top of his conflicts with Charyk and difficulties with his own boss, led him to conclude he would be happier elsewhere. It was, deputy Edward Giller later recalled, “an emotional parting.”
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*There was some debate about what to call the office. Scoville felt that one proposed title, Office of Electronic Activities, encroached on other people’s territory, while others felt that Scoville’s suggestion—Office of Electronic Intercept—was too explicit. (“DD/R Staff Minutes 15 June 1962,” June 18, 1962, 2000 CIA Release.)