The Wizards of Langley (19 page)

The continuing battle was the subject of memos from McCone and McMillan in April and June 1965. On April 21, McCone gave explicit in
structions to Wheelon that the CORONA contracts with Lockheed (systems integration), General Electric (reentry vehicle), and Itek (camera) should clearly establish that CIA had the responsibility and authority to provide technical direction for the CORONA payload.
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In June, McMillan charged that the CIA had not complied with terms of an agreement reached by McCone and Vance in August concerning the systems engineering and systems integration functions. McMillan’s memo alleged that a CIA employee instructed Lockheed personnel not to sign an essential contract due to security issues. Despite resolution of those issues as well as discussions with the DCI, and a written request from McMillan to the Deputy DCI, the CIA injunction against signing this contract had not been lifted.
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Launch scheduling also proved an irritant. In the view of CIA officials, the heart of the issue was Program A’s detachment from intelligence production. A CIA memo noted that “Personnel from the NRO Staff and Program A who are divorced from the intelligence mission are more interested in launch schedules and recoveries than in the quality of the photography.” It mentioned a meeting in February between Col. Frank Buzard of the NRO staff and a CIA representative during which Buzard reportedly stated that sixteen CORONA launches had been scheduled by the DNRO for 1965 and those launches would take place according to the established schedule. The CIA representative responded that “CORONA was an intelligence reconnaissance program and that the missions would be flown in response to intelligence requirements, not in response to pre-established Air Force launch schedules.”
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Harsh words were also exchanged in 1965 over allegations that the CIA had been withholding data from the Air Force concerning orbiting CORONA payloads. On March 24, McCone placed an urgent call to Vance requesting that he see Carter as soon as possible. At their meeting the next day, Carter told the Deputy Defense Secretary that allegations by McMillan about the CIA withholding information concerning the functioning of the CORONA payload required to conduct launch or recovery operations were baseless. Carter assured Vance that all information on the condition and operation of the payload and the payload section of the vehicle that bore on the decision to de-orbit was provided immediately to Air Force representatives. Carter added that he believed such accusations were “just another attempt to get CIA completely out of the satellite business.”
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Carter then went to see McMillan, who had put in a call for him, for a much less amicable meeting. He gave McMillan a fact sheet on the alle
gations. It asserted that the CIA had provided the Air Force with “more, repeat more, operational data on the payload” since August 1964 than at any time prior to that date. According to Carter, McMillan became “visibly disturbed” and confirmed that the allegations were misleading.
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Carter told the NRO director that it was apparent to him that “there was a clear-cut effort to run CIA out of the satellite business and make this critical intelligence collection system a complete blue-suit operation.” According to Carter, McMillan then attempted to reopen the entire matter, suggesting that the Air Force should receive all the basic telemetry and calibration data. Carter told him that he “would not have it,” and had no intention of establishing or allowing to be established a separate diagnostic, analytical function by an agency having no responsibility for the payload.”
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Matters worsened when McMillan asked Carter to agree that detailed results of the payload telemetry analysis would be provided to the Air Force Satellite Test Center. Carter ignored the exact phrasing, stating that he saw no reason why the results of the analysis should not be made available, but before giving firm agreement, he wished to consult with his staff. McMillan lashed out, saying he had “the impression that McCone and you are captives of your staff and unable to make decisions.” Carter fired back, telling McMillan that “he would do well to learn how to use a staff himself as well as exerting some caution in his use of the English language.” Carter closed his memo describing the meeting by noting that “while we have clearly won this skirmish, the battle will continue so long as McMillan, [Col. Paul] Worthman, Buzard, . . . are in the act.”
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One day in 1966, Robert Mathams and three other men drove out into the Australian outback, about twelve miles from Alice Springs. They passed through some low hills, took seats on the ground, and opened a case of red wine. A toast followed. At the time, Mathams was head of the Scientific Intelligence Group of Australia’s Joint Intelligence Bureau. Joining Mathams in the toast were Bud Wheelon and his deputy, Carl Duckett, and Leslie Dirks, another key DS&T staff member. The celebration concerned the selection of the site for the ground station for a new type of intelligence satellite—a satellite that had its genesis in a newspaper article that appeared in the summer of 1963.
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Not long after becoming head of the DS&T, Wheelon was reading a story in the
New York Herald Tribune
about Syncom, a NASA-DOD
Hughes satellite program. The article discussed what was then a revolutionary means of communications, first suggested by science and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, that allowed communications far beyond the horizon—signals were transmitted from a ground station to a satellite and then back down to another ground station.
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The Syncom satellites were not low-earth orbiters whizzing around the earth and thus out of view of one or both ground stations for substantial periods of time. Instead, they flew 22,300 miles above various points on the equator—in geostationary orbit. At that altitude and location, the satellites revolved around the earth at the same speed as the earth turned on its axis. In effect, they hovered over a single point on the equator. In addition, at their high altitude, about one-third of the earth was in view of each satellite. Such satellites thus represented an efficient and always available means of shuttling communications across large portions of the planet. It occurred to Wheelon that it might be possible to employ such an approach to intercept signals from key targets and relay them to a U.S. ground station.
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Targets might include telemetry signals from Tyuratam, Plesetsk, the White Sea, and even Sary Shagan, which was located far enough in the Soviet interior to be immune from U.S. land- and air-based eavesdropping efforts. A geosynchronous intercept system would also allow the collection of down-range telemetry from the impact zone on Kamchatka. In addition, such a system promised to provide launch-pad telemetry from all the sites, which would provide better estimates of thrust and warhead capability.
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Wheelon assembled some key CIA officials to explore such ideas—including George Miller, chief of the Office of ELINT; Carl Nelson, from the Office of Communications; and Leslie Dirks, who had joined the CIA in 1961 after obtaining a B.S. from MIT in 1958 and a research degree from Oxford University in 1960.
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Also brought into the discussions was Lloyd K. Lauderdale, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. A veteran of OSI’s defensive systems division, he had experienced the frustration of trying to understand the Soviet ABM program with its main test center at Sary Shagan.
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An initial concern was whether such a program was feasible. Because the telemetry signals were transmitted at very-high and ultra-high frequencies (VHF and UHF), they would not bounce off the atmosphere, as high-frequency communications did, but leak out into space where the satellites would be waiting to scoop them up. But it was feared that the
noise from other, and unwanted, transmissions such as television signals would drown the telemetry in an ocean of noise. Spending several hundreds of millions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money only to wind up with Soviet television signals would hardly be a wise investment. Before proceeding further, Wheelon asked William Perry, who had just left Sylva-nia’s Electronic Defense Laboratories to form his own company, to study the matter. Six months later, he reported that the idea was workable. Many years later, Perry’s work in determining the feasibility of such a satellite would be a key, although unspecified, reason for his winning the CIA’s R. V. Jones Award—named after the British physicist who headed the British Secret Intelligence Service’s scientific intelligence effort in World War II.
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When presented with the idea, both McCone and Carter were supportive, and Lauderdale was tapped as manager of the new program, which was named RHYOLITE—an apparently chance selection of an appropriate designation, as rhyolite is a volcanic rock containing colorful pieces of quartz and glassy feldspar embedded in a mass of tiny crystals. Lauderdale would become the key figure in transforming the idea into a reality—arriving at work one day with a working model of a French umbrella antenna, which would also serve as model for the RHYOLITE antenna.
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Not surprisingly, RHYOLITE became another battle in the prolonged conflict between Wheelon and McMillan. Wheelon had no faith that McMillan or the NRO would give RHYOLITE a fair hearing, and the program was started using CIA funds, before McCone went to Vance to ask for NRO funding.
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McMillan later recalled that Perry’s study convinced him his initial skepticism about the feasibility of RHYOLITE was misguided, but a memo he prepared upon his departure from the NRO questioned whether such a system would be worth the expense. And according to Wheelon and John McMahon, the NRO and Defense Department did what they could to derail the program. Eugene Fubini suggested that the mission could be fulfilled by modifying NASA’s Advanced Technology Satellite, then in development. In addition, after RHYOLITE won approval from higher authorities, the NRO tried to slow down funding, while money flowed into a competing Air Force program. That program, code-named CANYON, resulted in placing satellites in geosynchronous orbit to intercept Soviet and other communications.
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Meanwhile, the NRO saw the CIA’s reluctance to provide details on program specifics or funding as another sign of the agency’s unwillingness to
accept the authority of the NRO. According to NRO staffer Frank Buzard, comptroller John Holleran “kept trying to get a handle on money for RHYOLITE and never was able to.”
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In early 1965, while the bureaucratic battle over RHYOLITE was going on back in Washington, the CIA station chief in Canberra, William B. Caldwell, informed Australia’s Secretary of Defence, Sir Edwin Hicks, that the CIA wished to establish a ground control station in Australia. Other sites, including Guam, had been considered, but central Australia had a crucial advantage. In May, Hicks was given a more detailed technical description of the program. The following month, Minister of Defence Shane Partridge was briefed on the project, and a senior Defence official was appointed to head a special team to determine the most suitable location for the prospective station.
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In late 1965, U.S. and Australian engineers began surveys of the Pine Gap valley in the Australian outback, formerly a grazing area. Official agreement to establish a station was reached in June 1966, when Secretary of State Dean Rusk addressed the Australian cabinet while in Canberra to attend a conference of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The station, commonly known as Pine Gap, was built twelve miles southwest of Alice Springs in central Australia—a location that, unlike Guam, ensured immunity from eavesdropping or electronic interference from Soviet spy ships.
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In the midst of the contention over hardware, McCone, Wheelon, and other DS&T officials were also waging a continuing battle concerning the authority of the NRO and its director. The intensity of the conflict and the importance of the issues had even produced a 1963 summons from President Kennedy for McMillan and Wheelon in an attempt to establish a more amicable relationship. Wheelon’s impression was that Kennedy was not very well briefed, and the meeting involved little more than a pep talk in which Kennedy spoke of the importance of their job and how they were both held in high regard.
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The session had no lasting, or even temporary, effect.

Thus, in 1964, the CIA-NRO rift remained an issue for the Johnson administration to confront. On May 2, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, chaired by Clark Clifford, delivered its report on the National Reconnaissance Program. The PFIAB concluded that “the National
Reconnaissance Program despite its achievements, has not yet reached its full potential.” The fundamental cause for the NRP’s shortcoming was “inadequacies in organizational structure.” In addition, there was no clear division of responsibilities and roles among the Defense Department, CIA, and the DCI.
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The board’s recommendations represented a clear victory for the NRO and its director. The DCI should have a “large and important role” in establishing intelligence collection requirements and in ensuring that the data collected was effectively exploited, according to the board. In addition, his leadership would be a key factor in the work of the United States Intelligence Board relating to the scheduling of space and airborne reconnaissance missions.
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But the board also recommended that President Johnson sign a directive that would assign to the Air Force responsibility for management, systems engineering, procurement, and operation of all satellite reconnaissance systems.
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The CIA might be assigned to do research on concepts for new systems, but the heavy lifting would be left to the Air Force. In a June 2 memorandum to national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, Vance noted his intention to see that several of the board’s recommendations, including that one, “be promptly pursued.”
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