by Neil Sheehan
Yet nothing that Ed Hall and Sam Phillips had ever done or would ever do would be more important than bringing Minuteman into existence. Schriever and his comrades had reversed the missile gap in favor of the United States with Atlas and Titan. The creation of Minuteman now put the United States so far ahead in the strategic missile competition that the Soviet Union was confronted not with a gap but with a chasm. Not until five years later, in 1966, did the Soviets acquire their first solid-fueled ICBM, designated SS-11 by NATO. By then the United States had 800 Minutemen waiting in silos in the Western and Midwestern states and the total would rise to 1,000 in April 1967 after 200 Minuteman II missiles, a larger and improved version that carried a still bigger warhead, were added to the force. Shortly after that first successful launch at Cape Canaveral on February 1, 1961, LeMay and Tommy Power at SAC proposed that the United States build and deploy 8,000 Minutemen. Robert McNamara, secretary of defense in the new administration of John Kennedy, who had assumed the presidency in January, decided that 1,000 was enough.
The advent of Minuteman put an end to the fear of a nuclear Pearl Harbor that had haunted Eisenhower. The Air Force organized the Minutemen into wings of 150 missiles, each wing composed of three squadrons of fifty, with five flights of ten comprising a squadron. Every flight was under a separate control center, housed in steel and concrete capsules placed well underground, with entry and exit through equally sturdy concrete shafts, and manned by two launch officers. Sufficient redundancy was built into the communications system so that if incoming Soviet missiles damaged it, any one of the control centers could fire all fifty Minutemen in the squadron. In practice it took more than a minute for the launch control officers to fire Minuteman. They needed two to three minutes. They had to verify the coded go command before each inserted a separate key into one of the two locks on the launch sequence control computer. Then they simultaneously turned the keys and in sixty seconds the missiles were gone. With the radar and other alert systems the United States possessed in 1961, and was to elaborate extensively in the years to come, this was certainly fast enough for hundreds of Minutemen to fly out of their silos before the Soviet missiles struck. And even if by some miracle the Soviets managed to hit first with everything they had, there would still be plenty of Minutemen intact in their steel and concrete shelters to doom Russia. No Soviet statesman with a vestige of sanity could risk a surprise attack.
BOOK VII
A SPY IN ORBIT
AND A GAME OF
NUCLEAR DICE
69.
A WOULD-BE SPY IN THE SKY GOES AWRY
Minuteman was not the only final accomplishment bequeathed by Bennie Schriever and his colleagues. There was another, Discoverer XIV, in its way a complement to Minuteman. On August 18, 1960, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, the first successful photo-reconnaissance satellite rose atop a Thor rocket to photograph, in a single mission, more of the Soviet Union from space than the U-2s had accomplished in all twenty-four flights over Russia during the four years before one was shot down just three and a half months earlier. “It was as if an enormous floodlight had been turned on in a darkened warehouse,” said Albert Wheelon, a Stanford and MIT physicist who was part of the Ramo-Wooldridge team before becoming the CIA’s first deputy director for science and technology in 1963. Schriever had taken charge of the Air Force’s space satellite program, Weapon System 117L, back in 1955. It had originated with the Air Development Center at Wright-Patterson, but since he was eventually going to have to supply the rockets to lift the satellites into orbit, Schriever had reasoned that he ought to have control. Tommy Power, whose empire as commanding general of ARDC in Baltimore included the Wright-Patterson laboratories, agreed and gave the project to him. WS-117L encompassed a family of satellites to perform photographic, electronic, and infrared surveillance. One of the photographic satellites planned was a so-called readout version. The film would be developed aboard the satellite and then transmitted to earth. The second type envisioned a system whereby the camera would feed its undeveloped film into a capsule. Once full, the capsule would be ejected. An attached parachute would burst open after it entered the atmosphere and an aircraft trailing a trapezelike hook would catch the chute canopy or its lines and winch the capsule aboard.
Nothing of substance got done, once more because Donald Quarles was imposing his “Poor Man’s” doctrine to hold down the military budget and please Eisenhower. Satellites had to be funded separately from the ICBM program and Quarles would not part with any meaningful amount of money for them. Sputnik and Eisenhower’s concern about an eventual successor to the U-2 changed all that in the fall of 1957. Eisenhower created the position of special assistant to the president for science and technology and named James Killian, the president of MIT, to the post. Simultaneously, Killian became chairman of a reorganized Presidential Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). He and Edwin “Din” Land, the photography genius who had invented the Polaroid Land Camera and who also had entrée to the Oval Office, examined the WS-117L program. They decided that the technology involved in the capsule ejection system had the best chance of succeeding in the near term and convinced the president of this. In February 1958, Eisenhower authorized creation of the satellite, with the proviso that it was to be managed as the U-2 had been. The Air Force would provide the booster rocket and satellite vehicle and do the work, but the CIA would be in charge, even though the only hardware it would provide would be the camera. The agency would also exercise complete control over the intelligence derived from the film. Eisenhower knew how parochial the military services could be in intelligence matters, and in the CIA-run U-2 program he had a successful precedent to follow. The same two men who had brought it to fruition moved back into action. On the CIA side, Richard Bissell, Allen Dulles’s special assistant for plans and development, was named overall manager, as he had been for the U-2, while Ozzie Ritland, who had been Bissell’s deputy on that endeavor and was now Schriever’s vice commander at the Ballistic Missile Division, headed up the Air Force team. Bissell, an economist by education, had displayed a gift for technological intelligence projects, and Ritland, who began his career as a test pilot at Wright Field, had a marked flair for technical improvisation. The arrangement did not let Schriever off the hook in the event of a fiasco. The official chain of command for the project listed him above Ritland: he was to keep a watchful eye and to take the blame if the Air Force failed to perform.
On the assumption that the series of launches involved could not be hidden entirely from the public, a cover story was concocted. Schriever announced that the Air Force was putting its rocket capability to the service of science and medicine with a new program called Discoverer. Its objective was to test the effect of the conditions of space—vacuum, weightlessness, and frigid temperatures—on everything from human bone marrow to corn seedlings, hence the need to recover the capsule in which these would be placed. In the meantime, the CIA had a second and secret code name for the enterprise, Corona, adopted by one of Bissell’s subordinates from the brand of cigars he smoked. Lockheed had been chosen as contractor for the satellite vehicle for the WS-117L program and a decision was made that it could be used for Discoverer. The vehicle was called Agena and it was actually a combination second-stage rocket and satellite. After the Thor booster rocket had brought the Agena to near-orbital velocity and shut down and dropped away, the Agena’s rocket kicked in to complete the flight. Once in orbit, the satellite characteristics of Agena came into play. The vehicle was fitted with small orientation rockets fired as needed by the inertial guidance system to keep the camera port pointing at the earth should the Agena begin to tip off kilter and aim the camera over the horizon. Retro rockets, ignited on radio command from the ground, were also mounted to slow down the satellite when the moment arrived for ejection of the film capsule.
Forrest McCartney, whose three-star career culminated in the directorship of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, remembered how crude this first satellite was in c
omparison to what was to come. McCartney was a twenty-seven-year-old captain in early 1959 when he began to teach himself how to fly satellites at the nation’s first satellite control center, set up for Discoverer in a motel in Palo Alto, California, just south of San Francisco. A nuclear weapons engineer by trade, McCartney had worked for Moose Mathison at the Special Weapons Center at Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base. Schriever had put Mathison in charge of the satellite control center and Mathison was reaching out for younger officers smart enough to learn this new business, which he was also having to teach himself. They did not stay long in Palo Alto, soon moving to cramped quarters in Lockheed’s facilities in nearby Sunnyvale. The “control room” was a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot space with a table in the middle and folding metal chairs around it. There was a radio console on the table with which the operator on duty transmitted commands to the satellite. Facing him was a blackboard with various orbit parameters and instructions chalked on it. The “communications room” was an adjacent closet. In the closet Mathison had voice radio and Teletype hookups to the launching crew at Vandenberg and to the subsidiary monitoring and control stations on Kodiak Island, off Alaska’s south coast, and in Hawaii.
The miniature computers with sophisticated microcircuitry that were to direct the satellites of the future did not exist in 1959. Nor did the solar panels that would be attached to satellites to provide plenty of electricity from their photovoltaic cells. Electrical power came from batteries. These limited the amount of time the satellite could be kept in orbit and their weight reduced the payload for camera and film. The Agena’s control system resembled that of an old-fashioned player piano, which had a roll of paper with holes punched in it to trip the keys in accordance with the tune as the paper unwound. Agena’s mechanism consisted of an electric clock timer hooked up to a motor that drove a long plastic tape with holes in it. The clock, either through preprogramming or on a radioed signal from the operator back on earth, told the motor when to start and stop. Metal fingers of different lengths, bent inward at the ends, reached out over the tape. When the tape arrived at the point where a hole lined up with the end of one of the fingers, the bent end dropped through the hole and completed an electrical circuit, thereby executing a command. Because of the primitiveness of the system, Agena was capable of only thirteen commands, such as the order to eject the capsule.
The test launches began inauspiciously. During the first attempt from Vandenberg, on January 21, 1959, the Agena nearly took off on its own from atop the Thor. Its systems accidentally turned on during a prelaunch check, the Agena’s orientation rockets fired, the explosive bolts attaching it to the Thor also blew, and the Agena’s main rocket engine might have ignited had the launch crew not managed to shut everything down, but not before there was serious damage to the satellite vehicle and some to the Thor. The crew decided the whole thing had been so farcical that they would not count this attempt as part of the series, labeling it Discoverer 0.
The president was not so dismissive. When Bissell, who had just been promoted to deputy director for plans, the CIA’s euphemism for chief of clandestine operations, went to the White House to deliver a report, Eisenhower gave him a dressing-down. Discoverer I, the second launch, a bit over a month later, went fine. As far as could be determined, the Agena sailed up into the intended polar orbit from which, with the earth spinning sideways on its axis beneath, the whole of the Soviet Union would be exposed to photography. Attaining a correct orbit had been the main purpose of this mission, and so there had been no test of ejection and recovery of the capsule. Not so Discoverer II on April 13. Its liftoff launched Moose Mathison off into an adventure on the edge of the Arctic.
The Agena circled the earth every ninety minutes. Because of the limitations of battery power, the capsule had to be ejected on the seventeenth orbit, slightly more than a day in space at twenty-five and a half hours. As this terminal orbit approached, the Sunnyvale center instructed the subsidiary control station in Hawaii, the satellite’s last point of contact before it headed back around the bottom of the world, to issue the ejection signals. “Commands going out,” Hawaii replied. Unfortunately, the Hawaii controller’s radio equipment was malfunctioning. An antenna to his receiver had become disconnected. He was supposed to get a sign on his console confirming that the commands had been transmitted to the Agena. When he saw none, he transmitted again. Again there was no confirmation and so he transmitted a third time and a fourth time and a fifth time before he realized he had better stop. Telemetry from the instruments on the Agena told the Sunnyvale center that the satellite had received all five transmissions.
This information precipitated a reaction that might charitably be described as extreme anxiety and more accurately as panic, because it meant that the Agena would eject its capsule somewhere far from the area in the Pacific approximately 380 miles northwest of Hawaii where the capsule was supposed to come down. A squadron of C-119 transports, their crews trained in the retrieval process and equipped with the trapezelike hooks that trailed behind in flight, was on alert at Hickam Air Force Base near Honolulu. The C-119 had wide clamshell doors at the rear through which the capsule could be winched after the hook snatched the canopy or rigging of its parachute. There was no way the Sunnyvale center could correct the problem, because they could no longer talk to the satellite. The designers of the Agena had outsmarted themselves. To prevent the Soviets from seizing control of their satellite in flight and also to conserve battery power, they had programmed its radar beacon and radio receiver to switch off as soon as the Agena was out of range of the Hawaii station. The beacon and receiver would not switch on again until the satellite had gone back around the earth and was approaching the Alaska station. By that time it would be too late to correct. An analysis concluded that the capsule was going to eject far from the Pacific, on the Norwegian island of West Spitsbergen. The island’s northern end edges the Arctic Circle.
Not a man to abandon a prize wherever it might land, Mathison borrowed a C-54 at Edwards Air Force Base and flew it to the air base at Thule, Greenland, where he switched to a C-130 that he could land on the island’s airfield. The Norwegian embassy in Washington was called and asked to have officials on Spitsbergen watch for the capsule’s parachute. A friend in the Norwegian air force also arranged a welcome for Mathison from Odd Birketvedt, the governor of the island. The governor told Mathison a number of people had observed an object attached to an orange and white parachute and with a strobe light on it descend in an area where analysis had been posited that the capsule would land. When a search party reached the site, however, they had found nothing but tracks in the snow leading from and returning toward a coal mining concession the Soviet Union had held since the 1930s in northern Spitsbergen. The concession was regarded as under Moscow’s sovereignty and the Norwegians did not venture there. Mathison was convinced the Russians had his capsule, but not even the undeterrable Mathison dared go any further. On the flight up a cautionary message from Schriever had also been relayed to him over the radio: “Tell Moose to stay out of Soviet territory.”
The capsule contained nothing of military value to the Russians. A camera had not been mounted in the Agena and so the capsule’s contents had only, in accordance with the cover story, consisted of “mechanical mice,” electronic devices rigged to record biomedical effects. Mathison made a last try. He had the Norwegian governor send a telegram to the governor of the Soviet mining concession inquiring about the capsule. Many years later in retirement, Mathison had an English translation of the reply, sent to him by Governor Birketvedt, framed and hung on a wall of his bedroom in his home in Albuquerque. It read:
Dear Mr. Birketvedt: In connection with your telegram of 20th this month, of whether there was anybody of Russian population on Spitsbergen who saw a container of an American satellite, Discoverer II, I inform you that Russian population have not seen that container and we got no information about this. Yours sincerely, Ignat Shejko.
For the next year
and four months, the Air Force program officers, their Lockheed counterparts, and the CIA officers involved were unable to land a capsule on Spitsbergen or anywhere else. Through ten more flights, something always went wrong: the Agena did not go into orbit, or the orbit was bad, or the retro rockets that were to slow down the satellite for capsule ejection did not fire, or some other misfortune occurred. “It was a most heartbreaking business,” Bissell said later. “In the case of a recce [reconnaissance] satellite, you fire the damn thing off and … you never see it again. So you have to infer from telemetry what went wrong. Then you make a fix, and if it fails again you know you’ve inferred wrong. In the case of Corona [Discoverer] it went on and on.” Pauses as long as two months in launching were taken to try to puzzle out the glitches. Specialists from the Ramo-Wooldridge team working on the missiles were summoned. When the launching resumed, success would again prove to be a mirage.