After high school, Godel attended the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell and then, later, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. He initially went to work for the War Department’s military intelligence division, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Godel was commissioned as an officer in the Marine Corps and participated in the initial landings in the Pacific. He was wounded twice, including at Guadalcanal in January 1943, where he was hit by a hand grenade. The fragments shattered the bone in his left leg and destroyed a good portion of its muscle. He was awarded the Purple Heart and sent back home to recuperate. For the rest of his life, he would need a leg brace and walk with a limp.
Godel desperately wanted to stay in the Marine Corps and insisted he was fit to serve, but by 1947, after a series of medical reviews, he lost the battle. The wound in his left leg was still not completely healed, and Godel was forcibly retired from the Marine Corps, declared medically unfit for service. He made enough of a name for himself that after the war General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services, recruited Godel to Washington to work as an intelligence research specialist for the army focusing on the Soviet Union.
It was a chaotic but exciting time to be involved in intelligence. Before the war, intelligence was regarded as something of a dirty business. “Gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail,” Secretary of State Henry Stimson declared in 1929, when explaining why the United States should halt its cryptanalysis work. Pearl Harbor and World War II might have discredited that view, but there was still nothing approaching a robust intelligence machine even after the war ended. There were, however, powerful personalities lobbying for power, particularly those who formed part of a close-knit community of military and intelligence operatives who had served together in World War II. Men like the air force brigadier general Edward Lansdale, a legendary spy, and William Colby, the future director of the CIA, emerged during this period. So, too, did William Godel.
In 1947, Harry Truman signed the National Security Act, which attempted to impose order on the bureaucratic chaos that emerged after World War II. The war had created a multitude of people and organizations vying for power, and the legal reorganization was supposed to bring some clarity with the establishment of the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency while also streamlining the Department of Defense and creating the Department of the Air Force, splitting it off from the army. The National Security Act, in reality, simply spawned an array of new organizations all competing for resources. The army, the navy, and the newly created air force all claimed ownership of rocket and missile research, while the CIA also saw a need for military technology that could collect intelligence on the Soviet Union.
The most important of those new technologies was, as Stalin rightly pointed out, an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. It would be a categorically different military capability; by the early 1950s, the Soviet Union was building bombers that could carry nuclear weapons to the East Coast of the United States, but they could also be potentially detected and intercepted. In the United States, computer scientists were already hard at work developing computer systems that could link radars together, to allow the military to stop incoming Soviet bombers, but there was in the 1950s no existing technology that could conceivably stop an ICBM attack. Even if a missile were detected by radar, the military would have just seconds to respond, and then there was little to be done to stop it: it would be like trying to shoot a bullet out of the sky.
In the immediate years after World War II, there was initially little enthusiasm in the White House for investing in such long-range missiles. In 1947, President Truman, who had promised to bring federal debt under control, slashed the military’s rocket and missile programs. Funding was tight, and it was being fought over. The army, the navy, and the air force all had their own rocket and missile programs, each with justifications, often tenuous, for why that work properly belonged to them. The seeming triumph of American technology was short-lived. The United States had spent millions gathering up German technical talent, but when von Braun proposed research to his Pentagon masters to build more complicated rockets or—his ultimate goal—to design rockets that could travel into space, he was refused. It was a time of “professional gloom” for him and his team.
Yet the Soviets by 1949 had already developed a new ballistic missile, called Pobeda, or “Victory,” that could fly higher and carry more than the V-2 rocket. That same year, on August 29, the Soviet Union set off its first atomic bomb on the Kazakh Steppe, ending America’s monopoly on nuclear weapons. A little more than a month later, China fell to communism, and in June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea. Truman, who thought he would demilitarize, was suddenly left dealing with twin threats of a Soviet nuclear and conventional buildup in Europe and a growing communist threat in Asia. The only choice for politicians in Washington seemed to be developing weapons even more powerful than those that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
—
On November 1, 1952, Herbert York made a call to the nuclear physicist Edward Teller with a brief message. It was “zero hour,” York told Teller, who was watching a seismometer at the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. Fourteen minutes passed, and then Teller called back with his own coded response: “It’s a boy.”
That “boy” was Ivy Mike, a 10.4-megaton hydrogen bomb that had just exploded in the clear blue waters of Eniwetok Atoll, vaporizing the island of Elugelab and creating, as Richard Rhodes described it, “a blinding white fireball three miles across.” The device, designed by Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that went off in Hiroshima. York, the young physicist who just seven years earlier had proudly told his father that war was obsolete, was now in charge of recruiting the scientists to design a new class of weapons whose power was so great that at one point it was feared the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and vaporize the oceans. Ivy Mike was a test of the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, known as the Super. This new bomb did more than create a new generation of superweapons; it also eliminated one of the last arguments against developing ICBMs. Thermonuclear weapons with yields in the many-megaton range meant that accuracy was no longer critical; with a big enough bang, hitting the target precisely was not as important. And once the thermonuclear weapon could be reduced in size, the military did not need bombers to haul weapons over long distances; it could pack them on an ICBM.
Three days after Ivy Mike exploded, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was elected president in a landslide, running on a campaign that focused heavily on battling communism. “World War II should have taught us all one lesson,” he declared. “The lesson is this: To vacillate, to hesitate—to appease even by merely betraying unsteady purpose—is to feed a dictator’s appetite for conquest and to invite war itself.”
By the time Eisenhower took office in January 1953, the Korean War was already drawing to a close, and he was alarmed by the growth in the federal budget. In the past two decades, spending had grown twenty-fold to more than $80 billion, and over half of that was going directly to the Pentagon. To rein in military spending, Eisenhower instituted a policy called New Look, which turned to nuclear weapons as a cost-effective way to offset drawdowns in conventional forces. It was fortuitous timing for rocket enthusiasts. Von Braun and his team had moved in 1950 to Huntsville, Alabama, where they were finally working on a new missile, called the Redstone. In Washington, Eisenhower was met with a flood of reports and panels making the case for rocket technology: both as weapons that could reach the Soviet Union and as a way to carry satellites into space. Rand, a newly established think tank funded by the air force, produced a series of reports proposing an earth-orbiting satellite as a military capability. Because satellites did not yet exist, there was still a question of national sovereignty: Would a satellite that flew over another country, such as the Soviet Union, be regarded
as a violation of its airspace?
In 1954, the Technological Capabilities Panel, appointed by Eisenhower to look at the potential of a “surprise attack” by the Soviet Union, offered a solution: the United States would launch a purely scientific satellite as a pretext to establish “freedom of space,” which would then pave the way for military satellites. With all three of the military services developing separate technologies, the question was which should get to build the first rocket to space.
—
As the military services battled over a nascent space program, William Godel in the 1950s was in the midst of a different war in the intelligence world. Back in Washington, D.C., he worked as an assistant to General Graves Erskine, the Pentagon’s director of special operations. Godel quickly earned a reputation as the go-to guy for special assignments, particularly those that combined intelligence with science. Whether it was recruiting foreign scientists to work with the Pentagon or formulating plans for Operation Deep Freeze, which established the American presence in Antarctica (and earned him an eponymous plot of frozen water, the Godel Iceport), Godel was known as a man who could get things done.
Godel was also often called in to deal with the turf wars in areas like psychological operations. Frustrated by the lack of coordination for such operations—covert and overt—across government, President Truman in 1951 established the Psychological Strategy Board and appointed Godel as a member. The job brought Godel into periodic battles with the CIA, though many of them were petty. Official correspondence from the time mentions CIA officials clashing with Godel about everything from the CIA director’s refusal to attend a Pentagon function for visiting dignitaries to whether the CIA was providing a Hollywood studio with film footage of American prisoners of war held in North Korea. But the infighting was bad enough that Frank Wisner, the head of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, banned Godel from his buildings.
It might have been run-ins like those that prompted a security investigation into Godel, something that was not unusual in an era when information dug up from background investigations was used as a blunt weapon to oust political enemies. In 1953, Pentagon security officials interviewed Godel after reports surfaced that his adoptive father had been a Nazi sympathizer. While denying the allegation, Godel also distanced himself from the man who raised him. “I didn’t care for him,” Godel said. “I had no personal association with him other than as a man who has been very nice to my mother since I left in ’38.”
The investigation did not stop Godel’s upward trajectory in government, however. In 1955, Donald Quarles, then the assistant secretary of defense for research and development, assigned Godel to the National Security Agency, a part of government so highly classified at the time that its existence was not even acknowledged. The NSA had been established in 1952, bringing together the communications intelligence and code-breaking capabilities that had emerged from World Wars I and II. Like the rest of the Defense Department, the NSA was being scrutinized by the Eisenhower administration, which was unhappy with the quality of strategic intelligence. Godel was supposed to help straighten out the NSA’s overseas operations and cut back ineffective foreign bases. For Godel, the NSA assignment combined his twin interests in intelligence and technology. In a later unpublished interview, Godel had a simple description of his mission: he was a hatchet man.
In 1955, the year Godel was assigned to scale back the NSA, a copy of his security interview, which included questions raised about his adoptive father’s Nazi sympathies, was sent over to the FBI at the personal request of J. Edgar Hoover to review. It is unclear what the FBI chief was looking for, but two years later Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson wrote back to Hoover: “Glad to know you think [Godel’s] doing a fine job.” Godel’s role by then had earned him consideration for a top slot at the NSA.
Godel might have been doing a fine job, but the NSA, like the rest of the defense and intelligence community, was about to become embroiled in yet a new crisis. The same year that Quarles sent Godel to revamp the NSA, he also appointed a panel to decide which rocket proposal would take the United States into space. The problem was that there was no civilian rocket program; only the military services were developing the technology that could launch a satellite into space. The air force’s plan was to launch an ICBM into space, and the army proposal would have involved relying on former Nazi scientists working at a military arsenal. The navy’s rocket, while the least mature, had the advantage of not being associated with a weapon. In the end, the panel passed over the army’s German rocket team and the air force’s ICBM, selecting instead the navy proposal, a rocket that was still in development. “This is not a design contest,” an outraged von Braun protested. “It is a contest to get a satellite into orbit, and we are way ahead on this.”
Von Braun’s concerns were ignored, even as over the next two years the navy fell behind schedule. The delays did not spark much concern among America’s political leaders, and particularly not for President Eisenhower, who still believed that the United States was ahead of the Soviet Union.
Then, in the fall of 1957, the CIA and the NSA were monitoring Soviet launches of intermediate-range missiles from Kapustin Yar, in western Russia, unaware of a much more important launch that was being prepared in Kazakhstan. Twelve years after winning a scientific gamble on nuclear weapons, Americans were about to face the reality that the horror the six-year-old Michiaki experienced in Nagasaki could soon reach the continental United States. The United States would no longer be invulnerable, and war was anything but obsolete.
CHAPTER 2
Mad Men
On the evening of October 4, 1957, Neil McElroy was enjoying cocktails in Huntsville, Alabama, fresh from a doomsday tour of the United States. McElroy, who was about to become the secretary of defense, was chatting with the army general John Medaris and the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun during a casual reception held as part of McElroy’s tour of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. It was one of many visits the secretary designate and his entourage were making around the country as he prepared to lead the Pentagon.
Huntsville should have been the least memorable stop for McElroy, who had been traveling the past few weeks in a converted DC-6 transport aircraft reserved primarily for the secretary of defense. Along the way, he was plied with fine liquor and deluxe accommodations, all while getting a crash course in overseeing a military at the dawn of the age of nuclear Armageddon.
The new position was a big change for McElroy. His last job was heading Procter & Gamble, the consumer products company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. McElroy, who had no prior experience in government, was one of the “industrialists” Eisenhower had brought to the capital in the belief that business-style leadership could help straighten out government.
The media had not been kind to McElroy after Eisenhower picked him to head the Pentagon. The native Ohioan had made his name in the nascent field of “brand management,” penning a famous letter admonishing Procter & Gamble executives on the importance of promoting the company’s soaps to the proper consumer markets so that the products would not compete with each other. “Soap manufacturer Neil McElroy is president’s choice to succeed Wilson,” The Milwaukee Journal declared on August 7. Another report mocked McElroy’s experience in advertising, saying that he had been responsible for “vital activities in persuading housewives to buy one bar of soap or another.”
Now McElroy and his entourage were being wined and dined across the country by military officials pitching their soon-to-be boss on the importance of their aircraft, missiles, and bases in case of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union—all in between plenty of martinis. At Strategic Air Command, near Omaha, Nebraska, they were greeted with a table covered in whiskey, ice, and “fixings,” before being shown the control room, where military commanders could launch a nuclear attack. Later, General Curtis LeMay, the head of Strategic Air Command, personally piloted a demonstration of the new KC-135, a refueling aircraft, for McElroy and
his staff.
At Edwards Air Force Base in the high desert north of Los Angeles, the group met General Bernard Schriever, the head of the Western Development Division, which was responsible for developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. McElroy and his entourage took an immediate liking to the air force general, who was “extremely able” and could “shoot golf at par.”
In Colorado, at North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known by its acronym NORAD, the group was assigned luxury suites at the Broadmoor, whose mountain-view rooms were stocked with bottles of scotch and bourbon. The next day they were briefed on the calculus of a survivable nuclear war, where commanders had to weigh the lives of three million civilians versus protecting a key military site. It was a world, McElroy’s aide, Oliver Gale, wrote, “where horror is as much a part of the scene as manufacturing cost is in the soap business.”
The final stop on McElroy’s itinerary was Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, a quiet southern town in Alabama whose economy was rapidly shifting from cotton mills to rocket production. General Medaris, commander of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, was polite but unimpressed by McElroy. The problem with a businessman is that he can “become a sort of czar, surrounded by subordinates who carry out his orders and obey his whims without daring to question his judgment,” he wrote in his memoir just a few years following that meeting. “This gives him the illusion that he knows all the answers. He rarely does, outside his own general field.”
Neither were McElroy and his staff impressed with the army general, who sported a black mustache and was known for dressing in old-fashioned officer riding breeches. Medaris was a “salesman, promoter, who pushes a bit more than might be considered palatable,” wrote Gale, who worked for McElroy at Procter & Gamble and was following him to the Pentagon. Coming from an advertising man, the description was telling. Medaris was trying to sell the services of von Braun and his group of German rocket scientists, who were now based in Huntsville but could not seem to shake their Nazi past. “Von Braun was still wistful about what would have happened if [the V-2s] had all gone off,” Gale recorded in his journal, “not because he was sorry that Germany did not win the war (apparently) but because he was sorry his missiles, his achievements, had not been more successful.”
The Imagineers of War Page 3