The Imagineers of War

by Sharon Weinberger

  Johnson and Godel took the idea directly to Eisenhower, who liked it. So, too, did Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Jerome Wiesner, one of the president’s science advisers, who attended the meeting to discuss SCORE, was dead set against it, but Dulles’s enthusiasm won over the president. Eisenhower had one caveat: if the United States was going to make a craven shot at publicity, it had better work. “It must remain secret, I want the absolute minimum number of people over there in the Pentagon to know about it, and if it leaks out in any way, the entire project is automatically canceled,” Eisenhower warned Godel.

  At Eisenhower’s insistence, SCORE was shrouded in such extreme secrecy that it required duping not just the public but also hundreds if not thousands of engineers and technicians involved in launching the rocket. To maintain the ruse, Godel recruited Dan Sullivan, a former FBI agent famous for tracking down the bank robber John Dillinger, to serve as ARPA’s security manager. The launch was given the cover story of a routine air force Atlas launch so that if it failed, the Pentagon could deny any knowledge of Project SCORE. “Only 88 people, each required to sign an oath of secrecy, even knew of its existence,” the ARPA history says, and they were referred to as Club 88.

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  Godel says it was Eisenhower’s idea to put a scientific payload on the Atlas, perhaps a nod to his scientific advisers. And for that, Godel turned to a group of Operation Paperclip scientists at Fort Monmouth, in New Jersey. While the German rocket makers had ended up in Huntsville, Alabama, the communications engineers had been sent to the East Coast. “They had recently proposed that ARPA fund a communications package to be launched on an as yet unselected carrier,” Godel wrote. He decided that ARPA could easily fund the Germans’ communications equipment without alerting anyone it was going to go on the Atlas.

  The army’s “communications package,” designed by the German scientists but built by RCA, was actually fairly simple, designed to record, receive, and send voice communications. The voice relay would accomplish two goals: first, it would offer a psychological triumph, by allowing the United States to be the first country to broadcast voice messages from outer space, and, second, it would test whether communications from space might be degraded by highly energized particles in the earth’s magnetosphere. The next question, however, was what message should the United States relay from space? Godel proposed to Andrew Goodpaster, Eisenhower’s close adviser, that the president personally record the message, but Goodpaster disagreed. “You know perfectly well, Bill, that the President doesn’t want to have anything to do with this; he simply does not want to be involved, so you put any message in the thing that you want,” Goodpaster told Godel. As a result, Wilber Brucker, the secretary of the army, a man nicknamed Ploopie, was selected to be the first voice that humans would hear from space.

  SCORE took eight months of preparation, and the more time passed, the harder it was to keep it a secret. Just forty-eight hours before the launch, members of Club 88 were scheduled to switch out the missile’s blunt nose cone with one that was pointier. Now, anyone with even a bit of technical knowledge would know something was up, but the hope was that even if people had their suspicions, there would not be enough time for them to confirm them before launch. The ruse had to be maintained even to the final hours, when a member of the “club” secretly disabled a mechanism designed to cut off fuel to the main engine, which would normally be used if the missile were heading for the ocean.

  Then there was one last hitch. When President Eisenhower was briefed on the final preparations for the launch, he decided that it should be his voice on the message from space after all. At that point, however, the army’s communications payload was already buttoned up in the nose cone of the Atlas. The launch director, another member of Club 88, gave Godel a choice: take down the whole payload, which would tip off the growing horde of reporters who had shown up to monitor the launch, or rerecord the message remotely. That, too, had a risk. The new message would be sent by radio to the communications payload, and anyone on the right frequency could pick it up. Johnson left it to Godel. “You are the project manager, Bill,” he said.

  Godel decided that beaming the president’s voice—that is, transmitting the new message over an open radio frequency to replace the recorded message inside the capsule—was less risky than physically removing the entire payload. “So, hoping that no radios would be on at two o’clock in the morning, the President’s voice went on the air, and erased that of the hapless Secretary Brucker,” Godel recalled. Now the only thing left was to launch the recording before anyone could figure out the missile was heading to space.

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  On January 21, 1959, as the press gathered to watch the launch, a few reporters suspected that something unusual was afoot. Jay Barbree, an NBC television news reporter, already knew exactly what was going to happen, because while hiding in a bathroom stall with his legs drawn up off the floor to avoid detection, he eavesdropped on an air force general and a “spook” talking about the launch and the president’s message. Barbree bragged that “good old RCA, NBC’s parent company came through” and told him about the classified mission, even playing for him the president’s entire message. The reason he did not air the story prior to the launch was not fear of divulging classified information but concern over losing a scoop: if he revealed the plan, the launch would be scrapped and the whole operation denied. If he kept quiet, he would get exclusive coverage at the White House when the broadcast was announced.

  The official story was still that the Atlas was about to be launched across the Atlantic Missile Range and land in the ocean, but as the minutes ticked away, the strangeness of the test became more apparent. Those cleared into Club 88 went to ever more elaborate lengths to cover for modifications made to the Atlas, like a missing transponder usually used for range safety. The deception had been so elaborately constructed that even as the final minutes rolled around, the test conductor and the man responsible for pressing the launch button did not know the Atlas was heading into space.

  As Roy Johnson sat in the VIP bunker to monitor the launch, Godel stood in front of the launch control monitor. If anything went wrong, it was up to him to give the order to destroy the missile, which would obliterate months of work—not to mention his and Johnson’s reputations. At 6:02 p.m., the missile launched, and then everyone waited and watched. Suddenly the missile veered off course. Yet the members of Club 88, keeping up the charade to the end, did nothing. When the range safety officer saw that the missile was not heading into the ocean, he reached over to push the destruct button and had to be restrained. Godel recalled those first 180 seconds, during which the missile hurtled skyward on its path out of earth’s atmosphere, as “the longest of his life.”

  And it worked. No one outside a small circle of people had an idea about the satellite’s true purpose. The next day the Cape Canaveral Communications Center picked up the first broadcast of Eisenhower’s Christmas message: “This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you via a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one: Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind, America’s wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere.”

  When word got to the White House that the missile was in orbit and the broadcast had worked, Eisenhower decided to announce Project SCORE’s success at a diplomatic dinner that evening. At a hastily arranged press conference following the dinner, the White House played a recorded version of the broadcast for reporters. It did not matter that most people never actually heard the president’s voice broadcast from space and instead heard rebroadcasts carried by television and radio news programs. Nor did it matter that the final words were an “indistinct garble” to the reporters gathered for a press conference to hear the actual broadcast from space. In the end, SCORE proved to be the psychological success that Godel had promised.

  York, who had so opposed SCORE, had been wrong. So, too, wer
e the White House scientists. The nuances of “payload,” versus the weight of the vehicle in orbit, did not appear to matter to the average citizen, who read headlines like “U.S. Orbits Biggest Moon” and “Ours Is Giant Size!” Life magazine ran a photo-essay and behind-the-scenes article commemorating the launch and its cloak-and-dagger drama (with no mention of Godel, who remained in the shadows). The day after Eisenhower’s message was broadcast to the world from space, Godel, who had spent the last several months working nonstop on SCORE, took an evening off to attend the NSA’s holiday reception. When asked where he had been the past few months, Godel joked that he had been “transcribing Christmas messages for the White House.”

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  Project SCORE, though a success, did little to resolve the fundamental tension between the scientists pushing for a civilian space agency and Johnson, who wanted ARPA to remain a military space agency. If anything, it merely antagonized relations further. Johnson had no more interest in York’s interplanetary spaceships than York had in holiday messages from space. By the end of 1958, the rift between Johnson and York took a new turn when York was offered the newly created job as the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering. The new position would outrank the ARPA director. Told of the decision just hours before a press conference announcing York’s new position, Johnson was furious.

  ARPA still reported directly to the secretary of defense, but York was now in a more senior position. Nor was Johnson’s relationship with Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy ever particularly close, and Donald Quarles, the deputy defense secretary, who had been intimately involved with ARPA’s establishment, died unexpectedly of a heart attack just two weeks prior to the announcement. “It was awkward,” York said, of suddenly leapfrogging over Johnson.

  Awkward or not, York went straight to work stripping the young agency of its most important work, the space programs. He now claimed that ARPA had been a stopgap solution to space, while his new office was the long-term solution that would represent the Pentagon on space matters. York’s new position as a “space czar” was to move forward with sound projects and to weed out the more insane proposals, such as those from the military proposing moon bases. (“We ought to consider the possibility of moon-based weapons systems eventually to be used against earth and space targets,” Major General Dwight E. Beach, the army’s director of guided weapons and special projects, told Congress in 1959. “I would hate to think the Russians got to the moon first.”) York saw himself as the only way to stop such craziness. “The guy who denied that the moon had to be captured on behalf of the United States had to be in a position above the Service and also had to be believable for intellectual reasons,” he said. “It was a mess, it really was.”

  A May 27, 1959, article in The New York Times declared under the headline “Pentagon Lacks Firm Space Plan” that York, now promoted to the Pentagon’s head of research and engineering, was the top space official and not Johnson. In a personal note to Gale, McElroy’s assistant, Johnson included a copy of the article, on which he wrote that prior to his death Secretary Quarles “had agreed that ‘ARPA’ would represent DOD in all space matters. This sort of thing ‘confuses’ even me.” That Johnson was essentially calling on a dead man to support ARPA’s claim to space was not a good sign for the young agency.

  In June 1959, just six months after leaving ARPA, York wrote to Johnson telling him that he was canceling any more funding for the Saturn rocket, Johnson’s pet project, because there was no military justification. York might have supported an atomic spaceship, but he was against Johnson’s attempt to use Saturn to keep ARPA involved in space. When Johnson protested, York relented on cancellation but insisted that Saturn be moved to the newly formed NASA, which still enraged Johnson. “The date of the transfer of the Saturn program from the Pentagon to NASA may go down in history as the point when the United States firmly committed itself to being a second-class military space power,” Johnson told Congress. What Johnson saw as a disaster, York marked as a victory. He later wrote that the transfer of Saturn, along with von Braun’s entire team, to the newly created NASA was the “single most important act of my tenure in the Pentagon.”

  York watched with slight amusement as Johnson’s relations with the White House went from bad to worse. Godel was stuck in the middle: he was realistic enough to know that if Johnson was going to fight the White House, it was a losing battle. Saturn lived, but it would belong to NASA, and the president rebuked Johnson. The ARPA director no longer cared, because he was on his way out. “Saturn was the biggest Roy Johnson contribution and he did it over the dead, dying and bleeding bodies of just about everybody,” Godel later said.

  The immediate question for York, once he was installed as the Pentagon’s space czar, was why even keep ARPA? There were already calls for the agency’s abolishment, particularly from General Bernard Schriever, who argued the agency’s work properly belonged with the military. Other critics called for ARPA to be absorbed by York’s new office. By 1959, ARPA’s portfolio of space programs had been whittled down to military and intelligence satellites, and it was not clear how much longer it would keep even those. Of those, its most important program was Discoverer, a series of satellite launches that was, among other purported goals, testing life-support systems in space. Godel was one of the few officials at ARPA who knew about Discoverer’s true purpose.

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  On April 13, 1959, William Godel, recently elevated to deputy director of ARPA, stood with a gaggle of journalists on a wooden grandstand ten thousand feet from a launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. With the public transfixed by the emerging space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, rocket launches of any type were major news events, guaranteed to make headlines. As journalists filled their coffee cups and milled about the rows of typewriters and telephones, Godel briefed them on the impending launch of Discoverer 2, a satellite built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Discoverer had a purely scientific mission, he said, designed to test an “environmental capsule” in space. “You could call the environmental capsule a life support system,” Godel told one reporter.

  It was all a lie. While Johnson and York were battling it out over space exploration, Godel was spinning stories to cover up secret spy satellites. Discoverer was just a cover story for what would become known later as Corona, a joint CIA–air force satellite program that would take pictures deep inside the Soviet Union. The life-support research was nothing more than an elaborate cover story to deceive reporters, and, more important, the Soviets, and obscure the true purpose of the launches. Discoverer was really the world’s first reconnaissance satellite.

  The idea of taking pictures from space was, in 1959, still a novel idea. But for five years, the air force had been secretly working on a spy satellite called Weapon System 117L, code-named the Pied Piper, based on a concept proposed by the Rand Corporation. Rand’s proposal involved launching a camera on a satellite, which would take pictures of military facilities as it overflew the Soviet Union and then jettison the film, which would be picked up by an aircraft as it floated back to earth. It was technically daunting, but if it worked, it would help resolve questions over the purported missile gap by providing crucial imagery of the Soviet Union. The U-2 spy aircraft could take pictures deep inside the Soviet Union, but it was vulnerable to being shot down, and thus subject to more restrictions. A satellite, on the other hand, could overfly the Soviet Union without being accused of airspace violations associated with an aircraft.

  Corona had to be kept secret, however, thus the cover story about the environmental capsule. Even the animals were fake. Inside the capsule of Discoverer 2 were four “mechanical” mice, which were really just small electromechanical devices that mimicked signs of life. The decision to use the mechanical mice was made after two sets of live mice had died, raising the ire of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In one launch, the mice died prior to liftoff after they ingested bits of pain
t sprayed on their cage (believing the mice might be asleep, engineers went up and banged on the capsule, even mimicking a cat’s meow). Killing mice in a program that was ostensibly supposed to demonstrate a life-support system was, in general, rather bad publicity, so for the April 13 launch the Pentagon had opted for the mechanical mice. It was to be a good choice, because, as Godel told the reporters, recovering the vehicle was a “remote possibility.” In reality, the United States had every intention of recovering the capsule, because it was really designed to contain film, not mice.

  At 12:45 local time on April 3, Discoverer 2 launched, and onlookers watched as the missile carrying the mechanical mice passed by the sun, leaving a short-lived trail etched in the sky. The launch was a success, and two hours later ARPA held a celebratory press conference. The next day, however, ARPA announced that plans to recover the capsule had gone awry. The plan was for the capsule to be ejected at a precise time and place so that it would eventually land over Hawaii, where it would be picked up by the air force, but the ground controllers “goofed” and sent the signal at the wrong time. While the worst-case scenario was that the capsule would land in the middle of the Soviet Union, the second worst-case scenario took place. It landed somewhere in the vicinity of Norway’s Spitsbergen Islands inside the Arctic Circle, not far from the Soviet Union. Making matters worse, the island was home to Russian mining villages permitted by a treaty signed in 1920.

  The mission to find the capsule became the stuff of legend. An air force officer in charge of launch operations claimed that the military got hold of “two guys” in Longyearbyen who saw it come down. Panicked that the Soviets might acquire the capsule, which could reveal critical aspects about the program, the air force launched a recovery mission. Colonel Charles “Moose” Mathison, who, despite not being privy to the full details of Discoverer’s true purpose, decided to take recovery matters into his own hands. He hopped on a commercial airliner to Oslo and then persuaded a general in the Norwegian air force to fly to Spitsbergen. Mathison was determined to use Discoverer to garner publicity for the air force and soon reported back that tracks in the snow indicated that the Soviets had indeed nabbed the capsule. An official air force recovery team, headed by Colonel Richard Philbrick, traveled to Spitsbergen and gave local residents colored crayons, asking them to draw what they had seen. The residents drew “a gold bucket and light colored shrouds leading to an international orange and silver parachute—exactly right.”