A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  Eisenhower, who was briefed after each launch, began to complain with mounting asperity not only to Bissell, but also to Allen Dulles, Bissell’s boss as the director of central intelligence. The presidential temper became yet markedly shorter after the U-2 was shot down on May 1, 1960. With the charges of a missile gap agitating Washington and stoking John Kennedy’s presidential bid, Eisenhower had lost his one means of penetrating the sealed world of the Soviet Union. Schriever also caught the president’s wrath. Bissell and Schriever did their best to shield the program team, but the men felt the increasingly less bearable pressure. Bissell’s CIA officers began to lose heart and suggested abandoning the whole project and trying some other approach. One of the Air Force men, recalling the many bleak days with Thor and Atlas, remarked, in the words of the secret official history, declassified forty-seven years later, that “it was too early for a wake” and urged pressing on. Bissell agreed and press on it was.

  70.

  MATHISON SNATCHES THE PRIZE

  Schriever did not favor abandonment but, after the failure of Discoverer XII on June 29, 1960, he decided a new Air Force team was needed to take a fresh look and was about to clean house. He warned Mathison he would soon be relieved. Mathison replied that if Schriever gave them one more chance, “I’d put it [a recovered capsule] on his desk.” Mathison’s job running the satellite control center was on the periphery of the project’s organization. He had never been admitted to the inner councils of the Air Force program office or briefed by the CIA operatives on the plan to turn a public Discoverer into a secret Corona. He was shrewd and resourceful enough, without sanctioned access, to discern what was going on and to keep abreast of progress being made and problems being encountered, which is why the private reports he made to Schriever were valuable to a boss to whom he was intensely loyal. Moreover, the experience he had acquired in the missile-building trials had given him perspective to judge when enough of the bugs had been removed so that a system would probably work. Mathison was convinced Discoverer was at that point.

  Willis Hawkins, Lockheed’s manager of space systems, had recently eliminated one of the most persistent bugs—the ejection of the capsule. To send the capsule straight down into the atmosphere, and not have it drift off into space on an orbit of its own, it had to be spun like a top as it emerged from the Agena. Then, after entering the atmosphere, the capsule had to be “despun,” stopped from spinning, so that it would not tangle up the lines of the parachute released at that moment by small explosive charges. Finding the right type of miniature rockets and attaching them to the capsule to perform this spinning and despinning ballet had proved maddeningly difficult, but Hawkins had at last accomplished the task.

  When Discoverer XIII lifted off from a pad at Vandenberg on August 10, 1960, Mathison waited through three circuits of the earth to be certain the Agena was in a correct orbit and then flew straight to Hickam. The capsule ejected perfectly on the seventeenth orbit and came down exactly where predicted, over the Pacific Ocean 380 miles northwest of Hawaii. The C-119 from Hickam missed catching the parachute in midair because of confused communication with an RC-121 control plane and obscuring cloud cover. The capsule was fortunately sealed and buoyant and so bobbed in the waves, easily visible because of its trailing parachute. (There was no precious film to be lost. The flight had been designed to see if the ejection system jinx had at last been dispelled. The capsule held only instruments and an American flag.) A Navy recovery ship, the USS Haiti Victory, equipped with a helicopter, had also been stationed in the vicinity. It took a few hours, but the pilot of the C-119 guided the ship to the spot. The helicopter crew plucked the capsule from the water and delivered it safely to the Haiti Victory’s deck.

  On the morning of Friday, August 12, Lieutenant Colonel Gus Ahola, the commander of the Hickam squadron, expected to meet the Haiti Victory at Pearl Harbor to accept delivery of the capsule. He learned to his surprise that Mathison had already helicoptered to the ship and taken charge. There was nothing Ahola could do to stop him because Mathison, a full colonel by this time, outranked him. To indicate that he would brook no attempt by the Navy to reap glory by hanging on to the space trophy, Mathison, who had a fondness for the dramatic gesture, arrived on the ship with a Colt .45 service pistol strapped to his hip. The ship’s captain offered no resistance and Mathison was soon back in the helicopter, capsule secured, headed for Pearl Harbor. He had arranged by radio for General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, Jr., the commander of the Pacific Air Forces, to meet him there for a photo opportunity with the capsule that was certain to generate headlines, as the photos would be distributed nationally and internationally by the wire services. (“Satellite Is Recovered off Isles in Perfect Condition,” the headline in one Hawaii newspaper read.)

  The publicity parade set in motion, Mathison shifted himself and the capsule to a C-130 for the long flight back to Sunnyvale, where he picked up Ritland and Lieutenant Colonel Clarence “Lee” Battle, Jr., an engineer with an indefatigable temperament whom Schriever had chosen as program director, and then flew on to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington. It was raining when they arrived on Saturday, but Schriever and General White, the chief of staff, were waiting to greet them. Both men were ecstatic at the success of the mission. One of the photographs shows the two generals beaming as Mathison held up the lines of the parachute still attached to the capsule and explained how the parachute was released by explosive charges after reentry. The capsule resembled a big kettle of shiny copper or brass, rounded at the bottom and flat on top where the cover was attached. That night and Sunday night as well, the capsule sat, as Mathison had promised, in a protective container in front of Schriever’s desk in his new office at Andrews. (In April 1959 Schriever had received the third star of a lieutenant general and promotion to command of the Air Research and Development Command. Its headquarters had shifted to Andrews from Baltimore. Ritland had replaced him as commander of the Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles, while simultaneously serving as Bissell’s deputy for Discoverer-Corona. His promotion did not relieve Schriever of any responsibility for Minuteman or any of the other missile programs or for the Air Force role in the photoreconnaissance satellite project. It merely widened and deepened that responsibility and he kept as close a watch as ever over it all.)

  On Monday, August 16, they all went to the White House. Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy, the new secretary of the Air Force, Dudley Sharp, and LeMay, at the time still vice chief of staff, joined the group as General White removed from the capsule the Stars and Stripes that had circled the earth seventeen times and presented it to Eisenhower. Afterward, a clearly delighted president invited Schriever and Mathison, who had exchanged his gray pilot’s coveralls for neat summer tan jacket and trousers, to join him for coffee in a small inner sanctum off the Oval Office. The meeting lasted fifteen minutes, a generous visit in a president’s busy day. Schriever sat quietly while Eisenhower questioned Mathison closely about the details of the project. Then Schriever and Mathison were off to Capitol Hill to garner political support by displaying the capsule to such powerful men as Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, and Lyndon Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader. The capsule never went back to California. It toured the United States under Air Force sponsorship and years later came to rest in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington. McCartney and the other young controllers named the capsule Lucky XIII.

  None of this was supposed to happen. The CIA had worked out a cloak-and-dagger plan for surreptitious delivery of film-filled capsules to Eastman Kodak’s photographic-processing facility at Rochester, New York. Although Discoverer XIII’s capsule contained no film, its retrieval was going to be a dress rehearsal of the CIA scheme. At Hickam, Ahola was supposed to turn the capsule, in its protective container, over to an Air Force courier from BMD in Los Angeles. On the courier’s arrival in California, probably by commercial air, a switch would be made. The container, emptie
d of the capsule, would go by some fairly obvious route to Lockheed, while the capsule, disguised by repackaging, would be sent east in an unmarked truck to Rochester. Then the bull moose had charged and scattered the plan.

  The secret official history accused Mathison of possessing a “unique mix of creative anarchy and casual effrontery.” Had Mathison known these qualities would be attributed to him, he would have been flattered. What Mathison had done was precisely what Schriever had wanted him to do, otherwise Schriever would have stopped him. Like Jacobson and several others, Mathison was a member of a small band of officers, spoken of within the Air Force, and not always in a friendly tone, as “Bennie’s colonels.” They were bold and clever men of initiative, who believed fervently in what “the Boss” was seeking to achieve, and were entrusted with tasks Schriever would not have delegated to anyone else. The venerable Air Matériel Command at Wright-Patterson was soon to be broken up into two functionial organizations. One, to be called the Air Force Systems Command, was to be an enlarged ARDC, responsible for research, development, and initial production of all the Air Force’s aircraft, missiles, and other weaponry. (The other organization, a new Air Force Logistics Command, was to be concerned solely with supply.) Schriever was slated to head the Systems Command, a post he hoped to use to gain responsibility for all space satellites—a function, he believed, that belonged naturally with the Air Force. The struggle to get the ICBM program moving by briefing Eisenhower in 1955, and the lift provided by public relations coups like the Time cover story in 1957, had taught him how important political backing and enthusiastic publicity were to an undertaking. This was what Mathison’s actions had been all about. In showing off the Discoverer XIII capsule, Schriever and Mathison stuck to the biomedical cover story, because they had to, but it is doubtful that this fiction fooled the Soviets or any other interested parties. The aviation industry press in the United States had been speculating that the Air Force was in the process of creating a photoreconnaissance system from space. Why else put up a satellite with an ejectable capsule except to fill it with film from a camera?

  71.

  DISCOVERER GOES “BLACK” INTO CORONA

  No time was wasted getting Discoverer XIV up into space on August 18, 1960, just eight days after its predecessor had been launched. XIV was the real thing, with a Space Age panoramic camera called the Itek mounted in its port. The Itek had been specially created for satellite photography by a recently formed firm of the same name in Massachusetts. One of the company’s founders was Richard Leghorn, an Air Force Reserve colonel who was a pioneer in high-altitude photoreconnaissance. He had worked for Schriever in earlier years as the reconnaissance specialist in the Plans and Programs Office at the Pentagon. A witty, iconoclastic man, Leghorn had been one of the instigators of the U-2 and of Eisenhower’s Open Skies program. An idealist, he believed that the United States and the Soviet Union could coexist in peace if they dispelled fear by allowing free passage of each other’s reconnaissance vehicles over any part of the globe. Discoverer XIV’s orbit took in more than 1,650,000 square miles of Soviet territory. The camera exposed and spun into the capsule 3,000 feet of film, virtually all of the twenty pounds that had been stored in the Agena. Ejection and recovery went perfectly, the C-119 snatching the parachute in midair, and after Eastman Kodak had developed the film, the CIA photo interpreters pronounced the results “terrific, stupendous.”

  At least half of the frames were clear of cloud cover. The Itek camera was so exacting that from roughly 120 miles above the earth, it had taken photograhs with a resolution of fifty-five lines per millimeter. Objects on the ground ranging upward from thirty-five feet in dimension were identifiable. Less than a week later Edwin Land unrolled a reel of developed film across the carpet of the Oval Office to Eisenhower’s desk. “Here are your pictures, Mr. President,” he announced. After viewing the take, as the developed film was called in the photographic intelligence business, Eisenhower was extremely pleased and extremely emphatic. The success of this spy satellite and all future ones was to be held in utmost secrecy. No photograph from space was ever to be released for publication, a policy retained for many years by his successors. What seemed to worry him most was that if the United States boasted of its intelligence triumph, Khrushchev would raise the same brouhaha he had over the U-2, whereas if all was kept quiet, the Russians might not react even if they did detect what the satellites were doing. He was also fearful that they might attempt to interfere with the satellites.

  As it turned out, neither fear was justified. The Soviets intended to put up their own photoreconnaissance satellites once they acquired the technology, which they did in later years, and Forrest McCartney’s “implied rules of engagement” during the Cold War applied as much to satellites as they did to other technological spy systems like the Turkish Radar. The Russians never attempted to interfere with or control an American satellite and the courtesy was returned. As McCartney phrased it: “You don’t tinker with my satellites and I don’t tinker with yours.” Discoverer XIV’s photography also discredited definitively the myth of a missile gap. As was the custom in 1960 for presidential contenders, Kennedy was given a top secret briefing. He stopped talking about a missile gap himself, but politics being a killer sport, he did not stop his supporters from talking about it, and Nixon suffered the consequences on election day.

  The program now went “black” in the lingo of the intelligence community, Discoverer gradually disappearing into the darkness of Corona. The Air Force provided less and less detail about each subsequent launch until its press spokesmen would provide none at all. Eisenhower, who had always prided himself on restricting military spending to what he believed was necessary, had fostered creation of the means to perpetuate that policy through a constant flow of concrete information. Regrettably, not all of his successors were inclined to be guided by reality. Corona remained the nation’s principal source of photographic intelligence until 1972, when it was retired and replaced by a more advanced system that remains secret. There were many failed launches and malfunctions of the satellite in the years to come, but they were far outweighed by the successes. Its capacity and sophistication moved ahead rapidly. McCartney recalled that within six to eight months the crude plastic tape with thirteen punch-hole connections was replaced by a mechanism called the Lockheed Orbital Decoder and Programmer. This gave the satellite sixty-four commands. The controllers could turn the camera on when the satellite was over areas of the Soviet Union they wanted to photograph, and then off, rather than just letting the film run. They could even load fresh film into the camera from the ground. By 1964, camera life in orbit had been extended to eight days. In 1965, the satellite was equipped with multiple cameras to obtain a stereoscopic effect for height and depth. By 1967 camera life was fifteen days. The ejection and retrieval systems became so dependable that between 1966 and 1970, twenty-eight capsules were launched and twenty-eight capsules were recovered.

  Moreover, in addition to finding airfields, missile installations, nuclear weapons manufacturing facilities, and other targets in the Soviet Union, the Corona satellite greatly enhanced the power of the American deterrent by making it possible to determine the exact location of these targets. Prior to the existence of the satellite, targeting had to be done with maps and photography from the U-2, the occasional SAC penetration flight on the periphery of the Soviet Union, or even from Second World War Luftwaffe aerial reconnaisssance photos in the captured German archives. All of this involved a certain level of error. The targeting officers at SAC headquarters in Omaha always had to ask themselves exactly how far and on exactly what bearing was the center of Moscow or the Soviet missile complex at Plesetsk from an Atlas missile silo at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming or from their own nearby runways at Offutt. An inertial guidance system in a missile or an inertial navigation system in a B-52 could perform only as well as the information cranked into it. With the coming of Corona, error was dispelled. It became possible, as McCartney explained, t
o “tie continents together.” Because the parameters of the orbit were known and the satellite was fitted with a clock that recorded the time the photograph was taken, the precise distance and direction of the target from a known point in the United States or anywhere else in the world could be calculated. Even such factors as the curvature of the earth could be taken into account. That the missile would strike and the bomber would find its target became far more certain. As the Soviets built their own photoreconnaissance satellites, they would learn this and the knowledge would make them fear all the more the formidable deterrent they faced.

  The CIA was to take credit for Corona, because Eisenhower had placed the agency in charge, but the dedication and skills of the organization Schriever built had put it into the sky. This first photographic reconnaissance satellite and its precious capabilities became the final brick in the foundation they laid for a nuclear peace.

  72.

  A HAREBRAINED SCHEME

  By October 1962, the lofting of Discoverer XIV on August 18, 1960, had dispelled the darkness from the interior of the Soviet Union for more than two years, permitting an acccurate assessment of its strategic capabilities. Minuteman, the weapon that was to play such an important role in keeping the nuclear peace by safeguarding against the nuclear Pearl Harbor so dreaded earlier, was moving into deployment. The first flight of ten Minutemen went on alert in silos at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana on October 22, 1962. Yet that same month, in no small irony, the eternal curse of the human race, man’s folly, brought the United States and Russia the closest they were ever to come to nuclear war. Nikita Khrushchev precipitated the crisis by shipping Soviet missiles to Fidel Castro’s Cuba in a wild poker play to try to even the strategic odds. When Khrushchev was overthrown two years later in a conspiracy led by one of his principal subordinates in the Presidium of the Soviet Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev, the Missile Crisis was cited as an example of his “harebrained scheming.” It was not the only reason for his downfall. His colleagues had other complaints against him as well, but a harebrained scheme it certainly was.