The Falcon and the Snowman

by Robert Lindsey

  Chris was told he had been assigned to work in a communications vault that was the nerve center for this system of international espionage—a code room linking the TRW plant with CIA Headquarters and Rhyolite’s major ground stations in Australia. The continuing disclosures about the secret world fascinated Chris, and he was especially intrigued by what he saw as a bizarre contrast between the mechanical spies he had been told about and the location of the ground stations. The Rhyolite earth stations had been planted in a world that was about as close as man could find now to the Stone Age; they were situated near Alice Springs in the harsh Outback of Australia, an oasis in a desert where aborigines still lived much as Stone Age men did thousands of years ago.

  Under an Executive Agreement between the United States and Australia, Chris was told, all intelligence information collected by the satellites and relayed to the network of dish-shaped microwave antennas at Alice Springs was to be shared with the Australian intelligence service.

  However, Rogers told Chris, the United States, by design, was not living up to the agreement: certain information was not being passed to Australia. He explained that TRW was designing a new, larger satellite with a new array of sensors; the Australians, Rogers emphasized, were never to be told about it; anytime Chris sent messages that would reach Australia, he must delete any reference to the new satellite.

  Its name was Argus, or AR—for Advanced Rhyolite. Whoever in the CIA had selected the cryptonym must have enjoyed his choice, because it was appropriate. In Greek mythology, Argus was a giant with one hundred eyes … a vigilant guardian. With its array of sensors, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Argus was mythology’s giant brought to reality. It is not known whether the author of the code name knew the mythological fate of Argus. Ultimately Argus was slain by Hermes, the god of commerce, cunning and theft … the patron of thieves and rogues.

  Chris was vaguely troubled by the revelation that one of America’s closest allies was being deceived by the U.S. Government, but he let the thought slip away and accepted an invitation to go to lunch with some of the other TRW employees assigned to Rhyolite. The group included Rogers; Gene Norman, a thin, balding black man, and Fred Young, a taciturn engineer who he later learned was a former CIA agent who had been assigned to the agency’s secret war in Laos and had used his pull in the organization to get a job on the TRW program when the war ended. Chris realized the lunch was to be a celebration of sorts, to mark his induction into their secret society.

  His mind was still numb from the effects of the “whites” as he crowded with the others around a table at The Hangar, a dimly lit beer joint two blocks from M-4 that was a hangout for TRW workers. Hamburgers were ordered along with a pitcher of beer. The pitcher was soon empty, and they ordered one after another. Like lodge brothers introducing a new member to some of the inner secrets of their private fraternity, the older men gave Chris their observations about various bosses on the project, some opinions about the CIA residents who worked undercover at TRW and some thoughts on the women in M-4. Someone mentioned Laurie Vicker.

  “She’ll screw anybody; be careful,” Norman said with a laugh, and the others leered agreement. “She’s kinky,” Rogers added, as if it were a warning, and Chris wondered what he meant specifically.

  All four began to feel the effects of the beer after a while, but Norman was the least successful in concealing it. Slurring his words, he devoted ten minutes to recounting how, when he was in Vietnam, he and another Marine had raped a woman near a paddy field while her husband was kept back at rifle point. Chris had heard of such incidents, but never at first hand. He sat back with his glass of beer cradled between his hands and stared at the stranger as he added further details to his spicy narrative. What kind of group have I gotten into?, Chris asked himself.

  By the time they arrived back at the plant, the four men had finished seven or eight—nobody was sure—pitchers of beer. Each paid extra attention to the challenge of not stumbling as they walked past the guards.

  After lunch it was time for Chris to see the Black Vault.

  Concealed in an obscure cluster of offices in M-4, it was a tiny fortress within a fortress that was separated from the rest of the plant by a steel vault door—the same kind, Chris noted, that banks used. Beneath the floor and around the vault, he was told, were thick blankets of concrete, and the vault door could be opened only with a three-number combination known by three people; even knowing the combination did not ensure entry, because behind the main door was another door that required a key.

  The vault was located beyond a wall of an office used for processing classified data that was decorated in aerospace-industry bland, with squares of asphalt tile on the floor; wall panels painted turquoise; ceilings surfaced with squares of acoustical tile and the omnipresent fluorescent lights.

  Seated at a desk near the vault door Chris saw a girl of about thirty with coarse black hair that seemed to have been combed recently without much effect. She was plump, with a large bosom, but not pretty enough to warrant a second glance. She was a “systems analyst”—an expert, he was told, on computers. Norman led Chris over to the desk and introduced him to Laurie Vicker. As they shook hands, Laurie looked Chris over, and a shameless look of interest flickered in her eyes that didn’t escape him.

  Off to one side of this office, Chris noticed a long room with walls lined with filing cabinets, each with a locked steel bar running down the center.

  Beside the khaki-colored door of the vault, signs warned, NO ADMITTANCE, and RESTRICTED AREA: ENTRY BY PERMISSION ONLY. A smaller notice ordered no one to enter the vault without a clearance, and there was a sign-up sheet on which persons entering or leaving the vault were required to log the time.

  Only six people were cleared for access to the vault, Chris was told, and he was to be one of them. People called it the Black Vault, Norman explained, because Black was a catchall term the intelligence community applied to any covert intelligence operation; Air Force officers assigned to the project, for example, called themselves the “Black Air Force”; “spooks” was another affectionate expression for operatives on CIA projects. Another TRW employee translated another euphemism; whenever “Special Programs” or “Special Project” was mentioned, it was likely to involve espionage.

  It was time to enter the vault.

  The Black Vault (Communications Vault) was located in a heavily guarded complex within Building M-4.

  Chris was led past the threshold and discovered a room that was long and narrow—maybe fifteen feet long, no more than five feet across. Flimsy red carpeting covered the floor; the dropped ceiling was veneered with sound-absorbent tile; folders, binders and books were stacked around the room in no apparent order. There were also a floor safe and several filing cabinets, two clocks showing different times of day, a table and a chair. Along one wall was a machine that looked to Chris like a teletype machine, and on the opposite wall were two similar machines with keyboards. About midway in the vault was a set of drapes that prevented anyone who might be walking by from seeing in when the vault door was open, and also provided a barrier between two people working within the vault.

  Norman said Chris would have to have a “Crypto Briefing” from the National Security Agency before he worked in the vault. The NSA outranked even the CIA when it came to dealing with the transmission of classified information, he explained, and the NSA briefing officer wouldn’t be at the plant until next month. Because of that, he added, he couldn’t tell him everything about operations in the vault.

  At the close of what would seem later like a long day, Chris was handed a two-page statement by Rogers. The statement, CIA Form 2441, read:

  SPECIAL PROJECT SECRECY AGREEMENT

  I acknowledge that I have been indoctrinated in the Project identified below and thus have received highly classified information related to United States intelligence collection activities. I am aware that the unauthorized disclosure or negligent handling of such information could seriously affect the n
ational defense and that the transmission or revelation of such information to unauthorized persons could subject me to prosecution under the Espionage Laws. I have been informed that approval for access to Project information may only be granted by Project Headquarters. I have also been informed that extraordinary security measures and controls have been established to protect Project information and that access to such information is restricted to those who “must know” based on their present position or functional use.

  I realize that a briefing of this scope and depth, which identifies sponsorship, reveals codewords and admits to the ultimate intelligence application of the Project, is given only to those individuals who have been specifically approved for the above identified Project at the highest level and that this type of information may not be divulged to individuals with lesser levels of access.

  Having reviewed the above security requirements, I pledge that I will never publish or reveal, by any means, classified Project information to unauthorized persons. Along with this pledge, I recognize and accept the fact that I have a personal and individual responsibility for the protection of all such information in my possession no matter where generated or how acquired and agree to abide by the security requirements and regulations established for the Project.

  There was an additional pledge not to visit Communist countries without prior approval. The agreement concluded by identifying Projects Rhyolite and Argus as the subjects of the security agreement. Chris signed it, and the agreement itself was marked SECRET.

  Just before quitting time, Norman gave him one more quick tour of the vault. He spun the combination of the Diebold floor safe and reached in and showed Chris a handful of papers that he said contained codes for the cipher equipment the NSA was to brief him about later.

  “These are probably worth twenty thousand dollars a month to the Russians,” he boasted, a conspiratorial grin on his face. Chris just looked at the ciphers, not knowing what response was expected of him. He decided the black man was a braggart.

  After work, Chris found his Volkswagen in the parking lot. But before getting in, he decided to puff a joint. He lit up one that had been in the car and watched the passing crowds of TRW workers, not yet sure that he liked the aerospace industry.

  He spotted Laurie Vicker in the crowd walking toward him, and as she approached, looking for her car, a flash of recognition appeared in her eyes. She recognized the odor of the smoke coiling out of the joint, smiled at Chris and kept on walking.

  The next day Laurie was wearing a low-cut dress that revealed a substantial panorama of cleavage. Before noon, she came into the vault; Chris was momentarily by himself, and she invited him to have lunch with her at her boyfriend’s apartment; the boyfriend was out of town working, she explained, with an inviting smile.

  Chris couldn’t avoid admiring her breasts as she leaned over the desk where he was working. But there was something coarse about her that subdued any lust he might have felt. He declined the invitation—the first of many she would tender, even after she got married.

  10

  On December 12, 1974, a National Security Agency officer arrived from Washington and began to brief Chris on the crypto equipment. Secret messages, he explained, sometimes had to be broadcast over the open airwaves, which meant foreign agents could intercept them. The United States was able to prevent potential enemies from discovering the contents of its most private military and diplomatic messages, he continued, by using a highly sophisticated system of classified codes and transmission methods developed by the NSA. The secrets, he emphasized, were secure only as long as the methods used to encode and decode them were secure. Thus, he went on, extreme precautions had to be taken to protect the communication methods and the codes. The Government, he continued, had established a level of security clearance for people assigned to work with the crypto systems that was even more selective than Top Secret, and Chris had been approved for this most exclusive of clearances.

  The NSA officer then launched into an explanation of how the system worked.

  Computers, he said, now did most of the work of encoding and decoding. Before messages were released to the airwaves, telephone lines or teletype circuits, the computers scrambled them into a kaleidoscopic babel of electronic pulses. They were so complex that would-be code breakers would have to analyze millions of possible combinations of signals before finding a pattern. The coding instructions for the encryption machines were the most precious secrets about the system. He showed Chris a list of numbers; it was marked TOP SECRET/NOFORN, which he said meant no distribution to any foreign countries. This key list, he said, was used in setting the codes on the machine; the coding instructions—called ciphers—were changed daily by all of the stations using the system, and they all had copies of the same designated code for each day. The broadcast frequencies on which the messages were transmitted also were changed frequently.

  The official instructed Chris in how to operate the communications gear in the Black Vault, and, despite an acute absence of mechanical aptitude, he caught on quickly: after all, it was about as easy as using a typewriter.

  When the briefing was over, Chris signed an agreement pledging not to divulge to anyone the crypto information he had been given. Incredible as it would seem later, the $140-a-week college dropout now possessed a Top Secret clearance from the Department of Defense, a Strategic Intelligence–Byeman clearance from the CIA and a crypto clearance from the NSA; they would give him access to the nation’s most secret cryptographic systems and some of its most secret espionage operations. He was three months short of his twenty-second birthday.

  Over the next few months, Chris began to learn more about the history of TRW and the new world that he had entered. It was a world that, for the most part, had come into being in 1952, one year before he was born.

  American intelligence agents that year began to receive disquieting reports from agents in Eastern Europe that the Soviet Union, initially with the help of captured Nazi scientists, was developing rockets capable of hurling a payload weighing several hundred pounds over a distance of several thousand miles.

  U.S. officials suspected that the Russians were also trying to develop a hydrogen bomb. The possibility that sometime soon the Soviets would be able to rocket H-bombs through the fringes of space and drop them on New York or Los Angeles startled the few people in Washington who knew the secret.

  Early in 1954, after the agents’ reports of rocket research were confirmed, a hastily appointed Pentagon advisory panel sent a scientific study to President Eisenhower concluding that it was feasible—and urgent—for the United States to begin development of its own intercontinental ballistic missile to counterbalance the Soviet threat. Given a massive amount of work, the technology would be available, the panel said, to reduce the size of an H-Bomb so that it could be delivered by an ICBM—if the United States could develop an ICBM. The President gave his go-ahead, and a crash program matched in urgency only by the World War II Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb, began to develop a strategic long-range missile.

  Within a few weeks a group of Air Force officers wearing civilian clothes landed at Los Angeles International Airport and began searching for a command post from which to direct the secret project. They chose an abandoned Spanish-style Catholic church and connected parochial school in downtown Inglewood, a middle-class town near the airport and about thirty minutes by car from Palos Verdes, where many of the scientists, engineers and military men who were to converge on the old school would eventually choose to live.

  Because the urgency to develop the weapon was so great, the Pentagon decided that it couldn’t rely on conventional military command and engineering organizations. In an innovation, it decided to sponsor the establishment of a private corporation to manage the project, recruit engineering and scientific talent, and oversee design, testing and deployment of the ICBM on a parallel basis with the Air Force. Two engineer-entrepreneurs, Simon Ramo and Dean Woolridge, were chosen to head
the task, and they founded the Ramo-Woolridge Corporation, to direct the project, in 1953; five years later, after a merger with Thompson Products, Inc., the company changed its name to the Thompson-Ramo-Woolridge Corporation, and later it became the TRW Corporation.

  Under the stewardship of TRW, the United States would more than close the Soviet lead in missile technology. It began developing the Atlas, Titan, Thor and Minuteman missiles and started initial design of the nation’s first espionage satellites.

  In the summer of 1956, a new high-altitude reconnaissance plane, the U-2, which had been developed secretly in another part of Southern California by the Lockheed Corporation, began to fly clandestine missions over the Soviet Union to search for additional data about the Soviets’ missile project.

  The U-2 began to bring back photographic images of a tableau that, like Stonehenge or the aqueducts of ancient Rome, would become a distinguishing artifact of a particular age in the history of man. They were scenes, photographed vertically from great distances, of new roads in remote areas, of land shaved bare of vegetation, of trucks and new buildings, and evidence of human activity around tall structures called gantries. The photos were evidence of missile-launching pads under construction.