In August, 1957, the Soviet Union announced it had tested a “super-long-distance intercontinental multistage ballistic missile” that had flown at an “unprecedented altitude and landed in the target area.” Six weeks later, on October 4, Moscow announced that, using the ICBM as a rocket booster, the Russians had launched history’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I.
Both launchings had come sooner than American officials had expected, and they added urgency to the American project.
Two things happened in 1960 that altered history even more. On May 1, a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers was brought down over the Soviet Union. The effectiveness of the prized source of intelligence had vanished just when the United States most needed data about the progress being made on a Soviet weapon with the potential to destroy American civilization within half an hour.
The second event was closely related to the first and occurred on August 10. After twelve failures, the Air Force recovered a capsule over the Pacific that had been sent back to earth from an orbiting satellite called Discoverer. The cover story used to describe Project Discoverer was that it was a scientific venture to test the effects of space flight on monkeys and other animals; in fact, its mission was to bring back espionage pictures from space. It was a test bed for an unmanned U-2; instead of operating from fourteen miles above the earth, like Francis Gary Powers, it would spy from one hundred miles or more in space while traveling at a speed of 17,000 miles an hour.
The idea of using satellites for aerial reconnaissance had been proposed to the Pentagon in 1946 by the Rand Corporation. In 1953, the year Chris was born, the CIA hired Rand to study further the feasibility of satellites for espionage.
Although it would be five years before the Atlas and Thor missiles would be available to launch satellites into space, in a secret report called Project Feed-Back, Rand envisaged a push-button era of espionage; from their lofty vantage point in space, Rand concluded, satellites could photograph Russian defense installations and troop movements, ferret out Soviet radio transmissions and, with heat-sensing infrared detectors, detect an enemy’s missile launches. Such a warning of a missile rising from the Siberian wasteland, CIA officials were told, might give the United States enough time to launch a counterattack. Thus, the possibility that such a warning could be sounded might in itself ensure national survival: the certainty that America would know of a surprise attack and would have time to launch a devastating nuclear counterattack, Pentagon theorists said, should deter a first strike against the country because such an attack would become suicidal.
In the summer of 1955, the CIA, through the Air Force, gave Lockheed a contract to develop the first U.S. photoreconnaissance satellite, called Samos, and a companion system that was to detect the fiery plume of a rising missile with infrared heat sensors. Its name was Midas. The success of the Discoverer 13, after so many failures, established that it was possible to recover photographic film from a satellite speeding at five miles a second through the distant reaches of space. While it was developing this system to lob cassettes containing film back from space, Lockheed was also pressing ahead with another system; it would send strategic intelligence photos back to earth electronically via high-resolution television transmissions.
A year after the Discoverer 13 success, the White House, on advice from the CIA, clamped a secrecy lid on all satellite espionage operations. It became forbidden even to acknowledge the existence of such systems.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had begun to develop its own reconnaissance satellites, and a curious kind of international gentlemen’s agreement evolved: Each side knew the other had such satellites, but tacitly both agreed to say nothing publicly about the other’s espionage efforts in space. Each side knew what the other was doing, but they found no value in airing it publicly, because it would just trigger a response in kind. However, for all the superficial good manners regarding each other’s space spies, learning about each other’s capabilities—and vulnerabilities—in satellite espionage became a principal preoccupation of the intelligence services of the two countries, the CIA and the KGB.
By the early 1970s, no KGB agent had ever penetrated the U.S. satellite operations.
Meanwhile, satellites became as indispensable to modern generals as spears were to ancient warriors. Their surveillance capabilities became a cornerstone of American defense in the nuclear era, as well as a promising tool in the search for a stable peace. The satellites were eyes in space that could photograph and inventory the number, locations and types of missiles deployed by the Soviets, and thus allow U.S. negotiators to enter Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) with prior knowledge of the extent of the Soviet arsenal and determine if the Russians were living up to any SALT agreement. Likewise, the Russians could monitor U.S. land-based missiles the same way.
Satellites could eavesdrop on telecommunications around the world and maintain a vigil in space to warn of a possible attack; and if deterrence failed, satellites would be ready in space to report on the accuracy of missiles by locating and counting the mushroom clouds that would billow into the sky during a nuclear war.
The United States built a global network of tracking stations to control the satellites and receive information from them. Headquartered in a huge windowless structure beside a Lockheed plant in Northern California, the network spanned the globe with stations in Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, Iceland, Australia, the Seychelles Islands off Africa and other secret locations. From this command post, Air Force operators could guide the satellites by remote control, much as if they were in the cockpit of a plane.
Along with Lockheed, TRW became the CIA’s principal supplier of Black Satellites.
Besides learning more about satellite espionage, Chris in his initial months on the job began to know some of his associates better. Gene Norman, he learned, had worked at TRW for seven years, including five in Special Projects. He both liked and felt repelled by him. Gene seemed to enjoy assuming the role of an older brother teaching Chris the ways of the world. There was nothing racial about the tension that Chris began to feel toward his black co-worker. Chris felt no racial bias toward anyone. But Norman’s values were not always consistent with those of the new code-room clerk, who still carried with him substantial vestiges of the moral code he’d assimilated at St. John Fisher.
Norman made much of his two years as a Marine in Vietnam. To Chris he often acted as if he were still a Marine. He never stopped talking about the camaraderie of Marines under fire, and he was forever polishing his dark cordovan-colored shoes.
Norman loved to drink beer, smoke pot and ogle women’s breasts; Chris discovered this one night after work when Norman took him to a place near the plant called The Buckit. At noon and in the late afternoon, it was usually jammed with employees from the half-dozen or so defense plants in the area, CIA men from the Project and personnel from the sprawling nearby Air Force Space and Missile Systems Organization complex, which had evolved from the old secret organization that began in the Inglewood parochial school.
The Buckit offered inexpensive food, cheap beer and nonstop dancing on two runways by young women wearing G-strings, shoes and nothing else. Intelligence analysts who spent the morning reviewing photographs of Soviet missile pads taken from space could relax at noon by studying the bobbing breasts of young girls. Over beer, and against the noisy background of strident recorded music and customers’ cheers and whistles at the girls, Norman regaled Chris, as he had earlier, with stories from Vietnam—about the whores, the combat and the constant killing, giving Chris a much more personal view of the war than he had received via the nightly news. One of Norman’s favorite stories was how he and other Marines had taken Viet Cong soldiers up in a helicopter and then tossed them out—sometimes if they didn’t answer their questions, sometimes after they did. Chris didn’t believe the stories at first. But as they were repeated with additional horrifying details, he began to believe them, and it gave him still another perspective on his country.
Another
person whom Chris could not help getting to know better was Laurie Vicker. She was apparently a whiz at computers, but she didn’t seem too bright to Chris. Whenever her work load was light, or she just got a whim to do so, she came into the vault and tried to make conversation with him. Laurie wanted more than anything else to get married and move out of the home of her parents. She liked marijuana, Valium and amphetamines; the last, she said, were necessary to dampen her appetite so that she could lose weight.
During these first few weeks Chris learned other things about Laurie: she liked her sex in threesomes and, sometimes, accompanied by pain, and she delighted in talking about it. She said she enjoyed wearing black leather outfits during her sex and flogging men who got their sexual kicks that way. Chris wasn’t sexually interested at all in the lusty, overweight girl; she was too coarse for him, and her graphic invitations to join her group-sex sessions embarrassed him. But, as he discovered, he was clearly in the minority.
Each station in the Central Intelligence Agency network of which Chris was now a part had a designator, or “slug,” that identified it. It was an address cited on each message. For instance, CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, appropriately was called “Pilot”; TRW was “Pedal”; Canberra, the capital of Australia, was “Casino.” Chris learned that he was to operate two cryptographic systems between TRW and the CIA headquarters and, with Langley as an intermediate relay point, to Australia and other stations around the world.
The first of the machines was the KW-7. It worked exactly like a teletype machine except for one thing: when Chris typed a message on the keyboard, a computer scrambled the sequence of letters, words and sentences he typed into an incoherent stream of electronic pulses. Conversely, when messages arrived from Pilot, the machine reversed the process, transforming incoherent pulses from the CIA into plain English. The messages sent over this encoded teletype system were called TWX’s, like ordinary teletype messages. The second machine he operated, the KG-13, scrambled voices into meaningless gibberish to prevent eavesdropping on telephone and radio conversations between TRW, Langley and any other stations plugged temporarily into the circuit. When TRW or CIA representatives needed to hold what they called a “secure” conversation, certain not to be penetrated by the KGB or other foreign agents, they spoke over the KG-13 from the vault or from an upstairs command post in M-4 called the War Room. It was the room where day-to-day operations of TRW satellites built for the CIA were directed and where executives and CIA representatives congregated during crises. In both machines, the ciphers had to be changed daily. It was one of the systematic precautions taken to prevent enemies from getting access to the messages. Every so often, usually every three to six months, a new supply of ciphers arrived. The National Security Agency dispatched an armed courier to TRW with the ciphers, and they were locked in the Diebold floor safe. Chris learned how to change the ciphers each day by repositioning key settings on the machines. Soon, he was told, the NSA would be changing to a new system of computer punched cards. Under the new system, the cards were to come in booklets of thirty-four—thirty-one cards for successive days in the month and three for emergencies or other contingencies.
Chris’s life in the vault began to settle into a routine. A few minutes before 7:30 A.M. each weekday, he showed his Special Projects badge to a guard, then passed two more guard checkpoints before reaching the outer office in front of the vault. Before attempting to open the vault, he telephoned a TRW guard to announce his intention to do so, so that the guard could temporarily disconnect the main vault alarm. Then he worked the combination, opened the vault door and, using a key, opened the inner door. He switched off another alarm, opened the Diebold and then chose the designated cipher for the day. After he set the cipher and turned on the machines, there was a “good morning” contact with the CIA operator at Pilot. Then he tore up the previous day’s ciphers and placed them in a bag, where they would be stored for several weeks before being ground up into pulp by a high-speed electrical blender in the vault.
His next step was to collect the messages for TRW that had accumulated during the night and then make copies for the CIA resident officers at the plant and senior TRW project officials. One copy of each message—about fifty or sixty flowed through the vault each day—was retained in the vault for a year. Anyone with access to the code room could thus look back on a full year of the CIA’s decoded secret mail.
After copying and distributing the TWX traffic, Chris began sending outgoing messages and arranging conversations via the secure voice link. His was a job more or less like that of a switchboard operator who linked callers in telephone conversations around the world.
As the days went on, the young man who had grown up on the Palos Verdes Peninsula intent on becoming a Roman Catholic priest, and who had found his happiest days walking in the woods near Morro Bay, plunged deeper into the new world that had been revealed to him—the CIA espionage and its deception, Gene Norman’s tales of butchery in Vietnam, and Laurie’s continued attempts at seduction.
Chris disliked Norman, but kept his aversion to himself. They had to work closely together and their shifts coincided, and inevitably, circumstances brought them together a lot. They began to lunch regularly at The Hangar or The Buckit, where Norman’s favorite subject of conversation—aside from the Vietnam War, of course—was a hypothetical plot to sell some of the ciphers to a foreign country. It was a joke, but they fantasized how they might pull off the caper as they went through successive pitchers of beer. The best approach, they agreed, would be to sell the stuff to a Russian or Chinese embassy in a foreign country.
Chris occasionally rode with Norman on courier runs to the CIA’s West Coast Office, which, unmarked, filled the basement of a high-rise office building near Los Angeles International Airport, and Norman occasionally dropped by the bar and pool hall where Chris worked at night. Chris was supposed to close the bar at 2 A.M., but he got so tired of breaking up fights among the patrons on some nights that he sometimes closed early. After a while, even amphetamines didn’t keep him awake when he arrived for work in the vault, and on the day before Christmas, 1974, he quit.
Because the vault was off limits to guards and even to most senior executives at TRW, Chris discovered it was used as a kind of private playpen by the select group that was allowed inside. When traffic with Pilot was slow, Norman, Laurie and a handful of their friends came in for cocktails, or to gossip or play Risk, a game distantly related to Monopoly. When the liquor they hid in the vault ran out, Chris or somebody else went on what they all called a “booze run” to a nearby liquor store, carrying the liquor into the plant in a briefcase or other container as if it were classified data bound for the code room. The guards never asked any questions. Morning visitors to the vault could expect vodka–and–orange juice; afternoons, there was often peppermint Schnapps, red wine or daiquiris whipped up in the CIA’s document-destruction blender. The vault became an increasingly popular place.
As 1975 began, the domestic political pot was reaching a boil in Australia, the destination for many of the messages from Pedal. And in certain components of the United States Government, uneasiness was mounting about the political heat Down Under.
In 1968, Australia and the United States had signed an agreement providing for the establishment of CIA bases at Pine Gap and Murrunger, near Alice Springs in Central Australia, about two thousand miles northwest of Sydney. The bases sprawled over more than four square miles of bush country. Their function was to control and gather data sent back from space by spy satellites. But the Australian public had never been informed that this was the purpose of the bases. Although there had been occasional speculation in the Australian press that they had a military function that might invite a Soviet attack on Australia in the event of a U.S.–U.S.S.R. war, officially the Australian Government described the bases as “space research stations” operated by the U.S. Defense Department jointly with Australia. The impression was left—purposefully—that these remote bases were d
edicated to the peaceful pursuit of knowledge about the universe.
Despite probings by the Australian press, no one had ever publicly made a connection between the CIA and the facilities. This was highly satisfactory to the CIA, which regarded the listening posts as crucial to American intelligence operations.
An upset victory in 1972 by the Australian Labour Party and the election of Gough Whitlam as prime minister sent jitters through the CIA. The agency feared that a left-leaning government in Australia might reveal the function of the bases or, worse, abrogate the agreement and close down the facilities.
Because of these fears and apprehension that the KGB might find it easy to penetrate a labor government, the CIA decided to limit the information it made available to the Australian Security and Intelligence Service, the Australian CIA. To the American CIA, there were high stakes involved in the bases, and not surprisingly, it meant to keep them. Despite professions of loyalty from Whitlam to the American-Australian alliance, apprehension about an anti-U.S. shift in Australian policy continued to grow within the Central Intelligence Agency.
And in the minds of certain officials within the CIA, these fears were soon validated. One of Whitlam’s first acts after becoming prime minister was to tweak the United States by withdrawing Australian troops from Vietnam, and in 1973 he publicly denounced the American bombing of Hanoi, enraging President Nixon.
Meanwhile, strident demands for official explanation of the American bases were being voiced increasingly by some members of the Labour Party. The CIA, convinced that the future of facilities vital to the security of the United States was jeopardized by a potentially unfriendly government, placed the highest priority on ensuring the survival of the bases and secretly poured money heavily into the opposition Liberal and National Country parties. The CIA wanted Whitlam out.
The Falcon and the Snowman Page 8
