Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Radio Free Europe, the U.S.-sponsored network that beamed Western news into the Eastern bloc, picked up the rallying cry, its broadcasts becoming increasingly insurrectionary. Secretary of State Dulles, who had long vowed to “roll back” communism, encouraged the Hungarian demonstrators and pledged American support. “To all those suffering under communist slavery,” he said, “let us say you can count on us.”

  Emboldened, the protesters surrounded parliament and gathered outside the secret police headquarters, chanting for the Red Star atop the building to be removed. Their requests were met by a hail of gunfire, and in the ensuing hand-to-hand fighting eighty were killed. But the building was taken, as was a nearby armory. The uprising was now an armed revolt, gaining momentum. Radio Free Europe stoked the flames, instructing Hungarians on how to make weapons out of gasoline, bottles, and rags. Hungarians felt certain that the United States was behind them. Within days, 80 percent of the Hungarian army had switched sides. The Hungarian people could taste the liberty that Dulles had promised.

  In Moscow, at an October 28 emergency session of the Presidium, Khrushchev counseled caution. Molotov and the hard-liners wanted swift action, but the first secretary advocated compromise. “The Soviet government is prepared to enter into the appropriate negotiations with the government of the Hungarian People’s Republic, and other members of the Warsaw Treaty, on the question of the presence of Soviet troops on the territory of Hungary,” Pravda announced on October 31.

  In Washington, a jubilant Allen Dulles hailed the concession as “a miracle,” the most meaningful sign yet that communism could be in retreat. “This utterance is one of the most significant to come out of the Soviet Union since World War II,” he told Eisenhower.

  “Yes,” the president agreed skeptically. “If it is honest.”

  Khrushchev, the reformer, had unwittingly opened the floodgates, and now the Kremlin was being swamped in a tide of upheaval. And if Hungary fell, Moscow’s other dominions would quickly follow. No one would be able to stop the outpour.

  Just as swiftly, however, the tide turned. In Budapest that same day, the violence spiraled into an orgy of revenge. Dozens of suspected secret police officers and informers were hung from lampposts by rampaging mobs, while Imre Nagy, the Hungarian prime minister, defiantly summoned the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Andropov—the future KGB boss and head of state. Like Gomułka, Nagy had been imprisoned by Stalin and rehabilitated after the secret speech. Under Khrushchev’s liberalizations he had replaced the Stalinist puppet Mátyás Rákosi only a few months earlier. And now he had done the unthinkable. Hungary, Nagy told Andropov, was renouncing the Warsaw Pact and proclaiming its neutrality. A telegram had already been dispatched to the United Nations, asking the United States, Britain, and France “to help defend” the breakaway Soviet satellite.

  When news of the declaration and lynch mobs reached Moscow, Khrushchev reversed course. “We have no choice,” he said at another emergency Presidium session that evening. “We should take the initiative in restoring order.”

  “Agreed,” growled Molotov, Bulganin, and Kaganovich. “We showed patience but things have gone too far. We must act to ensure that victory goes to our side.”

  “If we depart from Hungary,” Khrushchev went on, “it will give a great boost to the imperialists. They will perceive it as weakness on our part and go on the offensive.”

  “We should use the argument that we will not let socialism in Hungary be strangled,” volunteered Pyotr Pospelov, the party’s PR chief and the editor of Pravda. “That we are responding to an appeal for assistance.”

  Khrushchev agreed. Closing the session, he instructed Marshal Georgy Zhukov, his deputy defense chief, “to work out a plan and report it.”

  There was no longer room for negotiation. This time an example had to be made; the fate of the Soviet empire depended on it.

  “Bombs, by God!” Eisenhower was awakened in the early hours of November 1. But it was not a Soviet invasion. Instead the news was that France and Britain (along with Israel) had attacked Egypt, in a punitive strike against President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. “What does Anthony think he’s doing?” Eisenhower demanded, as he picked up the phone to call the British prime minister, Anthony Eden. The whole world was going up in flames, on the eve of the U.S. presidential election. How could the United States now condemn the Soviets, a furious Allen Dulles lamented, “when our own allies are guilty of exactly similar acts of aggression?”

  Now there was no longer any room for talk of coming to Hungary’s aid. Moscow would have free rein to teach the Hungarian “hooligans” a lesson no one in Eastern Europe would soon forget. Shortly before 9:00 AM on November 4, the BBC interrupted its regularly scheduled broadcast with the following announcement: “The Soviet Air Force has bombed the Hungarian capital, Budapest, and Russian troops have poured into the city in a massive dawn offensive.”

  The death toll, this time, was thirty thousand. Russian tanks rolled out of their Hungarian bases and dragged bloodied corpses through Budapest’s central squares to serve as brutal warnings to future counterrevolutionaries. Nagy was executed. Thousands were placed under arrest, while two hundred thousand Hungarians fled to the West. By November 14, order had been restored, but there was little doubt in the minds of the Kremlin hard-liners who was truly responsible for the string of rebellions. “Khrushchev’s days are numbered,” Allen Dulles predicted.

  4

  TOMORROWLAND

  Much as the Anglo-French incursion into the Sinai Peninsula enraged Eisenhower, the simultaneous conflicts in Egypt and Hungary proved a boon at the ballot box. Ike had already enjoyed a significant lead over his Democratic challenger, Adlai Stevenson, when the twin crises erupted on the eve of the presidential poll, but he was ideally positioned to benefit from the international turmoil.

  As the incumbent, Ike was able to rise above the political fray and act the statesman, holding emergency meetings of the National Security Council and conferring with world leaders. He called for United Nations resolutions and addressed the nation on television. In those final days of the 1956 campaign, Eisenhower was not running for office; he was brokering peace in the Middle East and trying to contain the carnage in Eastern Europe. Stevenson had little choice but to back the president or risk appearing as if he was putting his own electoral ambitions ahead of the national good.

  When the votes were tallied on November 6, Eisenhower had won in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history, carrying nearly 60 percent of the popular vote. Even Nixon’s presence on the ticket (the vice president had finally confronted Eisenhower and forced the issue of his renomination) could not dampen the enthusiasm for the president; Ike made significant inroads in the heart of Dixie, giving the Republicans hope that they might one day break the Democratic stranglehold over the South.

  With Eisenhower assured of another term in office, the administration no longer had to pander to Symington and the other Air Power hawks. The nearly one-billion-dollar supplemental appropriation for B-52 bombers that the Democrats had pushed through Congress in the run-up to the election had thrown the budget into deficit, and now it was time to balance the books.

  Just where the additional B-52 funds would come from became apparent on November 26, when Engine Charlie Wilson announced the Pentagon’s new “roles and missions directive.” The document was aimed at clearly delineating each of the services’ duties and responsibilities, and laying out jurisdictional boundaries for the squabbling chiefs of staff. Bruce Medaris’s heart must have sunk when he read the section pertaining to missile development.

  In regard to the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles, operational employment of the land-based Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile system will be the sole responsibility of the US Air Force. Operational employment of the ship-based Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile system will be the sole responsibility of the Navy. The US Army will not plan at this time for the operational employment of the Intermediate R
ange Ballistic Missile or for any other missiles with ranges beyond 200 miles.

  The army had been frozen out. Two hundred miles was the range of the existing Redstone missile. The Jupiter, the ABMA project on which the army had rested its hopes, was effectively being turned over to the air force. To add insult to injury, the air force issued a triumphant statement after the ruling, declaring that “it will be better for the country if the ABMA team were broken up and the individuals filtered out into industry and other organizations.”

  Not only had the air force won the IRBM sweepstakes, now it wanted Wernher von Braun and his German colleagues as well. ABMA might well turn out to be the shortest command in Medaris’s colorful career. The irony, he might have reflected, was that Stuart Symington, the man who had set the current fiscal crunch in motion, was the very politician to whom Medaris indirectly owed his first general’s star and his belated promotion to brigadier general. It had been during another set of Senate investigations, back in 1953, that Medaris, then a colonel, had learned the power of public relations. Called to testify about the shortages of munitions and equipment in Korea, Medaris brought a grenade to a Senate Armed Services subcommittee, which he dismantled before the startled and spellbound legislators, to expose its precision parts. “If we let down our standards to speed production,” he explained, “we do so at the peril of our troops who deserve the safest and most effective firepower we can provide.” When confronted with a damning letter from a soldier who had written his mother pleading for her to send him ammunition in her next care package, Medaris, nonplussed, asked to see the document. Flashing a telegenic and slightly roguish smile, he disarmed Symington, who headed the subcommittee, by pointing out that the request was for .32-caliber rounds, which were used for target practice in recreational handguns, and not for military issue. For deflecting congressional criticism away from the army, Medaris within weeks received the promotion that had been denied him for nearly ten years. Politics could give, but it could also take away. Unfortunately, Medaris now ruminated, the air force was proving far more adept at politics than missile development.

  The air force, he fumed, was no match for the team of engineers he supervised at ABMA. In fact, it was so short on qualified technical experts that it had been reduced to hiring outside contractors to supervise its existing operations. The Thor program, for instance, was being managed by a recently formed private engineering concern, the Ramo-Woolridge Corporation (later known as TRW). “The lack of a sound, experienced, military-technical organization in the Air Force has been responsible for the technical side of that service becoming almost a slave to the aircraft and associated industries, subject to endless pressure and propaganda,” Medaris wrote angrily years later.

  Medaris was convinced that his in-house team had more experience and a more proven track record. But the air force had better political connections, along with the deep-pocketed support of the defense industry. So despite the fact that an early prototype of the Jupiter had just flown 3,000 miles, breaking every U.S. record for distance, height, and speed, it was ABMA that was going to be sacrificed to pay for bombers that could be rendered obsolete by the time they rolled off the assembly line. For this, Medaris partly blamed Eisenhower. “In all honesty, I do not think that the situation has been helped by having a soldier in the White House,” he complained. “Anyone whose personal experience ended shortly after [World War II] cannot hope to be abreast of today’s military needs. Yet having been immensely successful as a theatre commander in a major war, the President is necessarily impressed with his own military knowledge, and less inclined to listen to the advice of today’s military professionals.”

  Eisenhower, however, was more attuned to rocketry’s deadly potential than Medaris believed. “Can you picture a war that would be waged with atomic missiles?” the president had asked reporters at a February 8, 1956, press conference. “It would not be war in any recognizable sense.” War was a “contest,” a battle of wits, strategy, and attrition. Missile warfare, Eisenhower lamented, “would just be complete, indiscriminate devastation.” Ike understood the impact of fully developed missiles on any future conflict with the Soviet Union. He was simply in no hurry to rush headlong into what he labeled “race suicide.”

  The president was far from the only military man with doubts about modern rockets. The air force itself viewed missiles with extreme skepticism, and the bomber generals who dominated the service preferred the proven over the uncertain. In August 1956, for instance, the air force’s top research and development commander, General Thomas S. Power, warned of a “somewhat distorted and exaggerated picture” of missile capabilities and complained that missiles “cannot cope with contingencies.” And General LeMay openly opposed rockets, which he put at the bottom of his list of military priorities. Missiles, he argued, would gain only a “satisfactory state of reliability” after “long and bitter experience in the field.” Meanwhile, they would draw away funds from badly needed bombers. Another general, Clarence S. Irvine, groused that missiles didn’t have much of a deterrent effect. “I don’t know how to show… teeth with a missile,” he scoffed.

  Nor were these isolated views. Virtually all of the air force’s top officers were former bomber commanders or fighter pilots, who saw little glory in sitting in a bunker with a slide rule, pushing launch code sequences. Resistance to missile development within the service was becoming such an issue that Vice Chief of Staff Thomas D. White, in a 1956 speech to the Air War College, warned his subordinates to get with the program.

  We see too few examples of really creative, logical, far-sighted thinking in the Air Force these days. It seems to me that our people are merely trying to find new ways of saying the same old things about air power without considering whether they need changing to meet new situations and without considering the need for new approaches to new problems.

  And so the air force was getting missiles it didn’t even want, while the army, which desperately wanted them, was being left out in the cold. If Medaris thought the system cynical and Eisenhower out of touch, he was savvy enough to keep his grievances private while he still wore the uniform of a major general. One of his top aides, however, felt no such compunction to suffer in silence. Colonel John C. Nickerson had worked on the Jupiter program since its inception. More than anyone else, he had shepherded it through the labyrinth of the military bureaucracy, had nurtured its various stages of technical evolution, and had rallied behind its creators whenever morale flagged. The Jupiter was his project, and he could not bear to see it aborted. “The aircraft industry, and particularly the Douglas Aircraft Co. [which built B-47 long-range bombers under license from Boeing], openly opposes the development of any missile by a government agency,” Nickerson wrote in a lengthy report, which he sent to the aerospace writer Erik Bergaust and the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson. “It is suspected that the Wilson memorandum has been heavily influenced by lobbying by this company, and by the Bell Telephone Co.” Bell Laboratories, which had been headed by Donald Quarles for nearly twenty-four years before he became assistant secretary of defense, provided the radio guidance system for the Thor. “Discontinuance of Jupiter,” Nickerson went on, “favors commercially the AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors,” which was also one of Thor’s prime contractors.

  This was a direct attack on Secretary Wilson, who had started his GM career at AC Spark Plug and had been the division’s president. The accusation implied impropriety at the highest levels of government, and reaction in Washington was swift. Nickerson was arrested, charged with revealing state secrets, court-martialed, and sent to the Panama Canal Zone.

  Medaris scrambled desperately to distance himself from the Nickerson debacle, going so far as to testify against him at his trial. But it was too late. The damage had already been done. ABMA had made powerful enemies in Washington, and its future, and that of its star expatriate scientists, looked bleak.

  • • •

  Not for the first time, Wernher von Braun must ha
ve wondered if coming to America had been a mistake. After all, he had chosen the United States, among all the countries who had vied for his services, because he had thought that only America had the resources and foresight to pursue rocket technology. Even before the war had ended, von Braun had gathered his key engineers to discuss which Allied nation offered the best hope for continuing their careers. “It was not a big decision,” recalled the physicist Ernst Stuhlinger, one of those present during the defection discussions. “It was very straightforward and immediate. We knew we would not have an enviable fate if the Russians would have captured us.” The French had been discounted as strutting losers. The British had fought bravely, but the United Kingdom was small and no longer the power it had once been. West Germany would have strict limits placed on its military programs. That left only the United States.

  But the America that greeted von Braun when he first stepped off a military cargo plane in Wilmington, Delaware, in September 1945 was not the place he had expected. At the time, his mere presence on U.S. soil was deemed sufficiently sensitive that it was kept secret for over a year. He cleared no customs and passed through no formal passport controls. The paper trail documenting his entry was sealed in an army vault, along with his incriminating war files; his Nazi Party ties, his depositions denying his involvement in slave labor, and his three SS promotions remained classified until 1984, seven years after his death. For Colonel Ludy Toftoy and von Braun’s army minders, his past, as well as the even more frightening war record of some of the other scientists, wasn’t an issue. “Screen them for being Nazis?” a senior intelligence officer told the historian Dennis Piszkiewicz, laughing. “What the hell for? Look, [even] if they were Hitler’s brothers, it’s beside the point. Their knowledge is valuable for military and possibly national reasons.” The real concern in postwar Washington was how the transfer of technology from the Third Reich would play out with the general public. The horrors of the Holocaust were still too fresh, the newsreels of liberated concentration camps still too painful for most Americans to accept Germans in their midst. Toftoy needed to find a secluded spot to stash von Braun and his cohorts until the wounds of the Second World War had healed a little. The hideout he selected was Fort Bliss, a desolate army base near El Paso, Texas. It would become von Braun’s less-than-happy home for the next five years.