The Falcon and the Snowman (10 page)

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 T
OP
S
ECRET
/N
OFORN
, 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.

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.