The Wizards of Langley (10 page)

In early December, McCone complained to the president of United Aircraft after learning that there would be another delay in the delivery of engines. As a consequence, “by the end of the year we will have barely enough J-58 engines to support the flight test program adequately.” By the end of January 1963, ten engines were available. The first flight with two of them installed occurred January 15.
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A few months later, in late May, the project almost was exposed to the public. On a routine training flight, pilot Kenneth Collins’ plane stalled and went out of control, due to a faulty air speed indicator, forcing him to eject from the aircraft, which crashed fourteen miles south of Wendover, Utah. Collins was unhurt and the wreckage was recovered in two days, while persons at the crash site were identified and requested to sign secrecy agreements. Two farmers, who arrived near the crash scene in a pickup, were told the plane had been carrying atomic bombs, which discouraged them from getting any closer. The press was given a cover story describing the crashed plane as an unclassified F-105 fighter. All A-12s were grounded for a week, until the cause of the faulty instrument, which was easily correctable, was discovered.
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While one component of OSA was wrestling with OXCART’s problems, another was concerned with improving space reconnaissance capabilities. The most important aspect of that effort centered around a modification to CORONA, referred to as the CORONA-J or KH-4A. The camera system for CORONA-J, the J-1, was essentially identical to the KH-4 or MURAL camera, with only slightly improved resolution—usually between 9 and 25 feet, although it reached 7 feet at times. The major change involved doubling the size of the film-supply cassette, a change made possible and necessary by the addition of a second reentry vehicle to the spacecraft. KH-4A spacecraft, which began operations in August 1963, eventually carried up to 160 pounds of film, in contrast to the 39 pounds carried in the KH-3 missions. Mission lifetimes grew from a maximum of 7 days for KH-4 missions to up to 15 days for KH-4A missions. The combination of extra film and two recovery capsules increased the frequency with which targets could be photographed during a mission, and increased the probability of finding targets free of cloud cover. A KH-4A mission could produce 18,000,000 square miles of stereo coverage.
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During 1962, OSA was also involved in a joint program with the Air Force, designated LANYARD, to develop a satellite intended to provide high-resolution photography of a target located at Tallinn in Estonia. In
1961, KH-4 CORONA photos showed what some analysts feared were antiballistic missiles. The photos were of poor quality, showing roads ending in a circular clearing, like “lollipops in the snow,” according to one pho-tointerpreter. NPIC’s interpreters concluded that the photos showed construction for the deployment of the SA-5 GAMMON interceptor missile, with three batteries of six launchers arranged around a single engagement radar. The exact purpose of the Tallinn line, as it was called, was to be hotly debated within the intelligence community for years to come.
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In an attempt to obtain more detailed images for the interpreters, Scov-ille approached Under Secretary of the Air Force Joseph V. Charyk, who agreed to pull SAMOS E-5 cameras out of storage and start a crash program to put them into orbit. During 1962, Bob Leeper and Bill Cottrell, Lockheed engineers who worked in the CORONA program, traveled to their company’s classified warehouse to examine the cameras. Finding them in good condition, they arranged their transport to Itek in Boston, where they were reconfigured, tested, and shipped back to California to the Lockheed Advanced Projects Facility, where they would become part of the payload. The E-5 camera was redesignated the KH-6, and the hope was for it to produce images with a resolution of 2 feet.
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On March 18, 1963, the first LANYARD blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base but failed to reach orbit. A May 18, 1963, launch did reach orbit and returned a capsule. Unfortunately, the payload had not been activated, and there were no photographs to settle the debate over Tallinn. Another LANYARD was launched in late July, by which time Scoville was no longer a CIA official.
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On April 25, 1963, Scoville submitted a letter of resignation to McCone, effective June 1 (subsequently extended to June 17). In that letter, he noted that his efforts to establish a viable scientific and technical directorate had resulted “in a continuous series of frustrations in which, with a few exceptions, the working components have resisted any transfer of their responsibilities.” He also observed that although McCone had always supported the basic concept of the Research directorate, other senior agency officials had made it clear they did not, and “no one is willing to face up to the problems of implementing it.” One indication of that lack of nerve was that a recent “apparent decision to transfer OSI [to the DDR] was dropped.”
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Scoville also noted that “during the past year a major part of my activities has also involved joint programs of the Agency and the Department of Defense.” However, “I have never been supported and placed in a position where it was possible to direct this program in the manner it deserves. As a consequence, I found myself continuously in the position of being held responsible for matters which I have had neither the authority nor the means to control.”
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The joint programs Scoville was referring to were conducted under the auspices of a secret three-letter organization—the NRO.

The “NRO” was the National Reconnaissance Office—established through a September 6, 1961, letter from Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric to Allen Dulles and concurred in, on Dulles’s behalf, by Deputy DCI Charles P. Cabell. The letter was the initial result of the desire of Killian, Land, and officials in the new administration, particularly McNamara and Gilpatric, to formalize the management of the space reconnaissance program. Under its terms, the Air Force’s SAMOS and GAMBIT programs, along with CIA’s CORONA, MURAL, ST/POLLY, IDEALIST, and OXCART programs, would become part of a single National Reconnaissance Program (NRP), encompassing space reconnaissance as well as aerial overflight programs. The letter also stipulated joint management of the NRP—via the NRO—by the CIA Deputy Director for Plans (Richard Bissell) and the Under Secretary of the Air Force (Joseph V. Charyk).
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Neither the CIA nor the Air Force was forced to transfer its programs to the new organization, whose central headquarters had only a small staff. The CIA’s CORONA and other reconnaissance programs were still run by the Deputy Directorate for Plans, while SAMOS and GAMBIT were the responsibility of the Air Force Office of Special Projects, which had been established in August 1960 and reported directly to Charyk. The September 6 agreement allowed each organization to manage its reconnaissance projects as part of a single NRP, with a single security system, and each could be called on to assist the other’s programs in areas where it held special capabilities. Thus, in addition to whatever reconnaissance systems it developed or procured, the Air Force would provide launch, tracking, and recovery services. The CIA could be called on to assist with covert contracting and security for individual programs a well as for the NRP as a whole.

Although that arrangement was satisfactory to Dulles and McNamara, the National Security Council’s Special Group, which supervised all U.S.
intelligence activities, would not ratify the agreement, believing that the national reconnaissance effort was too important to entrust to divided management. Under those circumstances, and with Bissell’s departure from the CIA apparently imminent as a result of the Bay of Pigs, Charyk and his staff moved toward concentrating greater authority in the hands of the NRO and its director. On November 22, the NRO staff completed a draft statement of “NRO Functions and Responsibilities,” which suggested the transfer of several, and possibly all, CIA reconnaissance programs to the Air Force. Not long afterward, Charyk went further, advocating the consolidation of all program functions in the NRO “without regard for previous arrangements.” The CIA, he now believed, should not be given responsibility for either research and development or technical management of NRP projects.
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The radical changes Charyk envisioned became the basis for the serial exchange of memos between the NRO and CIA. In the midst of those exchanges, Scoville assumed the role of DDR in February 1962. He certainly reviewed and approved the CIA’s April 19 memo, arguing that covert programs then operated by the CIA should remain the CIA’s responsibility and that others assigned to the CIA by the Secretary of Defense and DCI would be the complete responsibility of the CIA.
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On the evening of April 19, Scoville and Charyk met, a meeting Charyk recalled as “not all that pleasant.” In that meeting and in a subsequent memo, Scoville resisted Charyk’s suggestions that Scoville should serve as deputy director of the NRO, arguing that he should be designated the CIA representative to the NRO. The former position implied subservience of the director; the latter did not. The two men also had differences concerning whether the CIA should have a veto on planning of advanced projects.
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After some additional wrangling, agreement was reached in the form of the May 2, 1962, “Agreement Between the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence on Responsibilities of the National Reconnaissance Office,” signed by McCone and Gilpatric. The agreement, which covered a number of issues, provided for a single Director (the DNRO), a position Gilpatric named Charyk to the next day (which was formally confirmed in a June 14 DOD directive). In addition, the agreement assigned technical management responsibility for all NRP projects to the DNRO, who would be selected by, and be directly responsible to, the Secretary of Defense and the DCI. However, it also specified that, as the CIA had pressed for, the CIA would serve as executive agent
for covert projects under its management and any additional projects assigned to it by the Secretary of Defense and DCI. In the view of an NRO historian, the agreement constituted “a relatively strong policy statement on NRO purposes,” but in other respects it “conceded to the CIA the key points at issue.”
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Round one had gone to Scoville, but it would be only a temporary victory.

In July, following a late May conference at Greenbrier, West Virginia, attended by key NRO and CIA officials—including Charyk and Scov-ille—Charyk issued a formal directive on NRO organization and functions. The memo outlined the NRO structure as consisting of a Director, an NRO Staff, and three program elements—A, B, and C. The NRO Staff, consisting largely of Air Force personnel, had an overt identity—the Office of Space Systems in the office of the Secretary of the Air Force. Program A also had an unclassified cover—the Air Force Office of Special Projects. Program B was the designation given to the CIA reconnaissance activities that were the responsibility of the Office of Special Activities. The Navy’s satellite reconnaissance effort, consisting of the GRAB ferret satellite, developed and operated by the Naval Research Laboratory, became Program C, with the Director of Naval Intelligence heading the program.
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There were some areas where the CIA (Scoville) and NRO (Charyk) were in agreement—among them that responsibility for developing SIGINT satellites belonged to NRO and not NSA. But both the May meeting and the July statement left several important issues unresolved, and the door open for further conflict. In June, Charyk began urging that mission planning, on-orbit target programming, and approval of mission targeting options be centralized at the NRO. Charyk considered such functions to be natural responsibilities of the NRO Staff, but Scoville did not.
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In late June, the PFIAB had advised President Kennedy that the NRO charter needed to be strengthened. After Kennedy endorsed the recommendation, McCone and Gilpatric sat down to discuss the matter, with Gilpatric suggesting that the only way to satisfy the PFIAB was to make the Secretary of Defense the executive agent for both DOD and the CIA aspects of the NRP, as had been proposed earlier in the year.
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However, while Gilpatric and Charyk were pushing in one direction, Scoville was pushing in the other. In late August and early September, Scoville announced or proposed two de facto alterations of the arrangements made earlier. He told Charyk that the CIA would continue to go directly to the Special Group on matters concerning ongoing projects,
which amounted to a rejection of Charyk’s May 22 proclamation that he would be the NRO point of contact with the Special Group, a policy he had reiterated in a subsequent memo to Scoville. In addition, Scoville noted his opposition to Charyk’s decision to have the CIA award covert contracts for programs not under its exclusive control. He argued that it was inherently undesirable for the CIA to “assume the responsibility for covert procurement” for Air Force programs.
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In an August 29 memorandum, Scoville returned to the issue of his role in the NRO, arguing that instead of serving as head of Program B as specified in Charyk’s July 23 memo, the DDR should be officially designated as the Senior CIA Representative. Scoville had already transferred the title of Director, Program B, to OSA head Jack Ledford. Scoville also objected to Charyk’s claim that the DNRO was responsible for determining the assignment of operational control for reconnaissance systems, arguing that the May 2 agreement gave that authority to the Secretary of Defense and DCI.
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Added to disagreements on issues and personality differences was another complicating factor in Scoville’s relationship with Charyk and the NRO—DCI John McCone. Part of the problem was that McCone came to the agency without the conviction that the CIA should be involved in space or aerial reconnaissance. John McMahon recalled that one of Mc- Cone’s first comments was “What are you people doing in the airplane business?” In addition, the new DCI was a good friend of Gilpatric and wanted to avoid a fight with McNamara, at the time the proverbial eight-hundred- pound gorilla of the national security establishment.
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