The Wizards of Langley (28 page)

By mid-June, the intelligence community was working on a “memorandum to holders” of NIE 11-8-68. Such memos were sometimes prepared to update portions of NIEs concerning issues of immediate importance. On June 12, the United States Intelligence Board had agreed to a memorandum suggesting that the Soviet Union’s actions to improve its nuclear forces fell short of an effort to achieve a first-strike capability.
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On Saturday June 13, the day after the USIB meeting, Helms, Abbot Smith, Jack Smith, Duckett, and Brandwein were summoned to a meeting with Kissinger and officials from Defense, State, and the NSC Staff. According to Brandwein, “Kissinger made it pretty plain he was unhappy with it! He kept saying he didn’t want to influence our judgements—but! It was a difficult 3 hours. Kissinger kept saying ‘his most important client’ wanted the facts separated from the judgements and identified as such. He also kept claiming he wasn’t a technical man, neither was his client—but the ‘facts’ are the technical details.”
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Kissinger asked that the memorandum be rewritten to provide more clarification of some points and additional discussion pro and con about the MRV-MIRV issue, including more evidence of the judgment that the SS-9 was not MIRVed. Smith rewrote the draft with assistance from several FMSAC staffers as well as Brandwein, who rewrote the sections on “Is it a MIRV?” and the SS-9 range, but did not change the conclusion.
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Then, on June 19, Nixon told a press conference that in proposing Safeguard, he did so “on intelligence information at that time,” and since that time, “new intelligence . . . with regard to Soviet success in testing multiple reentry vehicles . . . has convinced me that Safeguard is even more important.”
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Meanwhile, Duckett had been assigned to help Kissinger understand the technical issues involved. Kissinger referred to Duckett as “Profes
sor” because of his ability to explain technical matters in understandable terms, and Duckett later recalled the relationship:

On June 23, at a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Helms and Melvin Laird sat side by side. Helms noted that since he had last briefed the committee, the Soviets had conducted two additional long-range tests of the SS-9, and that “the intelligence community is in agreement that vehicles in these tests were not independently guided.”
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Laird, however, pointed to the recent SS-9 tests and argued that although the data were not conclusive, they were consistent with a MIRV capability. In addition, he noted that the level of deployment was not tapering off. He also claimed that there were no differences with regard to the meaning of the intelligence data, only an institutional difference, with the Defense Department planning for the worst case.
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But the battle continued behind the scenes. Brandwein addressed the President’s Science Advisory Committee on June 25 and gave a two-hour briefing on the SS-9, covering accuracy, range, and whether it was MIRVed. After the FMSAC director presented both sides of the argument, PSAC member Richard Latter, Brandwein wrote, “went on to a blackboard lecture to tell them how
his
calculations showed SS-9 accuracy had improved. I didn’t think he convinced the others.”
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With the issue still before the Senate, and no clear winner, Duckett prepared a July 17 briefing that, he would recall, was “as objective as I know how to do a paper.” With only senators allowed on the floor, Henry Jackson of Washington read the paper. Several weeks later, on August 5, Foster addressed a House subcommittee in closed session. He acknowledged that the evidence did not prove without question that the SS-9 was MIRVed but argued that “it very strongly indicates that it is a MIRV.”
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On August 6, the attempt to stop Safeguard or limit it to a research and development program failed. Vice-President Spiro Agnew broke a fifty-fifty Senate tie in favor of the program. Brandwein later observed that
“we lost that battle . . . I mean, I was convinced that the SS-9 was not MIRVed, was not a first-strike weapon, but we just couldn’t talk people into it.”
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One of ORD’s most successful projects in the late 1960s that aided U.S. monitoring of launches from the Shuangchengzi missile test complex (SCMC) was the CHECKROTE over-the-horizon radar. Installation of CHECKROTE on Taiwan began in May 1965, and operations started on August 1, 1966.
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The United States suspected that the PRC was testing medium- or possibly intermediate-range missiles at the complex, making it necessary to design the radar to detect the missile skin rather than the enhanced image. Thus, the radar had to be three times more sensitive than EARTHLING. CHECKROTE’s format was patterned after EARTHLING’s, but improved performance was obtained by increasing its power and antenna performance. CHECKROTE’s range resolution was also improved, to twenty times better than EARTHLING’s—an improvement that was crucial to the acquisition of missile trajectory information.
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The first missile detections from Shuangchengzi were made on December 5, 1966. Through September 1968, CHECKROTE identified thirty-eight suspected missile launches—three in 1966, twenty-nine in 1967, and six in 1968. Among the missiles being tested at the time was the CSS-2 intermediate-range missile, with a range of 1,735 miles; it became “the backbone of the Chinese missile force.” Analysts studied the detected signatures to determine if they were consistent with characteristics of missiles expected to be launched from SCMC and with expected radar performance. The conclusion was that the great majority of the signatures collected were bona fide detections. By spring 1969, a major upgrade of the target-identification capabilities of CHECKROTE was in progress.
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In October 1966, Richard Lee Stallings, a senior official of the Office of ELINT, arrived in Australia to oversee the construction of the RHYOLITE ground station at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs in central Australia. Earlier, Stallings had been stationed in West Germany, where he was responsible for management of OEL’s efforts in that country and the coordination of the CIA’s SIGINT activities with those of the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND). Stallings remained in Canberra until final arrangements for establishment of the station had been made, then moved to Alice Springs toward the end of January 1967.
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OEL’s Ground Systems Division operated the station on behalf of RHYOLITE’s “owner”—the Office of Special Projects. Back in Washington, John McMahon, who had become deputy director of OSP, directed the construction effort. As he put it, simply and emphatically, many years later, “I built Pine Gap.”
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Before the end of 1968, the first two radomes (radar domes), made of Perspex and mounted on concrete structures, had been built. The radomes, about 110 feet and 70 feet, respectively, protected the enclosed antenna against dust, wind, and the prying cameras of Soviet spy satellites. Construction of the third and fourth radomes apparently began in November 1968; they were completed in mid-1969. In early December 1968, with initial construction of the facility completed, Stallings was succeeded by Harry E. Fitzwater, who would remain at the station until 1972.
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By the time Stallings departed, the Air Force’s “alternative” to RHYOLITE had already made it into space. Indeed, the first CANYON launch attracted the attention of the
New York Times
’s John Noble Wilford. His August 7, 1968, article, “A Secret Payload Is Orbited by U.S.,” noted that the satellite, launched from Cape Kennedy on an Atlas- Agena rocket, carried a “super-secret payload.” In that pre-Watergate era, launch officials told inquisitive reporters, “You wouldn’t want to know what’s on that bird. It’s that secret.” The secrecy resulted in the first closed launch from the Cape since 1963. The erroneous belief persisted for two decades afterward that the CANYON launches were part of Program 949, a program to detect missile launches via the heat emitted by the missiles.
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Ultimately, seven CANYON spacecraft, bearing the numerical designations 7501 through 7507, were orbited, the second on April 12, 1969. Six were successful. Each CANYON spacecraft transmitted its intercepted
material to a ground station at Bad Aibling, Germany.* Approximately two months after the launch of 7502, another Atlas-Agena D blasted off from Cape Kennedy. This time, rather than placing a spacecraft in an approximately 20,000- by 24,000-mile orbit with a 9.9-degree inclination, the rocket sent the first RHYOLITE, 7601, into geostationary orbit above the equator just south of Borneo. From that location, it could intercept the telemetry signals from solid-fueled missiles fired from Plesetsk, as well as monitor SLBMs fired from the White Sea. Once RHYOLITE was in orbit, its antenna, about sixty to seventy feet in diameter, was unfurled, and after a period of testing, it began operations. Because of the similarities between the CANYON and RHYOLITE launches, which employed Atlas- Agena Ds and were launched from Cape Kennedy into high-altitude orbits, outside observers also believed 7601 to be a Program 949 satellite.
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The primary mission of “Bird 1,” as Pine Gap personnel called 7601, was to intercept the telemetry from Soviet missile tests. But it was soon discovered that 7601 also had a significant capability against communications in the VHF and UHF bands, and it was used to monitor both the Indo-Pakistani War in 1971 and the Vietnam theater.
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For part of 1969, it seemed that RHYOLITE might be the only one of Wheelon’s satellite programs that would make it off the drawing board and onto the launchpad. The HEXAGON/KH-9 program was abruptly canceled. The budget crunch, created by the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, threatened to end the HEXAGON program before it reached the launch stage.
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As a substitute, plans code-named HIGHER BOY were developed to put some KH-8/GAMBIT spacecraft into an area surveillance orbit. Such ad hoc substitutions were not acceptable to those running the reconnaissance program. In an attempt to restart the flow of funds, Roland Inlow, chairman of the Committee on Imagery Requirements and Exploitation (which had replaced the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance in 1967), was sent to talk to James Schlesinger, who was responsible for national security
programs at the Bureau of the Budget. Inlow explained that the KH-9 was essential to arms control verification, and the money began to flow again.
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One last delay occurred in late 1970 as the spacecraft was being prepared for a January launch. A minor change, involving a single resistor, was ordered on paper but never actually made. The result was catastrophic damage to the film supply during thermal tests. Preparations then were begun to make the second HEXAGON vehicle the first to fly.
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The spacecraft lifted off from a Vandenberg AFB launchpad on June 15, 1971, propelled into space by a Titan 3D with 3 million pounds of thrust. The newest addition to the U.S. reconnaissance arsenal was a 30,000-pound cylinder, forty feet long and ten feet in diameter. Its size enabled it to host a variety of other projects. Thus, the new-generation surveillance satellites often carried antennae for SIGINT collection and relaying messages from U.S. covert agents in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The additional missions often led NRO to keep the spacecraft in orbit even after all the film had been returned to earth. HEXAGON launches also often carried a second payload, a ferret spacecraft designated 989 and designed to detect and record the signals from Soviet and other radar systems.
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The camera system, designated the KH-9, consisted of two cameras with 60-inch lenses. The cameras could operate individually or be employed to obtain overlapping photos of a target—which could then be used with a stereoscope to extract additional information about a target’s dimensions. In addition, the cameras could produce images covering a much wider area than the KH-4B but with a resolution of two feet, almost as good as the eighteen-inch resolution of the KH-7. Whereas the KH-4B camera system had a swath width of 40-by-180 miles, the KH-9 system was twice that—80-by-360 miles; the result was a fourfold increase in the territory that could be covered by a single photo. And whereas the KH-4B returned two film capsules, the KH-9 returned four.
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The KH-9 represented a major advance in U.S. reconnaissance capabilities. The greater film capacity meant longer lifetimes, and in normal circumstances, film could be returned as frequently as with the KH-4B. Thus, in the early days of the program, the KH-9 returned film capsules every three or four days. In emergencies, an incomplete reel could be returned without drastic damage to the overall mission. But most important, the tremendous swath width of the KH-9 meant an ability to conduct true wide-area searches to find new missile fields, test ranges, and nuclear facilities. It also meant that a greater number of requests for photography could be accommodated because of the ability to incorporate a wider area in a single scene. Thus, lower-priority targets had a better chance of being photographed.
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