CHAPTER 12
Dawn of the Information Age
“THINGS FALL APART; the center cannot hold.”
Yeats was concerned about the disintegration of Europe when he wrote those lines, but the rough beast he feared in the 1920s was a teddy bear when compared to the nuclear monster straining its leash a generation later. As the Soviets achieved nuclear parity with the West, as those weapons metastasized to the extremities of the superpowers, the maintenance of nuclear control from the political center almost slipped away. It was advances in communication technology that kept the nuclear weapons of the United States, its adversaries, and its allies under tight control during those most dangerous of times.
But communication technology did more than that. The advent of digital, high-speed, and global communications allowed the U.S. to decentralize control of its forces, replace armor with information, and shift the military odds by orders of magnitude. In earlier times, military theory held that a well-entrenched defender, enjoying internal lines of communication, held a three-to-one advantage over any attacker besieging his position. That is what Saddam Hussein thought as he viewed the world from his palaces in Baghdad. But the information revolution changed all that. With instant access to an unlimited supply of real-time information, the odds have shifted to favor the informationadvantaged. They now favor an attacker who holds the high ground of information superiority by more than a hundred to one.
The information revolution had a third even more profound impact on the Cold War—it destabilized the Soviet system. Copying machines, facsimiles, personal computers, and the Internet incapacitated the iron hand of the communist state. As the West began to speak directly to the Soviet people, and as those people spoke more freely among themselves, the Soviet government simply drowned in a flood of uncontrolled information. The Soviet general staff might keep control of its nukes, but the nomenklatura could not retain its hold on political power.
LOOSE NUKES IN EUROPE
By the end of the 1960s, in preparing to defend NATO from the overwhelming armor and artillery of the Red Army, the U.S. had forward-based thousands of nuclear weapons throughout Western Europe. Some were kept in bunkers, adjacent to the NATO–Warsaw Pact borders and along the expected routes of Soviet advance. Others were held within air bases belonging to our NATO allies. Many of these were subkiloton atomic demolition munitions, known as “backpack bombs,” for placement near bridges and other chokepoints. There were nuclear artillery shells and missile warheads, ready for bombardment of the Soviet front lines. And at the NATO airbases, there were mini-H-bombs, for delivery to the Soviet invader’s rear by tactical aircraft.
Each weapon was capable of inflicting the horrors of Hiroshima on every crossroad in Europe. Together they could stop any Soviet rush into Western Europe. Never mind that the residue would be a glowing waste-land, or that the Soviets were armed with similar nukes, gases, and bacteriological weapons of unimagined horror. These NATO nuclear miniweapons were to be delivered by the jeeps, guns, rockets, and airplanes of allied host countries. The nukes themselves were kept under U.S. lock and key. In theory, they were to be released only upon the say-so of the American President.
All that seemed like a sound arrangement until the spring of 1974, when an armed quarrel broke out between some of our partners. Only their common fear of the Soviet threat had brought them into the NATO alliance in the first place. With the outbreak of those hostilities, it occurred to the American Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, to ask the obvious questions: The U.S. stores nuclear weapons within NATO countries, does it not? Who guards them? How well? What if those people decide they want to go nuclear in their quarrel, to seize and use the weapons we have stored there? What if . . . ?
Earlier that year I joined the staff of the Secretary of Defense as his Director of Telecommunications and Command and Control Systems. That title was cumbersome and new, as the Pentagon was only reluctantly entering the information age. Telstar, the first experimental communications satellite, was launched only six years before. The new global communications links, such as the Defense Satellite Communication System, were held suspect by overseas military commanders who did not want microscopic supervision from their superiors in Washington. Digital computers were still large boxes of transistors, stand-alone monuments to modern technology. Their purchase and operation within the Department of Defense was funded and supervised by the Pentagon’s chief financial officer, since all were deemed to be glorified bookkeeping machines. “Voice message systems” were analog telephones, generally unencrypted and operated by the individual services for their own needs. Only with great effort had a Defense Communications Agency been created and imposed on the services as a systems engineer. Signals intelligence was the province of the National Security Agency, with oversight provided by an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. An envisioned World Wide Military Command and Control System existed only in the minds of a few.
I was to lay out a road map for assembling all of these pieces into an integrated system. It was in that capacity that Secretary Schlesinger turned to me, asking if he could talk to the U.S. officers holding the keys to our nukes within the NATO countries. Were they safe and secure? It seemed a reasonable question, but the answer opened a lot of eyes. I found that many of the NATO-based U.S. nuclear weapons were stored in locked bunkers further protected by double rings of barbed wire. A junior U.S. officer on site, often a newly minted lieutenant from West Point, held the keys and the passwords. At each such site that officer was supported by a handful of enlisted men equipped with small arms. At the major air bases there was some defense in depth; a more senior U.S. officer, usually a USAF major, was in charge of nuclear weapons security. But outside all the barbed wire, at all the bases large and small, the serious guarding was done by the locals. They were the ones ready for a serious firefight with Soviet invaders or infiltrated Spetsnatz teams. But given the sudden eruption of hostilities within the alliance, this arrangement gave us pause. What if our guards became our assailants?
To talk to the U.S. officer in charge of any such overseas enclosure, the Secretary of Defense could not simply dial 1-800-USNUKES. In 1974 the command link to the U.S. nuclear bunkers in Europe ran from the Pentagon via submarine cable to the U.S. commander in Europe, located outside Brussels. From there, communication was via the Cemetery Net, an unencrypted high frequency (“short wave”) voice link of dubious quality, operating at the mercy of atmospheric and man-made disturbances. It was not designed to accommodate a Secretary of Defense in Washington inquiring of a junior officer in the mountains of a NATO ally about his well-being. It was there to deliver the President’s release authority—to go to war.
The conversations with remote bunkers were difficult, but they confirmed that the lieutenants were there, on duty. They still had their keys. The guards were still facing outward, guarding, not attacking. At an Air Force base things got a little dicier, however. The local Army troops outside the fence wanted in. Their Air Force countrymen inside wanted them kept out. The nukes on alert aircraft were hastily returned to bunkers as the opposing commanders parleyed under a white flag. Soon both sides went off to dinner, but through it all we held our breath.
Within a few weeks the crisis passed, but back in the United States the lessons were unmistakable. The U.S. government began to take the deployment of mobile satellite ground terminals seriously. The National Security Agency moved to exploit the new digital technology, devising encryption schemes and compact hardware to accommodate secure communications worldwide. The atomic energy people improved the safety and lockout systems on our nuclear weapons. By the end of 1976 all U.S. tactical nuclear weapons were equipped with PALs. 37 But while these changes were in process, the control of nukes remained a dicey game. It was the integrity of the troops on both sides of the Iron Curtain that held things together.
LIMITED NUCLEAR OPTIONS
James Schlesinger was, and is, a most remarkable man. He is arrogant, with a great deal to be arrogant about. He is bright, with an open and inquiring mind, but any proponent of new ideas had best be prepared for a maelstrom of questions. As the nation’s twelfth Secretary of Defense, Schlesinger spent little time introspecting on the nature of the enemy. To him, communism was a treacherous, cruel, and implacable world movement that needed to be defeated, not accommodated.
Secretary Schlesinger was uniquely qualified for his job, having served at RAND, a military think tank in California, and then in the new Nixon administration’s Office of Management and Budget. From there he moved to the chairmanship of the Atomic Energy Commission; became Director of Central Intelligence; then moved to Defense when the man nominated and confirmed as Secretary of Defense for Nixon’s second term, Eliot Richardson, moved on to the Justice Department and the Watergate sinkhole.
With his arrival at Defense in the spring of 1973, Schlesinger inherited Deputy Secretary Bill Clements. A drilling contractor from Texas who served on the Defense Blue Ribbon panel during the first Nixon term, Clements was as structured and business-oriented as Schlesinger was disorganized and academic. They came to detest each other, but in my opinion, they formed the best Secretary and Deputy Secretary team in the history of the Pentagon.
Schlesinger dealt with the big picture, rebuilding America’s post-Vietnam defense policies with clarity and focus. Clements was a straight shooter from Texas who ran the Pentagon with an iron hand. He introduced reforms into the acquisition of weapons; the modern cruise missile was his personal creation. He overhauled the education and training of young officers, and welcomed women into the military academies. He imposed order on the World Wide Military Command and Control System, and through it all, he conserved resources starkly limited by the post-Vietnam Watergate Congress.
Schlesinger was not as orderly, nor was he straightforward. He liked to freelance. One of his most bizarre statements, in the aftermath of Nixon’s presidential resignation, was a claim that he, Schlesinger, had instructed the military to make no unusual moves at the request of the President (and Commander in Chief ) as his days in office drew to a forced close. The implication was clear: a potential coup was in the air. General George Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, confirmed to me that he received no such instructions, and that if he had, he would have laughed them off. He repeated that denial in October 1974 at a public appearance at Duke University.
Air Force General Brown was a unique and capable chairman. He paid his dues over Ploesti during World War II. His career progressed through the operational Air Force, culminating in his command of the U.S. Air Forces in Vietnam. He brought the lessons learned home to the Air Force Systems Command, where the post-Vietnam generation of aircraft were just taking shape. He became Chief of Staff of the USAF in 1973, the first officer with major weapons system acquisition experience to make that grade. Brown became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on July 1, 1974, just as the final scenes from Watergate were being played out. As July turned into August, he called his senior commanders to confirm that they would tell him of any unusual back-channel orders from the civilian leadership, but there was never any evidence of irrational presidential behavior, nor did Schlesinger ever give Brown warnings of such. During the Ford years, Chairman Brown built a unique and solid relationship with Deputy Defense Secretary Clements. Together, these two men guided—and if necessary dragged— the armed services of the United States into the information age.
Gerald Ford could not deal with Schlesinger’s arrogance. He sent Donald Rumsfeld to replace him at the Pentagon once he’d settled into the presidency. But during the dark Watergate and early post-Vietnam years, Jim Schlesinger and his indispensable military assistant, Major General John Wickham, held the Pentagon fort with tenacity.
At the beginning of his tour, Schlesinger faced a serious and dangerous challenge to American security. Distracted by Vietnam, the United States had allowed the Soviet Union to move into a position of strategic nuclear superiority, at least as measured by deliverable nuclear payload. With the massive deployment of SS-18 rockets, and with their nuclear-powered submarine fleet finally reaching numerical, though not technical, parity, the Soviets were turning their attention to Western Europe.
In that theater of operations, the U.S. had deployed massive nuclear firepower. Its purpose was to offset those components of the Red Army still in place throughout Eastern Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia since the end of World War II. The American weapons, known as Forward Based Systems, were mainly USAF fighter-bombers carrying nuclear weapons. These aircraft were taken seriously by the Soviets, especially after their impressive performance in Vietnam, defending the Marine outpost at Khe Sanh, fourteen miles south of the DMZ, during a February 1968 siege. The Soviets had not modernized their initial European deployment of medium range rockets in twenty years. Those now-antique SS-4s and SS-5s were liquid-fueled and slow to react, stored out in the open on unprotected launch pads in groups of four. They were sitting ducks for American airpower. As the U.S. Forward Based Systems continued to multiply, they were augmented by the introduction of a British and French nuclear capability in the air and at sea.
At the time of the first Strategic Arms Limitation agreement, signed in 1972, Soviet negotiators tried to include within the treaty the American Forward Based Systems, but they failed to do so. After the signing of those accords, the Soviets began testing a whole new family of rockets, such as the SS-16. Intelligence sources indicated that the upper two stages of that system were being readied for use as a mobile 2,400-mile intermediate range system. Flight testing of the resulting SS-20 (RSD-10) began in 1974.
As Soviet strategic nuclear firepower grew, coming to match the U.S. in the early 1970s, our NATO allies were growing nervous about the matter of “decoupling.” In the event of a conventional war in Europe, would the U.S. really come to the defense of its NATO allies with a full nuclear broadside? Would Americans really risk New York and Washington in order to save Bonn and Paris? Skeptics had their doubts. It was the view of previous administrations, Secretary of Defense McNamara in particular, that there could be no “limited” use of nuclear weapons; first use of a nuke would uncork the genie’s bottle. Escalation would be instantaneous because, as in the old Wild West, the price of being the last to shoot was too high. In McNamara’s eyes, planning for limited nuclear use was of dubious value, although “Flexible Response” might offer one last firebreak before the cataclysm.
The administration that followed took Flexible Response to a different conclusion. Given the growth in numbers and the catastrophic implications of a full nuclear exchange, Nixon, Kissinger, and Schlesinger concluded that the United States had to at least try to keep any nuclear conflict localized. Such efforts might not succeed, but it would be irresponsible not to try. The U.S. had to be able to respond to a Soviet invasion of Europe with less than a full, civilization-ending salvo.
In 1973 the Nixon administration developed the doctrine of Limited Nuclear Options (LNOs). These plans were to be subsets of the overall nuclear war plan, designed to provide a limited nuclear response without degrading overall U.S. military capabilities. This reordering of nuclear war plans was dictated by the politics of Europe, but it was made possible by advances in U.S. technology. The introduction of multiple independently targetable reentery vehicles (MIRVs) into the missile forces gave the targeteers more options, easing the problem of allocating scarce resources among many targets. The advent of reliable computers made real-time retargeting a possibility. Not only could the strategic nuclear forces reallocate assets after an LNO, they could update the master plan daily as specific targets moved and new ones were discovered.
LNOs would give the United States the ability to strike only a few (or a few hundred) military targets far from Moscow. Or the U.S. could attack the electrical power grid or the transportation system of the Soviet Union without destroying its nerve center in Moscow. Protection of the latter was important if we were to negotiate an end to a fast-moving nuclear crisis. Although some LNO targets were civil in nature, these became known as “counterforce” attacks. The civilian/industrial “countervalue” targets—the nation’s cities and lesser population centers— were to await developments, perhaps to be struck a day or two later if things were not working out.
These plans for Limited Nuclear Options were formalized in President Nixon’s NSDD-242, signed in January 1974. They became known as the Schlesinger Doctrine. This targeting scheme was a laudable effort to control the nuclear genie, but the thought of “just a few hundred” nuclear strikes boggles the mind of anyone who has seen a nuclear device go off. And the concept imposed incredible demands on the nation’s emergency communications systems. It is one thing for the President to authorize an all-out response as a nuclear attack on the U.S. unfolds. For that purpose a few dedicated telephone and radio links will do. It is quite another thing to try to operate amidst a “limited” nuclear war, for one must assume the Soviets would not sit idly by while the U.S. bombarded the edges of their empire. Directing the operations of our remaining submarines at sea, a few surviving bombers, and the civil recovery of a burning U.S.—all from an orbiting aircraft after big pieces of the American infrastructure have been blown away—imposed staggering requirements on any communication system. And the leadership needed the ability to stop an LNO already under way if negotiations stabilized the crisis or brought it to an end.
A fleet of airborne relays, a network of buried communication lines, a galaxy of hardened communications satellites and secure communication protocols would be needed if the U.S. was to keep its remaining nuclear weapons on a tight leash. That was the job put before me in 1974 as I assumed responsibility for defense telecommunications.
TALKING TO SAIGON
Events in Saigon and then the Gulf of Thailand during the late spring of 1975 brought America’s clashing communications cultures into sharp focus. The military was stuck with, and enamored of, old-world, point-to-point “telephone” communications. Thousands of civilians in Saigon and dozens of airmen and marines in southern Cambodia paid the price. When those crises were over, a clear-eyed Deputy Secretary of Defense directed a resentful military to enter the satellite age without delay.
It all started in 1973, when the U.S. withdrew its forces from Vietnam. We promised to look after our friends there if the residual Republic of South Vietnam were to collapse, but that collapse came too fast. In April 1975 the North began its spring offensive. The South Vietnamese forces in the central highlands collapsed and fled. On April 29, Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport came under attack. Over 150 North Vietnamese rockets smashed into the facility, killing, among others, two U.S. Marines and destroying several U.S. aircraft.
Tan Son Nhut was gone; the American ambassador had dallied while it was still serviceable. He had not allowed an efficient evacuation of America’s friends and supporters while he had the chance. Now a sea of humanity began to implode onto the American embassy in downtown Saigon. The only evacuation, for a lucky few, would be aboard the airborne lifeboats operated by the U.S. Marines. As the Pentagon’s Director of Telecommunications, I listened in on the events of April 30, 1975, from my vantage point in the National Military Command Center.
The Marine helicopters were directed from a command post aboard a flagship offshore. They communicated with each other by HF (shortwave) radio. We could only listen in horror as the sergeant in charge of the embassy rooftop described the mob. They were battering at the embassy compound’s gates as he loaded one helicopter after another with desperate Vietnamese officers, CIA informers, and U.S. civilians fortunate enough to have made it into the embassy. The numbers never added up; additional refugees seemed to make it to the rooftop by unknown routes.
“Fourteen loaded and lifting off, thirty-seven to go,” the sergeant would report. Then, “Another fourteen away, twenty-eight to go.” He described the North Vietnamese tanks rolling down the boulevards toward him. He asked permission to drop grenades down the embassy stairwell, to keep the mobs away from his helipad. In so doing, he would be killing families who had risked their all to support the U.S. in Vietnam.
And then a voice from the command post offshore: “This had better be your last load, Sergeant. Pull your men out.”
With one last burst of grenades and gunfire, a dozen Marines left the embassy’s rooftop, and the U.S. presence in Vietnam ended.
President Gerald Ford was listening to the same conversations in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. He later told me of his grief as that sad chapter of American history came to an end.
We in Washington were but bystanders to that evacuation. There were two flagships in the South China Sea off Saigon that day. For whatever reason, the Navy brass responsible for the evacuation gathered on the ship with no satellite terminal. Captains at sea and admirals commanding fleets have a long tradition of operating on their own once they leave port. A ship with a satellite terminal might be seen as a break from that tradition. The officers evacuating Saigon in April 1975 might not have wanted much more “help” from Washington. Perhaps they had received enough during the previous decade.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Bill Clements was outraged by the lack of full-bandwidth communication with those officers, and he was willing to take action. Within days of the evacuation from Saigon, Clements signed a Program Decision Memorandum calling for the purchase and installation of satellite terminals throughout the U.S. Navy.
The price of telephonic parochialism became more focused two weeks later when the Mayaguez,a U.S.-registered freighter, was seized by Cambodians off the coast of Koh Tang Island. As this crisis unfolded, U.S. Navy “back-channel” communications gave the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington a somewhat benign view of what was going on. That was because his ships were on the wrong side of the island. The Acting Chairman of the JCS, an Air Force general, was getting a more garbled view from his airborne command posts and helicopters; they were under attack. A rescue plan was adopted that left eighteen American servicemen dead, fifty wounded.
The events at Koh Tang Island made it clear that instantaneous, global, and secure satellite communication was essential. To assure connectivity to the highest levels of government, we directed the Air Force to put satellite terminals on the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, the Boeing 747s then being purchased and outfitted for use by the President or his designated successor in time of crisis. Henceforth, be it evacuations or nuclear confrontations, the White House could be fully involved if it so desired.
DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY, SECURE COMMUNICATIONS, AND THE INTERNET
Governments have found it possible to encrypt teletype communications. At their core, such schemes involve replacing one letter or word in a message with some other, a process known as encoding, then scrambling the recipe that effects this conversion (encryption). Sometimes those encryptions are broken, the most famous example being the British cracking of Germany’s Enigma system during World War II. With the use of onetime pads, 38 however, teletype communications can be protected. Even so, the slow speed and extensive support needed made teletype communication useful principally between embassies and capitals, between headquarters and command posts, and with ships at sea. It is not feasible for troops in combat to use teletype. They must communicate in real time, with the opportunity for conversational give-and-take, under adverse circumstances, with equipment they can put in their pockets or on their backs. Voice circuits are the only practical choice. In earlier wars, when such voice communication was done by means of analog field radios, it was virtually impossible to encrypt those communications. Intercepts by an enemy often led to ambush, or worse.
Some point-to-point telephone users at one time employed voice “scramblers.” These devices chop the original analog voice signal into time-segmented pieces, then rearrange them for transmission out of order. The signal is reassembled by a receiver holding the reassembly recipe. The resulting voice quality is terrible, and scramblers can be defeated within seconds by a sophisticated computational eavesdropper. At best, scramblers remain useful only in civilian life for those wanting a modest degree of privacy in their personal and business affairs.
Another approach to analog encryption was the use of Native American Indians as radiomen during World War II. Their Navaho and other tongues baffled the Japanese in the Pacific, but by the time of Vietnam, we needed more modern and secure voice communications.
The problem got worse when individual communication links were bundled together into microwave channels. At the end of World War II, “retail” communications were carried out predominantly by copper wires and HF radio links. All that changed with the advent of microwave (upper megahertz) communications. With microwave, voice or teletype channels could be bundled, then transmitted for long distance at high speed. The reader has seen these microwave towers and dishes atop buildings in most big cities. With the coming of microwave in the U.S. and USSR, huge amounts of information could be shipped around town or across the country efficiently. But the open broadcast nature of such systems offered an appetizing target to the Soviet KGB.
When I arrived at the Pentagon, I found a first-class microwave collection scheme at work on the rooftop of the Soviet Embassy on Sixteenth Street in Washington. The Soviets were listening in to the local telephone traffic in D.C., for microwave had become the most efficient way for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company to expand its local service. The Soviets sorted the significant calls from the trivia by identifying the number called and the instrument doing the calling. While our high government officials were careful not to discuss classified material over the phone, the mere fact that the Secretary of Defense and his staff were working all night, and on what, was a significant indicator to the Soviet intelligence service.
The solution was the immediate rerouting of all critical circuits in Washington, New York, and San Francisco, the three cities where the Soviet Union had embassies or consulates, to underground coaxial cable. This protection included defense contractor and scientific laboratory circuits as well as government lines. When our work was done, the Soviets probably had to go back to their old collection system, already employed in London: sending out an agent every few hours to see which office lights were on in Whitehall.
Coaxial cables were only a patch on the challenge of secure communications, however. The seeds of a real solution had germinated a few years before. In 1968, Robert Noyce left Fairchild Semiconductor to cofound a firm to be known as Intel. At the same time, Jack Kirby, a scientist at Texas Instruments, was working on small, handheld computers. In 1969, Noyce and Kirby, working independently, hit upon the idea of putting a molecular transistor onto a wafer of silicon. Thus was born the monolithic integrated circuit, in time to be known simply as the “microchip.” Within a few years this technology formed the basis of the first microcomputers. High-speed digital operations were now possible.
Microchips came to revolutionize defense, consumer electronics, and eventually the entire world’s economy. One of the first uses of microcomputers, however, was to encode the human voice into a digital stream. Once digitized, those signals could then be encrypted. During the mid-1970s, I oversaw deployment of the first secure voice telephone systems to key offices. They were huge, bulky cabinets, and someone had to come change the encryption scheme manually every day. But by the time of the Cold War’s denouement, commanders could speak with their troops, ships could talk to shore, and bureaucrats could talk to their counterparts overseas without fear of eavesdropping. Today, American STU-3 secure phone sets are everywhere. Secure cell phones carry an encryption package that looks like a long-life battery.
And as this new high-speed digital technology began to spread, a handful of creative minds hit upon the idea of using it to link together the large, mainframe computers then standing alone at the leading universities and research centers in the United States. Since the original system architecture was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the resulting scheme came to be known as the ARPANET. It was first publicly demonstrated in 1972 at a computer conference. While the net’s ability to share research files at widely separated institutions was impressive, it was the introduction of electronic mail that stole the show. The concepts of packet switching, transmission protocols, and an overall architecture, matched to the emerging microchip and minicomputer hardware, gave birth to a whole new world: the Internet.
INTELLIGENCE SATELLITES
In August 1960, America’s first photoreconnaissance satellite achieved orbit, took some pictures, and returned the film negatives to earth by means of a reentry capsule. That system, known as Corona,was archaic by today’s standards, but at the time, it constituted a real breakthrough. On its first operational flight, Corona provided about half as much photographic coverage of the Soviet Union as all the previous U-2 flights put together. With the success of subsequent flights, President Eisenhower and his key advisers, who earlier knew there was no bomber gap, could see that there was no missile gap either. They could plan the nation’s defense based on facts, not fear.
The development of that first reconnaissance satellite was complicated not only by technology, but by politics and management challenges as well. The CIA provided the cameras and directed the project, while the Air Force provided, launched, operated, and recovered the satellite. In 1961 a most secret organization was created to manage all of the American overhead reconnaissance programs. It was to be known as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and at first it was led by Richard Bissell, the CIA Deputy Director for Plans, and by Joe Charyk, Undersecretary of the Air Force. In their management of the NRO, Bissell and Charyk reported to the Deputy Secretary of Defense in connection with operations and to the Director of Central Intelligence for targeting requirements. This management scheme was cumbersome, and for a while it got worse, but in time a single Director of the NRO, usually the Undersecretary of the Air Force, with a CIA Deputy Director, managed the NRO under the guidance of a joint DoD-CIA executive committee.
For many years the NRO operated that way, with streamlined management and appropriations flowing directly from Congress, its money “fenced” so the services and other defense agencies could not poach on the NRO’s turf. The very existence of this organization was classified because of the sensibilities of the nations overflown and photographed by its reconnaissance spacecraft.
As the 1950s drew to a close, there was no clear international law or precedent as to the height limits on national sovereignty. Under international aerial navigation treaties, each nation claimed the airspace over its lands. The shootdown of America’s U-2, flying at 70,000 feet over
Russia, underscored that nation’s rights to the edges of the atmosphere. But how about outer space? Surely each nation’s sovereignty did not extend all the way to the moon.
Nikita Khrushchev, fortunately, and perhaps inadvertently, established the precedent for “Freedom of Space” in October 1957 with the launch of Sputnik I. Although he had railed at the Americans about the U-2’s overflights of Russia, he felt free to fly his satellites over the U.S. and numerous other states.
The precedent made sense, of course, because satellites must orbit the earth in the grip of gravity; they do not maneuver within its atmosphere. Even so, the early U.S. and Soviet reconnaissance satellite flights triggered concerns about overflight rights in space. The fact that the United States was conducting such flights, the name of the territories they overflew, and the privacies thus invaded, were to be kept as dark secrets for decades.
During the years that followed, Corona gave way to more sophisticated optical systems and better recovery techniques. Resolution improved to the point where one could see the stripes on the Pentagon’s parking lot. The U.S. government felt comfortable with early Strategic Arms Limitation agreements because our reconnaissance satellites could check the facts. We knew what the Soviets were doing; we could tell if they were complying with the terms of previous treaties. Satellites also came to be used for electronic surveillance: eavesdropping and establishing an electronic order of battle. These systems remain shrouded in the darkest of secrecy even today, because we do not want the bad guys, whoever they now may be, to know how well we can hear them. And the political sensibilities still persist. Today, national leaders know we orbit over their countries, but at times they do not like having to admit it.
In 1976, I assumed responsibility for the NRO as its sixth director at a time when I also was serving as Secretary of the Air Force. My achievements were not flashy; they were to keep the operational systems on track during the post-Vietnam years and to keep delivering the imaging and signals intelligence product as we negotiated follow-up treaties. But I also was to initiate service from a fundamentally new type of electro-optical reconnaissance satellite.
Early in the decade the wise men of science had asked why we continued to recover photographic film. Why could we not transmit images directly from space in near real time? This would be important in times of crisis. The answer lay in the arcane fields of optics, sensors, and satellite communications. Massive light-sensitive diodes capable of producing electro-optical digital images with exceptional resolution were developed for this spacecraft. The resulting data would be distributed rapidly to earth via wide bandwidth channels and relay satellites. The resulting images would be printed out, using laser beams and huge rolls of film.
All of this came to fruition on my watch as Director of the NRO. The process came to be known as “near real time imaging,” near real time because it took a few minutes to collect the images from space and to display them on earth. Not quite instant TV from space, but close. All of this technology was packaged in a satellite the size of a Grey-hound bus.
The first launch of the electro-optical imaging satellite took place on December 19, 1976. The flight was a complete success. Crystal-clear images were delivered to President Carter on his first day in the White House, in January 1977. In connection with that event, we honored Dr. Edwin Land, an original advocate of this system and many other breakthroughs in U.S. intelligence collection, at an awards ceremony in the Pentagon. “Din” Land was a remarkable man whose foresight, over and over again, brought increased security to the United States and the free world.
Now, a generation later, the NRO is housed in spacious and visible offices near Dulles Airport outside Washington. The organization and the name of its director are listed on Defense Department organization charts. The imaging product is still developed and stored on film, but it is also shipped electronically, in digital form, directly to field commanders in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq for their use in planning and conducting military operations in real time.
TALKING TO SUBMARINES
In 1960, America’s first ballistic-missile-firing submarine, the George Washington, put to sea. 39 By 1975 over half of our strategic nuclear warheads were aboard a fleet of nuclear-powered Poseidon boats on patrol throughout the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as well as the Mediterranean Sea. That development was a great step toward stability in times of crisis. These warships were virtually undetectable while submerged, and thus virtually immune to surprise attack.
The Soviets did not enjoy a similar immunity. Their early submarines were noisy and thus easy for American technology to track. Throughout much of the 1960s most Soviet SSBNs heading out on patrol were identified by underwater sensors, by silent U.S. Navy attack submarines, and by airborne P-3 aircraft dropping sonobuoys. This tracking capability became more difficult to maintain in the 1970s when the Walkers, Navy radiomen father and son, gave away the game to the Soviets. At the same time, the Japanese sold the Soviets the technology to mill much quieter submarine propellers.
A quiet underwater fleet may be a good thing in some respects, but if one cannot detect or track a submarine, neither can one communicate with it. Keeping control of the submarine fleet, especially when it acquired nuclear arms, became a serious challenge.
Saltwater is a good conductor of electricity; it readily absorbs electromagnetic radiation. The degree of that absorption is a function of the incoming radiation’s frequency; very high frequency radar and radio signals cannot penetrate seawater at all. As a result, the submarines of World War II and immediately thereafter had to surface if they were to communicate. Those diesel-powered boats would deploy their HF (shortwave) antennae at night, from the surface or from snorkel depth, while recharging their batteries. But with the advent of more sophisticated adversaries, sitting atop the water or deploying a snorkel was too risky. Besides, HF transmission could easily be intercepted, would give away a submarine’s location, and was too unreliable.
The coming of nuclear power rendered the need to surface obsolete. To communicate with submarines only a few feet below the surface, but invisible to radar or an observer’s eye, the nuclear navies turned to Very Low Frequency communication systems. These transmitters operated in the three to thirty kilohertz range, resulting in a low data rate and requiring long receiving antennae at sea, 40 but those VLF signals could penetrate a few feet of seawater half a world away. VLF became the standard for both Soviet and U.S. Navy communication with their nuclear submarines.
As Soviet search technology became better, however, the Navy wanted to patrol at greater depths. Studies showed that transmitters operating at Extremely Low Frequencies (ELF, forty to eighty hertz) could communicate with deeply submerged boats. The data rate would be very slow and the required antenna huge, but the game was worth the candle. Using an ELF communication system, the nation’s strategic deterrent could remain truly undetectable, yet its payload of nuclear death and destruction would stay under the continuous and effective control of the National Command Authorities. Arranging for the capability to transmit such ELF signals was the catch. The required antenna would be miles long and needed to lie atop low conductivity rock. The best U.S. geology for such transmitters lay in northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Funding and constructing these ELF antennae involved the worst, most protracted, and most nonsensical environmental fight of my career. The ELF ground-based antennae were essentially power lines. There were some who thought the electromagnetic signals given off by such lines were bad for living creatures. Subsequent studies by the National Institutes for Health as well as the International Agency for Research on Cancer found the claimed evidence to be “weak” or “inadequate.” The magnetic fields under a power line correspond to those a foot away from a kitchen microwave or a TV set. They are far less than those generated by a hair dryer. Nonetheless, I spent much of my tour as Director of Telecommunications arguing the case for ELF with the scientific community and members of Congress. For years we weighed the nation’s security, keeping tight control of those nukes at sea, against concerns about the jobs of Michiganders and their environment.
My chance to lobby the most important Michigander of all came on a summer evening in July 1975. Gerald Ford had been President less than a year. We knew each other from earlier days, and he knew of my track record as a political manager. He wanted to talk. You may be important; you think you’re cool. But everyone’s first visit to the Oval Office is a fright. The majesty of the White House itself is overwhelming. Entry through the gates and guards, passing the Marine at the entry to the West Wing, walking down the narrow hallways, cramped for space but reeking of power, and standing in the President’s outer office, all burn themselves into your memory. They leave the visitor inarticulate, barely able to hear the soothing sounds from the President’s secretary. And then those fateful words: “The President will see you now.” Seven o’clock on the hot summer evening of July 17, 1975, was that moment for me. I was going to meet with President Ford, alone in the Oval Office, to discuss his political future.
A short eleven months before, Gerald Ford had succeeded to the presidency when Richard Nixon resigned. Upon taking the oath of office, Ford declared that our national nightmare was over, but in time he would have to endure many more nightmares of his own. In addition to abuse from the Watergate Congress and the fall of Saigon, Ford now had to deal with his own floundering campaign for election to the presidency. In our meeting, he came immediately to the point. He asked if I would join his campaign as its deputy campaign manager, its “political director.” The campaign manager at the time was resort developer and former Army Secretary Bo Callaway, who was soon to be engulfed in a public debate over the validity of his land-use permits. Callaway would be cleared of any wrongdoing, but he chose to resign.
I had run major political campaigns before and would again, all of them successful and some against immense odds. But like Shane, I did not want my talents as a political gunslinger known or recognized. I had gone straight. I was a physicist and businessman. At that time, I was working in the Pentagon as a high-tech bureaucrat. I liked what I was doing; I told Mr. Ford that the continuing recruitment of political helpers from the Pentagon was a poor idea and that my growing expertise in nuclear control was more important to the nation’s security. I argued that moving me to a campaign job would set the wrong tone as our nation tried to recover from Vietnam and Watergate. I recommended the services of a real political pro, Stuart Spencer (whom the President had never met, but subsequently hired), and then, as quickly as I could, diverted the conversation from presidential politics to the ELF project in Upper Michigan.
You can take the President out of Congress, but you cannot take the congressman out of a President. In a flash Ford was deep into the complaints he had heard from his former constituents, about radio waves sterilizing the cattle, about miles of ditches to be dug and filled by dozens of contractors and hundreds of workers, about the vulnerability of such a system to Soviet attack, and how the bucolic Upper Peninsula of Michigan would become a prime target. He weighed all of this against the need to stay in touch with his submarines. When I left in the gathering dusk of that summer evening, the President agreed to pass the word to his Michigan allies and constituents: support construction of the ELF antenna; it is important. A few weeks later he nominated me to serve as Secretary of the Air Force during the rest of his term.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
The world’s passage from the industrial to the information age was as transforming as Alice in Wonderland’s trip through the looking glass. On the far side, everything looked different. A citizen of the old order once wrote that Joseph Stalin was Genghis Khan with a telephone. That was true in more ways than one. The point-to-point nature of the telephone lets the leader decide who gets what information. It leads to compartmented, isolated systems. The dictator can have his way, everywhere, quickly and efficiently. On the battlefield, a defender relying on telephonic and point-to-point radios can rest on his internal lines of communication. He can impose burdensome losses on any attacker.
I once visited the Novodevichi Cemetery outside Moscow, where the remains of many Soviet military heroes lay buried. On their head-stones one finds the usual vital statistics and a bust of the great man. The astonishing thing is that many of those statues show the general not on horseback, but with a telephone to his ear. That was the symbol of real power in the Stalin era.
The problem is, when a military situation gets fluid, the man with the phone may not know who needs the information he has. He may not know who can act on it most efficiently. The advent of satellites and the associated rapid dissemination of information on the ground ended that Stalinist dilemma. It marked the beginning of the broadcast era, the Gorbachev age, when the receiver, not the sender, would decide what information he or she gets. The old world was turned upside down.
In military affairs, the commander in chief or an aircraft over the battlefield now can broadcast his instructions or his observations without knowing who needs the information he has. Everyone on the secure net gets it. The platoon leader, the pilots of other aircraft, can decide what information they want as they extract it from the broadcast flood. The attacker, if he enjoys information superiority, can draw detailed maps from satellites overhead in real time. He can identify tanks that cannot see him, and destroy them before they know they are under attack. He can watch an artillery piece fire, and return that fire while the outgoing round is still in the air.
In politics, the President in Washington or aboard his airborne command post can listen in to whatever and whomever he wants. He can query the JCS at the Pentagon or a platoon leader in the desert. He can speak directly to his commanders, his own people, or the people on the other side. It was this ability to be heard worldwide that made President Reagan’s Westminster speech—demanding democracy worldwide— and his evil empire speech (serving notice on the Soviet people that they had not been abandoned) so important. The ability of the Great Communicator—as Reagan was dubbed—to wage public diplomacy, to illuminate the illegitimacy of Stalin’s telephone-age empire, was a product of the broadcast age.
The problem with this new age is that the receiver has been overwhelmed by information. We can all now receive hundreds of channels on our home TV. But in the military, the receiver does not have time to sort through all the incoming data. He often misses vital pieces of his puzzle.
The Internet is changing that. Satellites no longer flood every receiver with more information than it wants. They now load that material into data banks, waiting for the military commander or patrol leader to call for the information he needs. AWACS and JSTARS aircraft can track virtually any equipment that moves, adding that information to the data base. Then a commander leading a tank column can ask his computer screen whether a convoy that suddenly appears is friend or foe. Within the life-or-death window of a few seconds, he can initiate or withhold his fire. In 1991, and even more so in 2003, the Coalition attackers had these advantages, imposing casualties of well over a hundred to one on the defending Iraqis. In the battle for Baghdad, Iraqi tanks played no meaningful role.
We have moved to the age of network-centric warfare. The general no longer need sit atop a hill, on his horse, overseeing the battle on the vast plain below. He can sit in his command center, half a world away, surrounded by screens, maps, and terminals that give him a far more complete picture of the battle, in real time.
The Internet-enabled twenty-first-century American deployments around Kabul and Baghdad made the 1991 battlefields of southern Iraq look archaic, but as the Cold War drew to its close, those 1991 examples were good enough to change history. Officers of the Red Army watched Desert Storm from the sidelines. They saw their equipment trashed, their doctrine overrun. They could only advise their political masters in the Kremlin that the game was up. The Great Communicator had delivered the same message to the people of Russia through different channels.