TREASONS, STRATAGEMS,
AND SPOILS
MARCH 4, 1992
PALACE OF CONGRESSES AND EXHIBITIONS,
TORREMOLINOS, SPAIN
The ten years that began with the announcement of Iridium in June 1990 were full of treachery, deception, and espionage worthy of the Roman Senate at its worst, penetrating across borders, arousing the ire of nations, and often resulting in outright violations of the law. On the same day that John Mitchell, Ray Leopold, and Durrell Hillis were holding their press conference at the Hayden Planetarium, Bary Bertiger was standing at a podium in London next to Olof Lundberg, Director General of Inmarsat, the quasi-governmental satellite system that supplied phone and data service to all the major ships of the world. Bertiger and Lundberg pretended to be jointly proclaiming a new era in satellite phone systems that would benefit all mankind, but secretly Lundberg was working against Motorola, trying to make sure Iridium never saw the light of day, while Bertiger had invited him to the event only because Inmarsat was based in London and it’s best to keep your enemies close. On the surface the whole world loved Iridium as the first truly global communications system, a revolutionary engineering marvel that would finally connect every point on the globe to every other point. In reality, Motorola’s enemies were legion.
Iridium was perceived as a game changer, and people didn’t like game changers in the 1990s any more than the owners of the Erie Canal had liked the first transcontinental railroads in the 1860s. New technology always leaves a battlefield littered with bodies, so this was a time for stealth, deceit, misdirection, and what Ray Leopold, a student of fighter-plane tactics, called “maneuver warfare.” Every enemy could quickly be converted into an ally, and vice versa. A hostile warplane on your tail could be transformed, with a tight loop-the-loop, into a target in your gun sights. All the alliances that would bring Iridium to life were shifting and unreliable, but it was a war of attrition—one company at a time, one nation at a time—that Motorola never shrank from. There were no government contracts involved, so the whole operation could be conducted in secrecy, and everyone was on high alert for enemy agents. But of all the mind-shattering moments leading up to the launch of Iridium, the most surreal occurred in February 1992, in an elegant French restaurant called Place Vendôme, a few steps from the historic harbor of Málaga, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
Motorola had rented the restaurant in order to do what the American government had been unable to do: inveigle information out of the KGB. The nations of the world were gathered in the neighboring town of Torremolinos to allocate radio-wave spectrum, an event called the World Administrative Radio Conference that is held infrequently—this was the first major one in thirteen years—but has a lot to do with what the electronic future of the world will look like. For Iridium, this was the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the World Cup all rolled into one. A decision had been made in 1990 to “proceed on the assumption that we’ll get the frequency we need,” but the world had changed greatly from the days when big American and British companies could tell everyone else how the airwaves would be used. Almost as soon as Iridium was announced, a chorus of “You can’t do that” had gone up from several other corporations, including every national phone company in Europe. As a result, the WARC was now a live-or-die situation. No frequency meant no Iridium. That’s why Motorola had spent the previous sixteen months lobbying the entire world to make sure it got what it wanted: radio frequency bands that could be used to operate the first point-to-point global telephone system, not to mention the first commercial switching system in outer space. The army of Motorola employees sent to Torremolinos far outnumbered that representing the U.S. government. The United States sent teams from the FCC, Voice of America, Department of Commerce, Pentagon, State Department, NASA, National Science Foundation, Coast Guard, U.S. Information Agency, and FAA—but all of those delegations combined were still smaller than Motorola’s team.
Since Motorola had offices around the world, the company was able to identify political allies in advance, but the company’s war plan went one step further and made sure that Motorola employees were named as actual voting members: the United States, Canada, France, and Australia all had Motorola employees sitting in their official delegations. Add to this the fact that Travis Marshall, Motorola’s chief lobbyist, was the U.S. ambassador to the International Telecommunication Union, which administers the conference, and you start to understand why many of the WARC delegates were resentful of the pressure, regarding the Motorolans as crass salespeople determined to hold them hostage, treating them like reluctant participants in the world’s biggest time-share presentation. We’ll be seeing you on the Costa del Sol in February, came the siren song of Motorola. Are you bringing your wife? Do you play golf? Do you enjoy casinos? I hope you’ll have time for our little presentation, and, by the way, there will be a six-course dinner afterward. Motorola had five hundred of the best “gadget guys” in the world—salespeople who hawked the latest electronics devices to service providers and systems owners on every continent—and they were all focused on Torremolinos. A few months hence, the respected Algerian historian Mohamed Harbi would complain to the ITU that he had “observed unprecedented commercial pressure” as a delegate to the WARC, and everybody knew exactly who he was talking about. One thing Motorola understood was closing a sale.
The WARC is technically a nonpolitical meeting of the ITU, a UN agency based in Geneva. The process of agreeing to stay out of one another’s way on the radio-wave spectrum had been going on for almost a hundred years—since 1897, when the first commercial radio signal was transmitted from London by the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, founded by Guglielmo Marconi. The first meeting of nine countries took place in Berlin in 1903, and ever since then the WARC had been a boring assembly of engineers and bureaucrats, most of them working for companies like AT&T and the British Post Office and Deutsche Bundespost, who would “clean up” the spectrum, identifying parts of it that were unused and then reassigning them as technology changed and new inventions (radio broadcasting, radar, etc.) required ever more specific frequency bands. By 1992 that had all changed. The WARC had become a place where billions of dollars were at stake, not just for private corporations, but for nations that depend on telecommunications for their economic survival. There were more than 1,400 delegates from 127 nations at the 1992 WARC, but the Iridium team had such a large transnational presence that it might as well have been the 128th: the sovereign state of Motorola. All 193 countries who were signatories to the ITU had been visited by a Motorolan during the previous year, and most of them had been wined, dined, or otherwise persuaded that the upcoming conference was an opportunity to advance civilization—and the fortunes of their own country—by leaps and bounds. Iridium would be the greatest thing to happen to the Third World since . . . well, since the United Nations was formed. At last every country, and every village in every country, could be connected to the worldwide grid.
In actuality the Iridium business plan would not be focused on the Third World at all, but on the well-heeled executive travelers in North America, Europe, and Japan, but for the time being it was better to talk about straw huts in Papua New Guinea, not ski chalets in Gstaad. A promotional video for Iridium featured the President of Mali, his wife, and his staff in acting roles. After a while, Motorola’s incessant statements of love and affection for the outcasts of the world started to wear thin. An observer for the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment drily remarked that the average citizen of the Central African Republic would have to work for four years to earn enough money to purchase an Iridium phone, then work seventeen hours more to pay for a one-minute call. But Motorola managed to brush off such impertinent observations as mere details. The reality on the ground was that most of the countries in the world were poor and “developing,” and wouldn’t it be better to get this infrastructure established? It wouldn’t cost any Third World countries a single penny, and it would be permanently available whenever they established a way to use it. Besides, while Ray Leopold was working the “technology for the Third World” angle, Iridium’s man in Paris, Leo Mondale, was working the darker side of human nature. Does your country have an entrenched phone company that fears Iridium? No problem—we’ll tack a dollar on to the “tail charges” of every Iridium phone call made from your country and send it back your way. If idealism didn’t work, maybe greed would.
“The fifty-four African countries were used to getting checks every month from AT&T,” said Mondale, “so we had to agree not to undercut that direct-dial service.” This stratagem would come back to haunt Iridium in later years, as national telephone companies routinely asked for kickbacks disguised as fees—tiny Madagascar wanted $500,000 a year—just to keep the Iridium license in place.
The politics of the WARC were so byzantine that new frequency allocations had to pass by unanimous consent—obviously impossible in any UN agency—so nothing was ever formally voted on. Instead, there were votes on nonbinding “recommendations” and “temporary assignments” of frequency, and then those recommendations were further refined by identifying primary and secondary users, and then further limited by adding footnotes identifying countries that would not be using that frequency for the purposes agreed to by the majority. The footnotes to the International Table of Frequency Allocations amounted to thousands of pages of fine-print text, resulting in so many exceptions to general usage that some bands were chaotic, cluttered, and highly unreliable. The unofficial motto of a WARC delegate was “What the allocations giveth, the footnotes taketh away.” This was why Motorola’s uphill climb would have been difficult even in the best of times—when companies were simply scrapping for underutilized frequencies—but Iridium was a whole new category. There was no frequency allocated for low-earth-orbit satellites at all—it was a totally novel use of the spectrum—and the “Big LEO allocation,” as it came to be called, was not even on the agenda, since Motorola had announced Iridium too late for the 1992 conference. Fortunately this would not be a problem in the United States because the FCC had a rule allowing for expedited processing when a company qualified as a technological “pioneer”—and Iridium certainly qualified. Still, the ITU had no such category. Motorola was essentially crashing the party.
Two months earlier a huge contingent of Motorolans had flown to Thailand for a meeting of all the ASEAN nations, hoping to round up their votes in advance, and Ray Leopold’s speech about what the system could do for remote tribal peoples had the Sri Lankan delegate in tears. “You have no idea what this means for my country!” she sobbed. Leopold beamed with pride. And Travis Marshall, the Motorola lobbyist, knew they were headed in the right direction.
Now they wanted all 166 voting nations to know that all Motorola needed—well, all the world needed, since it wasn’t a Motorola application, it was for the benefit of all, and Motorola welcomed any other satellite systems that could provide this level of global coverage—all we global citizens needed was a tiny portion of the L-band, the spectrum between 1610 and 1626.5 Megahertz that nobody really needed anyway. Yes, it was true that some armies and navies and air forces were using that part of the spectrum for weapons testing and other top secret purposes, and yes, it was true that it was supposed to be used in the future for a European version of GPS, but Motorola would only need a portion of it, and look at all the benefits to mankind.
And so, on this night halfway through the conference, at the Place Vendôme restaurant in picturesque Málaga, tuxedoed waiters bustled around serving champagne and foie gras and other delicacies to two high-level KGB officers and the Russian Minister of Telecommunications. While they were dining, the Iridium Chief Operating Officer and three Motorola executives regaled the Russians with stories about what wonderful things Iridium could do for the remotest parts of Siberia, not to mention the Moscow tycoons who would soon be carrying Iridium phones as they exported Russian ingenuity around the world. The backstory to the dinner was that John Mitchell had flown in from Chicago two days earlier, only to discover that things were looking grim for the frequency allocation. Inmarsat, the monopoly satphone supplier for the past decade, had been busy stirring up opposition. Various delegations had been influenced by enemies of Motorola to find complex technical reasons why the application should be denied. Some of those objections were easy to deal with—if Botswana needed part of a frequency for a regional airport, the exception was made and a compromise worked out—but Russia was an entirely different matter. Russia was apparently going to oppose the allocation, and Russia still had clout with most of the nations that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. It took only one vote to squelch everything. But the Russians weren’t saying why they needed that part of the frequency spectrum—because they didn’t have to. Any nation could cite “intelligence uses” of the spectrum without specifying exactly what it was being used for. Mitchell had taken a typically Irish approach. He bought several bottles of Jameson whisky, distributed them among the troops, and said, “Keep fighting! We’ll give you whatever you need!”
The objectives on this alcohol-fueled night were many, but the overriding goal was to find out what the Russians were using the spectrum for and, more important, which Russian officials were refusing to give it up. As the evening unfurled at the Place Vendôme, as the vodka bottles were drained and the multiple courses came and went, the Russians started to loosen up. Especially attentive was Mark Gercenstein, who was not only Motorola’s top foreign sales expert but spoke fluent Russian. One of the guests finally told Gercenstein, “You know, these older Russian generals, they don’t like to change their ways.” It seemed like an opening, so Gercenstein waited for a while and then asked whether they were speaking of any Russian generals in particular. They eventually came up with two names—somber, uniformed bureaucrats who were well known to Motorola’s Russian specialists—and after a while an executive discreetly got up from the table and called Bob Galvin back in Chicago. He gave Galvin the names of the two Russian generals, who turned out to be official delegates to the WARC.
Then, while the Motorolans and the Russians continued to make small talk, Ray Leopold—holding forth on the virtues of the Iridium system—suddenly did a double take. The waiter refilling his champagne glass seemed familiar. He waited for a moment until he got another glimpse: yes, it was Dale Grimes, the low-level guy in marketing who organized conferences back at the Chandler Lab. Dale was disguised as a Spanish waiter in order to gather additional intelligence on the Russian delegation. He was trying to eavesdrop on the Russians every time they left the table so he could find out what they wanted to find out from Motorola. In other words, he was in place as a secret spy on the professional spies who were already being spied on by Motorola.
The following day, the two Russian generals were simply . . . gone. They disappeared, called back to Moscow. Bob Galvin had given the names to his old Texas friend Bob Strauss, the serving ambassador to Russia, and Strauss had made phone calls. The word came back that the Russians didn’t need the spectrum anyway—it was just the old military establishment trying to protect its prerogatives. The Russian air force might have been able to keep its spectrum if it had simply been fighting the Pentagon, but they had taken on Motorola. Mission accomplished.
Motorola had never seen the opposition coming, though. From the moment the Iridium project was funded, Motorola management was hoping that it would be acclaimed as such a revolutionary system that someone would buy it, and then Motorola would live off the contracts to build and operate the satellites. That’s what Motorola normally did: invented new technology, then sold the technology to large operators who would in turn supply it to the consumer. Neither Bob Galvin nor John Mitchell wanted to be the permanent owner of a seventy-seven-satellite outer space constellation, much less a million-plus-subscriber mobile phone company that competed with everyone in the world. Finding another company to run Iridium and then selling multiple generations of equipment to that company was, in fact, the Motorola way. In many parts of the world Motorola loaned 100 percent of the money to build out cellular phone systems, then sold the local operator handsets and switches and other technology as he paid back the loan. But Bob Galvin had always thought “we’re leaving money on the table” by not owning telephone systems. He’d always had a hankering for the subscriber money, a revenue stream that would cushion the company against sales downturns if Motorola handsets ever became less popular. Still, if Motorola could realize the full value of Iridium in a onetime sale, it would be silly to risk annoying Motorola’s land-based customers. And so the internal debate went back and forth, and as time went on managers became comfortable with both sides of the equation. If they could sell it, great. If they couldn’t, they would be even richer. Iridium was obviously the best long-term solution for mobile phones, so there must be dozens of companies eager to buy it.
That’s why, as work went forward on Iridium, Inmarsat was assumed to be the ideal Motorola partner—at least at first. Inmarsat was an international treaty organization, set up by the United Nations in 1979 to bring order to communications on the high seas. (The name stood for International Maritime Satellite Organization, and it opened for business in 1982.) Based in London, Inmarsat answered to seventy-nine countries and used huge GEOs positioned over the Equator to cover as much of the ocean surface as possible, but it still fell far short of what Iridium could do. So back in 1990, three months before Iridium was announced to the world, Motorola put out feelers to Inmarsat, with John Mitchell himself making the approach to Olof Lundberg, the Swedish telecom executive who ran the company. Galvin and Mitchell thought the sale would be a cinch—the Inmarsat technology and the Iridium technology had virtually no overlap—and at the very least Inmarsat would want to joint-venture with Motorola. Inmarsat had already shown interest in expanding beyond the maritime industry, but its system was expensive and impractical. The original Inmarsat phone terminal weighed up to a ton and cost between $50,000 and $75,000. Even after ten years in business, it was priced way beyond the reach of small businesses—$30,000 for a clunky fixed terminal that weighed forty pounds and had to be installed aboard ship, then $12 a minute for the actual call. It wasn’t portable, it wasn’t cheap, it didn’t work at all in the extreme latitudes, and it wasn’t practical for anyone except multinational corporations, governments, and Royal Suite passengers on the Queen Elizabeth 2. Iridium would be a perfect add-on to Inmarsat. No need for the huge 105-foot antennas that homed in on one satellite. People aboard ships could use handheld portable phones for the first time in history, and the ship could never move out of signal range.
Lundberg agreed to bring all his top engineers and marketers to Schaumburg to hear a ninety-minute presentation on Iridium, and after it was over he pronounced himself “dazzled.” There were accolades all around for the inventors, exchanges of goodwill, and plans to work together—and as soon as the Inmarsat team returned to London, they started actively working against Iridium ever becoming a reality. Motorola began preparing a private placement memorandum—the formal document used to raise money—and before the ink was dry, Inmarsat had been in touch with most of the potential investors, telling them that “they’ll never get the spectrum,” that Motorola was an amateur corporation that had never been in the space business, that Motorola would need licenses in every country of the world and wouldn’t be able to get them, that the whole scheme was too expensive and too risky, and even that the system was illegal. The seventy-nine Inmarsat countries were prevented by international treaty from investing in a competing system—and Inmarsat regarded this as a competing system. Besides, Inmarsat was going to do the same thing on its own, Lundberg said. Low-earth-orbit satellites were nothing new—the military used them all the time. Within a few months Inmarsat was talking about something called “Project 21,” and already making approaches to Hughes Aircraft about how to build and launch its own version of Iridium.
When it became obvious that Inmarsat had taken the business plan and vamoosed, Bob Galvin sent Ted Schaffner down to the Chandler Lab to “build the business case”—to figure out the best way to maximize profit on Iridium. “So I got to Phoenix,” recalled Schaffner, “and I found this thing was already inevitable. People were brainstorming various categories of users. The first major meeting I had was with John Mitchell. He had all these documents from Inmarsat, a list of all the countries that were signatories and what kind of business they did. He showed it to me and said, ‘What I wanna do is re-create this.’ But we had big problems before we could get to that point. We had a technology problem—would it work? We had a spectrum allocation problem. This was partly why they ended up wanting investors from all jurisdictions around the world—they thought it would be easier to get the spectrum allocated that way. But I looked at it and I told Mitchell, ‘This is very speculative. What you have here is a start-up venture. I don’t think you should raise $3.6 billion’—which was the figure at the time. ‘Rather than do that, do a round of financing, build it out, go back for a second round. Do multiple rounds on this, like Silicon Valley.’ But he was opposed to that. He wanted committed financing for everything in place from day one. And that wasn’t normal. We had an entrepreneurial project here. People were committed to it. People were out marketing it. We weren’t pushing back at all. We weren’t scrubbing the business plan.”
In other words, the Chandler Lab was in a frenzy. Everyone truly believed that “if we build it, they will come.” And they had the backing of the ultimate Motorolan, Bob Galvin. It’s difficult to imagine any business leader in history who had the kind of charisma Galvin had within Motorola, but he was similar in presence to a Steve Jobs, a Warren Buffett, or, in previous eras, a Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie. Once a year Motorola brought all its top salesmen from around the world to Chicago, and when Bob Galvin strode onto the stage in front of those Motorola lifers, the thunderous ovation sometimes went on for several minutes until order could be restored.
“The Galvins were big believers in the idea that businesses can reinvent themselves,” said Schaffner. “Bob Galvin saw Iridium as a chance to reinvent Motorola. He thought it was time for that. The history of Motorola is full of moments where management decides to back a new and uncertain innovative technology. And that goes all the way back to the car radio. Nobody was clamoring for the car radio either.”
The optimism in Chandler was also reinforced by the rampant fear the Iridium announcement had created within the industry. At the time Iridium was announced, the idea of LEOs functioning as cell towers and switching systems in the heavens was all but unknown. By the time the WARC commenced sixteen months later, there were ten other satellite phone systems on the drawing boards, and several of them were already out raising money. Since this had never been done before, the designs for these systems were all over the firmament in various configurations of LEOs, MEOs, and GEOs that would have warmed the hearts of Tsiolkovsky and von Braun because they looked like they belonged on the covers of science fiction novels:
There were others, too, as entrepreneurs large and small saw the Motorola announcement as the commencement of a sea change in the way the world thought about mobile phones. There were so many, in fact, that by the mid-nineties the ITU started issuing stern warnings about “paper satellites” and threatening to take frequencies away from people who announced systems and then didn’t build them. But the idea of putting all the cell towers in the skies was seen by most as a neon lightbulb moment, a realization that, yes, we’d been doing it all wrong, and surely the cell-phone future would belong to whoever owned the coolest satellites.
What was odd about the latecomers was that, even though they were copying Iridium, they failed to copy the elements that made it unique. All the competing systems used “bent-pipe” technology, meaning the phone bounced a signal off a passive reflector and then down to a ground station, where the calls would fan out through the existing phone system. This meant you still had to position ground stations all over the world. Motorola had learned about cross-linking while developing autonomous systems for Star Wars—specifically the “brains” for exo-atmospheric spacecraft and kinetic energy weapons—so it was already sold on the concept of managing the whole system from space, with virtually no operations on the ground. Everyone else thought of the satellites as signal carriers only.
If outer space switching were to succeed, the stakes could be huge. The promise of Iridium was that the whole world could become wireless, thereby eliminating trillions of dollars in hardware. Every telecom company was burdened by the onerous costs of infrastructure. Cell towers are large, expensive, ugly, and unsafe—fatal construction accidents are so common that there are law firms that specialize in them—and in some geographical regions, including all the oceans and most major lakes, they’re completely impractical. Less developed countries will never be able to build towers for rural areas, and even some industrialized regions have never figured out a way to build and maintain cell systems. The national phone company of Poland was so far behind in 1992 that there was a ten-year waiting list for landlines, and they were still using copper wire. If you looked down the list of Inmarsat signatories, many of these companies were investors in a far inferior system—so why shouldn’t Iridium be the next step into the future?
By the time of the WARC, Motorola had registered Iridium as a separate corporation and handpicked two top executives. The first was Bob Kinzie, a solemn, poker-faced lawyer who had lived in the COMSAT/INTELSAT world of quasi-governmental satellite companies ever since the 1965 launch of Early Bird. The consummate technocrat, Kinzie had learned about Iridium during one of Motorola’s road show presentations, and since Inmarsat was apparently not going to play along, he was hired as chairman and CEO in order to go after the Inmarsat customer list. But Motorola also wanted someone from inside the Motorola culture, so Jerry Adams was hired as President and Kinzie’s right hand. Adams was head of Motorola’s cell-phone operations in Europe, but prior to that he had run a successful wireless company called Metro One, then worked for two years for Craig McCaw as McCaw Cellular was expanding all over the country. Kinzie and Adams moved into offices on K Street, where their mandate was to sell the private placement memorandum by putting together a consortium of investors and arranging for $3.6 billion in funding, then steal the big European clients away from Inmarsat. All the top Motorola executives, including Galvin, Weisz, and Mitchell, expected this to be a walk in the park. Mark Gercenstein, Motorola’s head marketer for foreign military sales, decided in early 1991 to hold an “Iridium investors conference” and charge $1 million for any company that wanted to hear the presentation. His idea was never implemented—nobody was that anxious to hear about Iridium—but it was not laughed out of the room either.
Unfortunately, the result of all the efforts of Kinzie, Adams, Gercenstein, and the Motorola engineers from Chandler was obvious almost from the first day of the first presentation: not just no, but hell no.
“We were dealing with telecommunications companies that in many cases were monopolies and in some cases were government-owned,” recalled Kinzie years later. “These were cultures that have no word for ‘competition’ in their language. It was tough because an American company can’t just go out there like the Hudson Bay Company and get complete access. We had to get cooperation.”
But cooperation would not come from the powerful postal, telephone, and telegraph monopolies, known in the industry as PTTs. In retrospect, it’s not that strange that the five-hundred-year-old PTTs in Europe would dig in their heels against a technological innovation that could erase their borders and make many of their services obsolete. These were companies set up in the Middle Ages to regulate postal rates, and they were the most entrenched bureaucracies in the world. “Governments don’t like global things,” said Bertiger. “We were stepping on toes.” Divestiture and competition, heralded by Margaret Thatcher, praised by Ronald Reagan, had not yet penetrated into companies like British Telecom, which even had a specific part of its charter forbidding it from being in the wireless industry. British Telecom had only recently been formed out of the British Post Office—prior to 1982 it was a division of the postal service—and the British Post Office had a reputation for a full century of obstructionism, beginning when its domination of the oceanic cable business was threatened by Marconi and continuing right up through attempts to stop INTELSAT. An American diplomat in Brussels described discussions with European Union representatives as “vitriolic” when it came to satellites and suspected that their uniform support for Inmarsat was simply anti-Americanism in disguise. “The EU harbors deep suspicions that the U.S. desires to keep [Inmarsat’s phones] out of the U.S. market,” the diplomat said in a State Department cable.
But it was early in the game, so Motorola didn’t recognize right away that they were being stonewalled by Europe. Several Motorola executives flew to Madrid for a presentation to Telefónica, the Spanish communications monopoly, and senior managers redecorated their offices to show off all the Motorola equipment they were using. They oohed and aahed at everything they were told—and then never followed up. In France it was worse. Heading up the Motorola diplomatic effort there was Leo Mondale, nephew of Walter Mondale, the U.S. Senator who had served as Vice President under Jimmy Carter. Mondale was a talented communications lawyer who had worked in the Paris offices of Fairchild Space and for the aeronautics division of defense contractor Mécanique Aviation Traction (better known as Matra), and he was the first hire at Iridium, partly because Motorola thought his connections could bring the big European telecoms aboard. The initial meeting at France Télécom turned out to be an elaborate farce, during which the French executives affected bonhomie for their frères from across the pond while fishing for competitive information—but that wasn’t the worst part of the experience. Someone had managed to place listening devices in the first-class cabin of the Air France flight that carried the Motorolans to the meeting, so the Paris executives knew exactly what Motorola was trying to do and how they were trying to do it. Whether the bugs had been ordered by the French government or the French phone company didn’t really matter, since it seems both were opposed to any supranational American phone company. Then, when the Motorola team members returned to their hotel rooms that night, their suitcases had been rifled. Things were getting rough in the world of satellite phones.
The French would continue their campaign against Motorola and Iridium, despite repeated attempts by Mondale, Kinzie, and others to partner with them. At the WARC, France Télécom delegates were telling anyone who would listen that participation in Iridium was a violation of the Inmarsat treaty. Then, after the Iridium system was patented anyway, France launched a complex and expensive legal challenge that resulted in a series of hearings before the European Patent Office in Munich. Frank Bogacz, Motorola’s chief patent attorney, took Iridium inventor Ken Peterson with him to the hearings, where proceedings were conducted in French despite all the French lawyers being capable of perfect English. The French legal team presented very weak evidence that the idea of a LEO satellite phone system was invented not by Bertiger, Leopold, and Peterson but by the engineers at a French company called Alcatel Alsthom. Bogacz wasn’t really surprised that the French would object to a patent—they objected to everything—but he was shocked when the Iridium patent was indeed revoked. At the conclusion of what he regarded as a “kangaroo court,” Peterson went back to his hotel room and placed a six-minute call to Leopold in Chandler to give him the details. When he checked out the next morning, he noted that the six-minute call had cost $106. Of course the Europeans hated Iridium, he thought; they were still selling terrestrial phone service at $18 a minute, which was exorbitant even by the standards of luxury hotels.11
Meanwhile, back in Chandler, the dawning realization that Iridium was universally feared had the thrilling effect of convincing everyone that Iridium had improved on sliced bread. All the competing projects, most of them linked to big players like Hughes or Fairchild or Boeing, were taken to be grudging endorsements of Iridium as the new gold standard in telephony. From twelve people in the Strategic Electronics Division, the offices assigned to Iridium quickly swelled to two hundred, and they were adding manpower all the time. There was an infectious enthusiasm abroad—Iridium was the breakthrough that would not only save Motorola’s research labs in Phoenix but just might become larger than Schaumburg. Iridium had now been memorialized in a formal description of system requirements called an A-Spec—thirty-seven pages of text and charts that the inventors needed several months to put together, since the original ideas had been all in their heads—and they proceeded to present the details at every scientific conference and telecommunications gathering in the world. (It was some indication of the value Motorola placed on Iridium that, until the A-Spec was finished, Bertiger, Leopold, and Peterson were not allowed to travel on the same plane.) They were about to launch the largest satellite constellation in history, a fact that made them the big dogs in the systems engineering world, and they had ways of warning would-be opponents that they were willing to use the massive reach of Motorola to crush all comers. The most dramatic public presentation occurred at Caltech, where Bary Bertiger engaged in a head-to-head debate with Andrew Viterbi, the legendary engineer who cofounded Qualcomm and was now backing Globalstar. “Their architecture was just wrong and I proved it,” said Bertiger. “We only needed one ground station and they needed dozens. They had no intersatellite links. They were bent-pipe. They couldn’t upgrade their satellites once they were flying. They had all the disadvantages of LEOs and none of the advantages of GEOs. The engineering community recognized this, we won all the debates, but Qualcomm was afraid that, if we succeeded, their ‘spread spectrum’ system would disappear.”
Then, four months before the WARC, Motorola sent its entire army to the Palexpo convention center in Geneva for the World Telecommunication Exhibition, a quadrennial event that Ray Leopold called “the most obscene display of opulence I’ve ever seen in my life.” The purpose was to let the world know that Iridium was coming, Iridium was inevitable, nothing could stop Iridium. The Motorola booth featured a huge holographic display showing how the Iridium system worked, and the hologram was so popular that people kept coming back to see it, creating a line that made the booth seem like a museum. On the second level Motorola had installed a dining room and kitchen, and then on the third floor some “very private” meeting rooms, as the effort to persuade the Europeans to join them, not fight them, was ongoing. The Motorola team was housed in $2,000-per-night hotel rooms, and there weren’t enough of them in Geneva proper, so the company also rented an old castle in Lausanne, sixty-five kilometers away, where a chauffeured Rolls-Royce was used to take people to and from the train station.
One night Ray Leopold and Jerry Adams, the new Iridium President, got lost in the bowels of the castle and stumbled upon a little Irish-pub-style bar that looked out onto Lake Geneva. They ordered some drinks and tried the local savory pudding, with hunks of rabbit in it, then started telling war stories. Adams had grown up near Chicago and gone to Navy Top Gun school, but his fighter-pilot career ended with a “cold cat launch.” He was being catapulted off the deck of a moving carrier, but the mechanism malfunctioned and his plane ended up in the ocean, where he was run over by the ship and sustained injuries that made him unable to fly. It was a hard-luck story similar to Leopold’s: after completing his master’s degree at North Carolina State, he was three-fourths of the way through pilot training at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona when some of his classmates threw him into the Officers Club swimming pool. The horsing around cost him two herniated discs and made him physically ineligible for combat flight—“and, for the first time, I realized I wasn’t indestructible.” It was a bonding moment for the two men, who otherwise had very little in common. Adams thought Leopold was a science geek who talked too much. Leopold thought Adams was too serious and too focused on profit and loss. But it was a microcosm of the heady spirits that were driving the Iridium project. People who would never otherwise socialize with one another were pulled together like family by a dream that seemed destined to change civilization itself.
In just a few months the engineers at Chandler and their colleagues had made more than three hundred road show presentations to potential investors around the world. In many places they were received as visionary geniuses. Leopold flew all night to get to a presentation at the national telephone company of New Zealand, but flight delays caused his talk to be postponed until three hours after closing time. Remarkably, almost all the employees chose to either stay late at the office or go home for dinner and return, because when he got there he had an audience of several hundred eager faces. He accepted every invitation to speak at every scientific conference, and one of his favorite tricks was to upset the local agenda by saying, “I think I’ll depart from my scheduled topic today—let’s talk about Iridium!” He loved the almost audible gasps of anticipation when he would do that. He also loved the question-and-answer sessions, during which skeptics would try to punch holes in the Iridium business case. Everyone at the Chandler Lab would get a surge of energy every time someone said, “It can’t be done.”
The energy in Chandler was intoxicating. One weekend the Motorola human relations department took the entire senior management team in the Satellite Communications Division out to a ranch in Prescott, Arizona, for “teamwork exercises.” It was a typical Motorola technique to create bonding experiences for what could often be large, unwieldy teams of people with disparate personalities. The ranch was outfitted with obstacle courses, some of them twenty feet above the ground, and the team had to figure out how to get through them as a unit. The Iridium guys went through the first five obstacles, but suddenly the Director of Human Relations called off the exercise.
“You guys are dangerous,” he said. “You’re middle-aged. We’re afraid you’re gonna have an accident.”
In other words, they were too gung ho for mere corporate games.
When Leopold would make presentations—and the team made over a thousand between 1990 and 1995—he would often say, “We’re programming miracles.”
And Iridium’s fame was starting to spread. It was during this period that Edward Teller, cofounder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the father of the hydrogen bomb, paid an unscheduled visit to the Chandler Lab. Leopold had gone through the Air Force Academy with Teller’s colleague Greg Canavan, creator of Brilliant Pebbles, and Canavan was bringing Teller by to discuss Star Wars. But Teller spent most of his time asking questions about Iridium.
“What I like about the system,” he said, “is your revisit time.” (This was a reference to how often the satellites revisited each point on Earth.)
But Leopold was especially proud when Teller said, “Did you think about doing the same job without using satellites? Did you ever consider high-altitude balloons?”
Leopold replied that indeed they had, and they spent several minutes talking about balloons that would function as cell towers.
And the great man said, “But they would bunch up, right?”
The atmosphere with Teller was collegial and friendly, and the Iridium engineers assumed it was just curiosity on Teller’s part, but a few weeks later they got a follow-up e-mail from Teller. He said he had tested the balloon theory at Livermore Lab, and their assumption was correct: solar winds would cause the balloons to bunch up in the stratosphere.12
Iridium, in other words, was known. It was the favorite topic of the cognoscenti who either ran telephony systems or worked in systems engineering. And perhaps that was why it was so unpopular among executives who were already committed to a certain way of doing things. Because it had now become obvious that the private placement memorandum was a bust. Motorola was asking everyone to buy 5 percent shares in Iridium at $80 million each. But as the rumors swirled, stoked by Inmarsat and the European PTTs, John Mitchell started to realize that the package wasn’t going to sell. The objections were many—Iridium’s business case was not well thought out, it was “just selling interface” between phone systems, it was a self-serving deal for Motorola—but the main deal-breaker was that Motorola hadn’t secured the necessary spectrum. Add to this the fact that Bernie Schwartz had sent his Globalstar salespeople out into the world, and he had managed a very clever reversal of the Motorola selling points. “If you sign up with us,” Globalstar was saying, “you can own your own gateway.”
By coining the word “gateway”—as opposed to “earth station,” “transmitter,” “receiver,” “terminal,” “communications unit,” “switchboard,” or any of the other traditional terms used to describe the ground facility where calls were processed—Globalstar had created a glamour item. “Gateway” implied a portal into outer space, on the one hand, and a funnel for commerce on the other. A gateway was the place where the door opened into the celestial future, pouring gold into your household coffers. Gateways meant infrastructure and jobs and a strong physical presence. The concept had been especially compelling in Europe, where Schwartz signed up Alcatel, Deutsche Aerospace, Daimler-Benz, and Vodafone as partners. In countries that had only one phone company, it was heady stuff: You can be the phone company in the future, Schwartz was saying. And since some of his investors were part of less-than-democratic societies, the gateway concept was attractive from the service-provider end as well: You could sell the phone to some customers and refuse to sell it to others. You were the boss. The gateway made you the boss. You controlled what came in and what went out, like the sultan who controlled the Bosphorus Strait.
Iridium didn’t have gateways. Iridium didn’t need gateways. Or, to be more precise, Iridium needed only one gateway, a place for calls to be processed when the sender or receiver used an old-fashioned landline or a land-based cell phone.
“We need gateways,” Mitchell was telling the troops. “If we had gateways, we could sell the system.” And with that, he shut down the road shows and the fund-raising. The team would go out again next year with a new plan. No one was going to invest in Iridium until the company had spectrum anyway. The only thing I want you to think about for now, said Mitchell, is spectrum.
For those who don’t have electrical engineering degrees—and there were a lot of nonengineers at the WARC—the radio frequency spectrum is all but incomprehensible, and the International Table of Frequency Allocations is impossible to read. It looks like the world’s most erratic EKG, on the one hand, but since it’s multicolored, it also resembles the world’s longest hippie peace quilt. Radio waves are mysterious. They’re a tiny part of the radiant energy that was created by the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago and now courses through the invisible universe. This energy can be described in many ways, but the most common is to name radio waves according to their frequency—the number of cycles the wave completes in one second. Hence the table is a twenty-five-hundred-page left-to-right chart using the radio-wave unit of measure, the hertz. Named after Heinrich Hertz, who proved the existence of electromagnetic waves in the 1880s, a single hertz equals one cycle per second. Therefore, one kilohertz equals one thousand cycles per second, one megahertz is a million cycles per second, and one gigahertz is a billion cycles per second. If you were to chart the entire frequency spectrum, it would also include terahertz, which is where microwaves and infrared photography reside, as well as petahertz, exahertz, zettahertz, and yottahertz (1024 cycles per second), and there are even higher frequencies that, according to physicists, are “not directly observable” but “may be inferred to exist.” In other words, there’s a mystical aspect to the radio frequency spectrum, and even people who spend their lifetimes studying it are constantly amazed by its quirks and peculiarities.
Fortunately for nonscientists, the only part of the band that’s usable for communications is from 3 KHz to 300 GHz, and even more fortunately, no one has to remember the actual numbers of the frequency bands because over the years the users have given names to the “sweet spots” that everyone competes for. Therefore we have the High Frequency band (3 to 30 MHz), the Very High Frequency band (30 to 300 MHz), and the Ultra High Frequency band (300 MHz to 3GHz). But because of their transmission characteristics—the “cleanness” of reception when you use them—the most highly desirable bands are between 1 and 3 GHz, especially the L-band and the S-band, both of which got their names from Navy counterintelligence units during World War II as a way of disguising what frequencies they were using for radar and electronic jamming.
The 1992 WARC was a turning point in radio spectrum history, when the world realized that all the available sweet spots were going to be overwhelmed if something wasn’t done. This realization led in 1993 to the United States spending billions to explore the potential of the rarely used Ka-band (pronounced “Kay-ay band”), between 26.5 and 40 GHz, by launching the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS). The ACTS remained active for seven years and was a gift to the world, proving that there were ways to use the Ka-band while avoiding its major problem, which was a tendency to fade or disappear when it rained. In fact, in 1998 ACTS would achieve a transmission rate of 45 megabits per second between the satellite and a Navy ship on Lake Michigan—twenty-two times faster than any previous data transmission from space—making it ideal for the Internet. As all the other sweet spots filled up with users, the Ka-band would become the new frontier.
But all that would come later. In 1992, Motorola wanted a proven, existing sweet spot. They actually wanted three sweet spots, but the first two were easy. The frequencies for the intersatellite links, so that the birds could talk to one another, were noncontroversial, because the band was already used by the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, and besides, the wavelengths would be absorbed by the atmosphere before there was any possibility of interference. The “feeder links”—communication between the SNOC and the satellites, uploading new software and downloading data through isolated earth stations called T-TACs in the northern latitudes—were equally easy to figure out. Those links used the Ka-band, and Motorola knew all about how to use it from the top secret Milstar program. Iridium would, in fact, be the first commercial firm to use the Ka-band in any significant way.
The problem was the frequency needed for what was called the “subscriber unit,” the actual phone. Motorola engineer John Knudsen had been working nonstop on the problem for a year and a half, and he had initially sought two bands in the spectrum, one for uplinks (caller to satellite) and one for downlinks (satellite to caller). Specifically he wanted 1545 to 1559 MHz for downlinks and 1646.5 to 1660.5 MHz for uplinks. But that was spectrum that Inmarsat was using, and no one had the stomach for a head-to-head fight with Olof Lundberg. Motorola’s backup choice (1610 to 1626.5 MHz uplink and 2483.5 to 2500 MHz downlink) was spectrum that the European Space Agency (ESA) had gotten specific authorization to use in 1987 for GalileoSat, Europe’s version of GPS. But it had never been used, because five years later GalileoSat had yet to launch, and there were rumors that the perpetually underfunded ESA was all but out of business anyway.13
But there was another problem. Motorola engineers found a government study showing that if they downlinked at 2483.5, they would be using a crowded band, part of the spectrum used by industries, scientific organizations, hospitals, and even garage door openers, pacemakers, and microwave ovens. Their conclusion was that the frequency was “full of all kinds of crap” and would cause them problems. Much later they found out the government report was wrong—the band would have worked fine—but at the time it caused them to make a fateful decision to seek both uplinking and downlinking in the same band, the L-band, the band everyone wanted.
It was spectrum used by Sweden for radar, used by the military in several dozen countries, used by every radio astronomy listening post in the world, and coveted by the soon-to-be-launched GLONASS system, which was Russia’s version of GPS, while coming dangerously close to a band of spectrum used by the Pentagon for weapons testing. It was also the frequency of the Geostar satellites used by Qualcomm for its asset-tracking service. In other words, Motorola was prepared to stampede, elephant-like, through the densest part of the jungle. Fifteen months later, when the Office of Technology Assessment reported back to Congress on the 1992 WARC, the white paper included the following passage:
In the future, government spectrum managers must be watchful that U.S. companies participating in international conferences support U.S. positions and do not promote their own special interests to the detriment of specific U.S. objectives. . . . Sometimes it is unclear who is in charge of formulating U.S. international spectrum policy—the Federal Government or the private sector and its consultants.
And everyone knew who they were talking about.
The WARC convened on February 3, 1992, in the Palacio de Congresos y Exposiciones, a white fortresslike complex situated on a landscaped hill in the resort town of Torremolinos, formerly a sleepy fishing village that put the Costa del Sol on the map when discovered by British tourists in the fifties. Here the motley congress of nations fell into chaos almost from the first day and ended up having interminable sessions in which very little was accomplished. There were the usual early fights over the High Frequency spectrum, better known as the “propaganda spectrum,” because, at 3 to 30 MHz, it was a virtually unregulated shortwave band that allowed broadcasters like Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and, increasingly, religious organizations to penetrate into any corner of the planet. Battles over the HF band had been going on for fifty years. Western countries tended to be in favor of expanding it, developing countries in favor of suppressing it, and the usual way to resolve differences was to make new allocations but embargo them for fifteen years. This was what was done, putting off the use of new propaganda frequencies until 2007. It was the last issue of the conference on which Europe would stand with America.
Each region of the world was trying to stake out some area of superiority. Japan was seeking a new allocation for high-definition television, since it had the technology ready long before anyone else. Europe wanted new frequency for something called “Future Public Land Mobile Telecommunications Systems” (FPLMTS), dubbed “Flumpits” by the delegates. Flumpits would provide spectrum for a new digital cell-phone operating system called Groupe Speciale Mobile (GSM) that had the potential to make cell phones compatible all over Europe. This was a problem at the time, as French phones didn’t work in Germany or Italy, British phones couldn’t be carried into Scandinavia, and the lack of connectivity was frustrating the common goal of a single European market. Thirteen European countries had been working on a pan-European standard since 1982, and they had set aside spectrum at 900 MHz for that purpose, but now that wasn’t going to be enough. Of course, one thing that made Iridium seem like such a great idea was that the planet was split up among dozens of competing analog cellular systems. That’s why the Motorola engineers thought Flumpits was a direct reaction to Iridium. No one really believed a single global standard for land-based phones was possible—there wasn’t enough bandwidth for even the current GSM system—but the Motorolans were suspicious: if all the Europeans wanted was to connect the nations of Europe, then why did they need a global allocation?
Meanwhile, the United States wanted new allocations for what was being called Broadcasting Satellite Service-Sound, better known today as satellite radio. The founder of Sirius Radio, a lawyer named Martin Rothblatt, was annoyed that Motorola was coming in at the eleventh hour and disrupting his plans to be the number one American priority, especially since satellite radio enthusiasts had been submitting proposals for twenty-five years and had met all their deadlines. Unfortunately for them, existing radio broadcasters in the United States were so opposed to the new technology that they considered Rothblatt the Antichrist, so the American delegation ended up serving two masters and articulating a mealymouthed position in the debate. Canada and Mexico, by contrast, were gung ho to light up the car radios of North America with Rothblatt’s international system, called WorldSpace. This gave Motorola another card to play when Leo Mondale brokered a backroom deal with Rothblatt: We’ll use our influence to get you your spectrum if you’ll use your influence to get us ours. In both battles, Europe was the enemy; Europe was opposed to satellite radio because it didn’t own the technology, and they eventually prevailed. The frequencies were approved—but embargoed until 2002.
Then there was the battle over the “Little LEO” spectrum, frequencies desired by four American companies that intended to launch mini-satellites that would be used for short-burst messaging and asset tracking.14 Once again the United States fought with Europe—and got the frequencies it needed, mainly because they were far from the sweet spots and didn’t threaten the PTTs.
All of these were hard-fought battles in which the small Third World countries were used as pawns by the tech giants, and with Europe opposing anything the United States wanted, even when the stakes weren’t that high. An example was the fight over Aeronautical Public Correspondence, better known as passenger phones on commercial airlines. This service, which allowed passengers to use seatback phones that could transmit but not receive calls, was in general usage in only one place in the world—the United States—but Europe wanted the worldwide frequency changed for no apparent reason other than to make it difficult for American companies to sell the service in Europe. No wonder the American delegates sometimes looked at their European counterparts as mean-spirited.
But none of the fights compared with that particular slice of radio-wave real estate that became known as the “Motorola Band.” Like gun control and abortion, you were either for it or against it. Technically it was the Big LEO allocation, and, if approved, it could be used by any low-earth-orbit satellite communications company, based anywhere in the world, but everyone knew that the lobbying effort was not led by Globalstar or Ellipso or Odyssey. Those companies were hanging back and letting Motorola assault the beaches, even as they planned to fight Motorola for that same frequency when it was considered later by the FCC.
When Motorola made it clear just exactly which part of the L-band it wanted, the first howls of protest went up from the European Space Agency. This was a loose consortium of thirteen countries that had its headquarters in Paris but had wisely distributed the Europork with a research center in Noordwijk, Netherlands; a mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany; an astronaut training facility in Cologne, Germany; an astronomy center in Villanueva de la Cañada, Spain; a satellite testing center in Redu, Belgium; and a launch site near the Equator in French Guiana. Ray Leopold and Leo Mondale made a preemptive strike by visiting ESA’s research-and-development center in Toulouse to reassure the Europeans that Iridium would work alongside them if they wanted to continue using the spectrum, but they reacted with hostility. Yes, it was true that they never launched the European GPS system, but they had a new system that would be using the spectrum. It was their own satellite phone system, called Archimedes. It would be fourteen satellites in medium earth orbit. Or maybe it would be three satellites in Molniya orbits. Or maybe it would be four satellites. At any rate, they were going to build it.
This was the first anyone had heard of Archimedes. There were no specs on it, not even a one-page description. Some of the Motorolans speculated that it had been dreamed up the previous night while the French were consuming a cocktail called the Archimedes at the hotel bar. Things got even weirder when another previously unknown system called LEOCOM was announced by the Italians. Suddenly speculative satellite systems were being invented in Europe almost daily, leading to after-hours barroom joking that they were all invented by Ulf Merbold. Merbold was the West German space traveler whose goofy smiling portrait was ubiquitous in the many offices of the ESA thanks to his being the first European astronaut on a European mission—a fairly irrelevant distinction at the fairly irrelevant date of 1983. Unfortunately for the German physicist, his grin and his name spawned an unlimited harvest of Ulf Merbold jokes as a way to lampoon the arrogant Europeans and their tendency to copy something from North America and then claim it as native. “It’s an Ulf Merbold project” became a way of saying, “It’s fantasy.”
Next Motorola got wind of a campaign by Inmarsat to challenge Iridium on the basis of licensing. If Iridium was unable to get “landing rights” in any given country, argued Inmarsat, then all seventy-seven Iridium satellites would have to be turned off any time they crossed the borders of that country. (This was a legal gray area, since outer space was technically unregulated, and Motorola intended to operate Iridium everywhere, regardless of whether the phone was legal on the ground.) Besides, Inmarsat argued, satellite telephony was not on the formal agenda, and the ITU shouldn’t make hasty decisions. Its recommendation? Spend ten years studying the issue before allocating any spectrum. “One advantage Inmarsat had,” said Mondale, “is that in 1992 there was no difference between a PTT and a regulator. They were one and the same. The national phone company was also the regulatory authority. And that was the regulatory authority that controlled Iridium licenses.”
But the Motorola delegation already had a mole within Inmarsat, so they knew how to fight back. The spy was an Italian named Enrico, and he had shown up unannounced at the end of the first week, asking to speak to the Motorola chief delegate. Enrico said he was frankly “disgusted” by what Inmarsat was doing in the dirty tricks department, and he would like to help. After extensive questioning—vetting him to make sure he wasn’t a double agent—Enrico was given a cover story and commissioned as an operative for the remainder of the conference. His cover was that he was dating one of the Motorola secretaries, which gave him ample opportunity to sneak away, pretend to be wooing her, and pass off information to his designated “handler,” Ray Leopold.
As the days passed, it seemed that everyone in Europe was more and more determined to shoot down Iridium. Part of the reason was that “one world, one phone” was a concept that threatened Flumpits, since Europe expected GSM to become the worldwide standard. The more visceral reason was that the Europeans simply resented the global dominance of the United States in cellular. And the symbol of that dominance . . . was Motorola.
The Swedes said they needed the Motorola band for radar usage, so Leopold met with them and figured out how to avoid interference. The DGSE—France’s version of the CIA—lodged a complaint that the Motorola band would interfere with its counterterrorism operations. There were loud protests from several radio astronomy centers around the world, but especially the ASTRON telescope in Dwingeloo, Netherlands, and the ICRAR telescope in Perth, Australia. There are dozens of radio astronomy installations staffed by physicists listening to radio emissions from distant galaxies. These are the scientists who discovered quasars and pulsars and theorized the Big Bang, and they have chips on their collective shoulders because their needs are constantly pushed aside in the name of commercial interests. The particular reason Iridium annoyed them was that there’s a “spectral band” emitted by hydroxyl radicals created by interstellar dust storms coming from the direction of Orion, and that band has a frequency of 1612 MHz—smack in the middle of what Iridium wanted to use for uplinks. The only nonastronomers who fully understand the spectral band are people like Ken Peterson, who was dispatched to the Plains of San Agustin, fifty miles west of Socorro, New Mexico, to meet the astronomers in charge of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and its twenty-seven antennas. Peterson recalled, “We discovered that the amount of interference is 10 decibels below Boltzmann’s constant”—a measurement that allowed Peterson and Leopold to come up with a “picket fence” solution. This was an interface allowing the thirty observatories focused on the spectral band to peek through Iridium transmissions during peak hours. Unfortunately, the Iridium hardware also denigrated the sensitivity of the telescope, thereby requiring twice as much listening time to observe the same number of hydroxide molecules. The astronomers were furious about losing their “quiet skies.” “They were dealing with signals from outside the realm of mankind,” said Leopold, “and they didn’t like sharing with mere humanity.”
One by one Motorola created impromptu tiger teams to deal with each objection. If the engineers could develop a compatible usage—a way for both parties to use the same frequency—then they would offer a compromise to the objecting nation. If a compromise was impossible, they would look for something else that country needed and try to get it in exchange for not opposing the allocation. And if all else failed, they would simply agree to a footnote saying that one particular usage in one particular country would be exempted. Footnotes could cause problems later, but it was better to get the allocation approved, even if the uses of it were ambiguous, than to have no frequency at all. During the process the Motorolans learned the art of writing footnotes, which was to make them as technically complex as possible and, more important, as vague as possible.
Week after week the conference dragged on, accomplishing nothing even with eighteen-hour sessions. The turning point finally came when Abderrazak Berrada, a respected scientist and head of the Moroccan delegation, rose for an impassioned speech, castigating the delegates for their inaction and calling it a dereliction of duty. He was speaking primarily to the bloc of thirty-two European nations, dominated by the entrenched postal and telegraph agencies, all refusing action that would threaten their dominance. Berrada then led a two-day walkout of Third World countries. Motorola saw this as an opening and intensified its sales pitch, offering the small countries discounted shares in Iridium, free government phones, and any other incentives they could think of, positioning themselves as the friends of the little guy against the economic bullies in Europe. “I fed the entire continent of Africa in those two days,” Jerry Adams told Bertiger.
And the courtship worked. “The Africans ganged up on the Europeans,” said Leo Mondale. “Since it was one country, one vote, they had them outnumbered.”
Yet the main issues of the day—Flumpits, satellite radio, high-definition TV, and Big LEOs—were all so fraught with emotion that presiding officer José Barrionuevo Peña was afraid to bring them to a vote. A seasoned politician, Barrionuevo was adept at figuring out where there was opposition and passing messages to the players so that everything could be worked out behind closed doors. Three weeks into the conference, he sent a message to the United States: Pakistan will oppose your allocation for Big LEO spectrum.
Pakistan? No one had heard anything about Pakistan, pro or con, during the entire history of Iridium’s development. A tiger team was quickly put together to figure out what Pakistan’s problem was. The two delegates from Islamabad were found staying in a cheap suburban hotel, eating meals in their rooms to save money. Obviously these were guys Motorola could work with. Soon the Motorola team was buying them dinners, suggesting they move into better digs, and trying to get down to the nitty-gritty: What is it, exactly, that you don’t like about our satellite phones?
And no one could ever get an answer. Both Pakistani delegates seemed to be lower-level functionaries who were simply afraid to vote for anything that wasn’t on the formal agenda. They didn’t have reasons, they didn’t have instructions from their bosses—they just thought a yes vote would somehow hurt their country. One of the delegates had been a prisoner of war in Kashmir, so there was some speculation that they were voting against it simply because India was voting for it. But Motorola could never extract any information beyond “We are not sure it’s good for Pakistan.”
And so it stayed, until the last night of the last week of the WARC, March 4, 1992, when the chairman announced that this would be the final session, and if the delegates intended to accomplish anything, now was the time. Everyone panicked—and suddenly Europe and Japan and the United States all came to the table. Europe could have Flumpits if the United States could have the Iridium allocation. Japan could have high-definition TV if it would in turn support Flumpits and Iridium. There was only one problem for Motorola: Pakistan was still determined to veto the satellite phone systems.
As the night wore on past 3:00 a.m., it started to look like Barrionuevo would never bring the Iridium allocation up for a vote. Every time Motorola sent a messenger to ask him about it, he would say, “We still have a problem.” Finally, a little after 4:00 a.m., Barrionuevo interrupted the speaker and called for an immediate vote on Big LEOs.
He had noticed that both of the Pakistani delegates were sleeping at their desks. The allocation passed.