By 1972, Duckett’s leadership had helped solidify the position of the Directorate of Science and Technology, which had become a worldwide enterprise—with CORONA, HEXAGON/KH-9, and RHYOLITE spacecraft orbiting the earth, U-2s patrolling the skies, and ELINT stations in Iran and Norway intercepting Soviet missile telemetry. In Washington, the Foreign Missile and Space Analysis Center and OSI were analyzing foreign nuclear and missile programs. ORD, meanwhile, was looking toward the future.
The directorate had also exhibited unusual organizational stability. The six offices Duckett had inherited—Computer Services, Special Projects, Special Activities, Research and Development, ELINT, and Scientific Intelligence—along with FMSAC, were still on the directorate’s organizational chart. Nor had there been any additions. That would change, with the reorganization of the responsibilities of FMSAC and OSI, the renaming and expansion of the mandate of Special Projects, and the acquisition of units that had been part of the intelligence and operations directorates.
Meanwhile, the CIA role in the U-2 effort it had forged would end in 1974. The directorate would also enter into new areas—some of which, such as covert communications, would become permanent missions. Others such as parapsychology would, fortunately, not survive much longer than Duckett’s tenure.
Three organizational changes occurred within the science and technology directorate in 1973. In September, responsibility for the analysis of the characteristics and capabilities of defensive missile and other weapons systems was transferred from OSI to FMSAC, which then became the Office of Weapons Intelligence (OWI).1
Because the analysis of weapons systems had significant common elements—such as the dependence on telemetry and data processing techniques—all weapons research was consolidated in a single office. OSI remained responsible for producing finished intelligence on foreign nuclear capabilities, biological and chemical warfare, advanced technologies, and the physical and life sciences.2
The transfer of the National Photographic Interpretation Center from the intelligence directorate to DS&T had been in the works for several years. By 1973, NPIC was no longer operating over a car dealership on K Street. In 1962, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board visited and were shocked by the conditions at 5th and K and advised the President that NPIC needed a new building.3
Kennedy promptly told DCI John McCone “to get them out of that structure” and wanted to know how soon a move could be accomplished. McCone responded that the Naval Gun Factory appeared to be a reasonable choice but that it would require a year to refurbish it. Kennedy’s reply was “All right, you do it.”4
On January 1, 1963, NPIC moved into its new home—Building 213 in the Washington Navy Yard, often referred to as the “Lundahl Hilton.” It was, according to McCone, a “rags-to-riches” situation. The 200,000 square feet of floor space meant that hundreds of more workers could be added. The building had large elevators, air conditioning, and good security. Most of all, it was the national center that Lundahl had envisioned almost ten years earlier. Most people in the building worked for the CIA—the people who typed the letters, drove courier trucks, ran the computers and library searches, and produced the graphics.5 But the photointer-preters came from the CIA, DIA, Army, Navy, Air Force, and other organizations. An Air Force interpreter who studied photos of Soviet silos might ride the elevator with a CIA interpreter who pored over photos of Chinese nuclear facilities and a Navy representative whose safe was filled with the latest photography of Soviet submarines.
Of course, the environment at the Washington Navy Yard, itself located in a rundown area of Washington, was far from luxurious. And working in a building whose windows, for security reasons, were bricked up certainly could be claustrophobic. But at least NPIC personnel were located in a larger facility with some amenities.
Even before the first KH-9 mission, NPIC officials, including director Arthur Lundahl and senior manager Dino Brugioni, realized that upgraded equipment would be needed to exploit the imagery fully. Using lasers rather than crosshairs for measurement would increase precision. Lundahl helped sell Richard Helms on the idea by arguing that better equipment would enable photointerpreters to extract more data from KH-9 images and thus reduce the chances of successful Soviet deception, a particular fear of Helms.6
Also required was other new equipment that would make the photointerpreters’ work easier and more productive, such as new light tables, microstereoscopes, and adjustable chairs. The new light tables would employ cold light to eliminate the unpleasant effects of hot lights, such as dry skin. Adjustable chairs would allow both short and tall interpreters to work in comfort.7
But the funding required was difficult to obtain while NPIC was in the intelligence directorate, where spending large amounts of money on equipment was not a common practice. Further, according to Brugioni, contractors were not interested in working with NPIC because it had relatively little money to spend. A million-dollar contract was not worth the trouble, and the intelligence directorate had no leverage with such contractors. However, the science and technology directorate did hundreds of millions of dollars of business with such contractors, giving it considerable influence. Accepting work from NPIC, even if it was for relatively little money, would be a smart business move if it was done for a valued customer. Helms was sufficiently convinced to authorize NPIC’s transfer to the DS&T, a move not without opposition.8
On February 2, 1973, Richard Helms’s tenure as DCI ended, a consequence of his refusal to permit President Nixon to use the agency to help cover up the Watergate break-in. Helms was shipped off to Iran as the new ambassador, and James R. Schlesinger, the former Bureau of the Budget official who almost terminated the HEXAGON program, became the nation’s new intelligence chief. Serving at that time as the agency’s executive director, its number-three official, was William Colby, a veteran of the OSS and the CIA’s Plans directorate. Colby quickly convinced Schlesinger that the executive director position was of little value, and that Colby would be more useful as the head of Plans.9
In his memoirs, Colby recalled that as the new head of Plans, he changed its designation to Operations and, on Schlesinger’s orders, transferred the Technical Services Division—which Helms had insisted remain in the Plans directorate when he headed it—to the DS&T. The change was, he wrote, “a start in breaking down the walls of compartmentation between the Operations Directorate and the Agency’s other directorates.” In return, Schlesinger agreed to shift to Operations the unit of the intelligence directorate that operated overtly within the United States to gather information from U.S. citizens with knowledge of foreign developments or personalities.10 As a result of the transfer, TSD became OTS—Office of Technical Service.
Colby’s boss had more in mind for TSD than a change in name and a transfer from one part of the agency to another. One day in April 1973, Schlesinger summoned John McMahon to appear at his office at nine o’clock the next morning. At the time, McMahon was in his second year as director of the ELINT office, after having served as deputy director of both the Office of Special Projects (1965–1970) and the Office of ELINT (1970–1971). Having no idea why Schlesinger wanted to see him, McMahon called Duckett, who joined him in the director’s seventh-floor office the next morning.11
Schlesinger told a surprised McMahon that he wanted him to assume command of OTS, replacing Sidney Gottlieb. The CIA veteran noted that his last real contact with the office and its activities was in the 1950s. Schlesinger’s response—“close enough”—settled the issue. With the issue of “whether” settled, the only question left was “when?” Duckett suggested the first of the month, but Schlesinger looked at his watch and said, “How about ten o’clock?” McMahon never returned to his office at OEL.12
McMahon’s immediate transfer reflected the DCI’s belief that it was necessary to clean house at OTS and do so without delay. According to McMahon, the key issue was that the drug research OTS was conducting with the Army had “got out of hand.”13 Schlesinger was also probably aware that in July 1971, TSD had provided former CIA officer and then White House employee Howard Hunt with an assortment of its products—a wig, a speech-altering device that would give him a lisp, a gait-altering device that would make him limp, a pair of thick glasses that provided clear vision, and false identification papers. Hunt’s projects included trying to dig up derogatory information on the Kennedys, in particular potential Democratic presidential nominee Edward Kennedy, as well as trying to obtain information that could be used to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked a copy of the Defense Department’s topsecret Pentagon Papers study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam to the New York Times.14 In May, Schlesinger issued a directive requiring all elements of the agency to report any activities that were conducted outside the agency’s charter.
Aside from cleaning house, McMahon had two other missions. One was to build up office morale, which had been damaged as a result of the negative publicity the CIA had received as fallout from Watergate and other matters. The other was to push improved technologies through the R&D phase and into operations.15
OTS, McMahon later recalled, “made any kind of James Bond device you could think of.”16 Those devices, in addition to the kind provided to Howard Hunt, included personal weapons such as the “cigarette pistol” (a .22-caliber weapon disguised as a European king-sized cigarette); a “pen” that could fire a .38-caliber tear gas cartridge; and a specially modified version of the Walter PPK—James Bond’s gun. Among the photographic and agent communications equipment developed and produced by OTS were cameras disguised as cigarette lighters and wristwatches and a complete radio station in an attaché case.17
Audio surveillance gadgets included briefcases and attaché cases equipped with recording equipment; clandestine listening devices disguised as batteries, appliance plugs, and other innocuous items; and hot-miked telephones—telephones wired to permit the mouthpiece to be activated even with the handset in the hung-up position. To help with surreptitious entry were such OTS products as assorted lock-picking devices, a kit to make key impressions, and an electronic stethoscope to aid in safecracking. There were also means for destroying equipment or cryptographic material (a combustible notebook), for producing explosions (explosive flour), or for incapacitating an adversary’s automobile (the gas tank pill, battery destroyer, or tire spike).18
OTS also produced a variety of means to open envelopes, including a flaps and seals kit, and a flaps and seals hot plate, which provided a portable heat source to aid in steaming open envelopes. In addition, there was the dead-drop device—an aluminum spike that could be unscrewed to insert microfilm or other material, rescrewed, and then driven into the ground—as well as a hollow coin that could be opened only by applying pressure to a specific point on one side of the coin.19
Schlesinger’s brief tenure in early 1973 as director was also marked by the April transformation of the Office of Special Projects into the Office of Development and Engineering (OD&E). The change in title reflected a change in mandate. Whereas OSP’s sole responsibility had been the development of satellite systems, OD&E was to provide engineering and system development support for the entire agency, with the Office of Research and Development focusing on “exploratory development.”20
Along with the new name came a new director for the office. Leslie Dirks, who had become OSP’s deputy director in September 1970 when John McMahon was assigned to head the ELINT office, became the first head of the office.21 Despite its more extensive responsibilities, OD&E’s primary business remained the same—development of satellite reconnaissance systems.
By the time Dirks assumed office, both the HEXAGON/KH-9 and RHYOLITE programs were well established. All three HEXAGON missions in 1972 had been successful, with the last staying in orbit for ninety days. The first of those missions was part of stepped-up U.S. reconnaissance activities designed to provide an updated survey of Soviet strategic forces in preparation for final negotiations on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. On April 23, the first 1973 mission was in its forty-fifth day.22
The first RHYOLITE continued to monitor telemetry from Soviet ICBM and SLBM tests. In June 1969, testing of a new SLBM, the SS-N-X-8, began and continued for several years. In October 1970, SS-9 Mod-4 tests resumed after a six-month hiatus, and by November 5, there had been four more. An October 1972 national intelligence estimate noted that the Soviets were continuing to test the Mod-3 version of the SS-11, which then constituted 60 percent of the Soviet ICBM force. The Soviets also began testing the Mod-2 version of the SS-N-6 Sawfly in 1972.23
The second RHYOLITE was launched March 6, 1973, and once its checkout was complete, a two-satellite constellation was established. The second RHYOLITE apparently was placed south of the Horn of Africa to receive telemetry from liquid-fueled ICBMs launched from Tyuratam toward the Kamchatka Peninsula impact zone.24 Both were kept busy by Soviet ballistic missile tests for years to come.
But OD&E was doing more than living off its past accomplishments. It was working on a follow-on to RHYOLITE, code-named ARGUS, which became the subject of an internal intelligence community battle and ultimately was killed by Congress.25 Most important, OD&E was proceeding with the KENNAN program, which promised to provide imagery in “near real-time”—as the satellite passed over its target—via a television-like electro-optical system. That program represented another victory for the directorate and Program B over their rivals in the Air Force Office of Special Projects (Program A)—but one obtained only through the intercession of some prominent scientists. KENNAN was also part of Bud Wheelon’s legacy and a personal triumph for Dirks, whose work on developing a real-time capability went back to the earliest days of the directorate.
In 1963, Dirks and several colleagues began pondering whether the United States could launch a truly secret reconnaissance satellite, one that could be kept secret not only from the American public but from the Soviet Union as well. An April 1963 memo from OSA deputy director James Cunningham to John Parangosky, his deputy for technology, argued that if, in the future, the United States relied solely on the heavy reconnaissance satellites under development, “an intense Soviet effort will seriously reduce our coverage and may deprive us of coverage completely.” 26
Cunningham believed that specter justified development of “a backup covert system which would rely, above all, on concealment” and “be kept on the shelf until needed.” Requirements of a covert system would include a clandestine and preferably mobile launch system, silent launch and operations, and radar cross-sections that did not show up on Soviet radar screens. Although the resolution of the photographs would be inferior to that of the more conventional systems, it was believed that “useful coverage can be obtained.”27
But Dirks and his colleagues quickly concluded that a secret satellite in low-earth orbit was not feasible. The Soviet space detection and tracking network would easily pick up the launch and orbit of the satellite. An alternative was to place the spacecraft in a much higher parking orbit, bringing it down only when needed. Possibly the Soviets would miss or be confused by this unusual maneuver. But this strategy also had a fatal flaw. As the film sat in space, unused, it would begin to degrade. By the time the secret satellite received NRO’s call, the entire film supply might be worthless.28
The alternative to film brought Dirks and his colleagues full circle to the concept of a television-type imagery return system, which had been suggested in the 1950s by Merton Davies and Amrom Katz of the RAND Corporation.29 The desirability of such a system had not been forgotten, despite the success of CORONA and the failure of SAMOS. Whether or not such a satellite could be kept secret from Soviet space watchers, it could send back timely data. The Cuban missile crisis was one dramatic example of the potential value of “real-time”—an example appreciated by both Bud Wheelon and a young Leslie Dirks. One day they visited AT&T’s Bell Labs in New Jersey to take a peek at something the company was working on, a special dispensation from Bell Labs president and PFIAB member William Baker, whose organization didn’t ordinarily allow outsiders to see work in progress. The two CIA officials saw work being done on charge-coupled devices (CCDs), which AT&T hoped would serve as key technology in videophones.30
Such technology was not mature in 1963, but Dirks realized that it might be in 1973. Over the rest of the decade and into the next, he and other OSP staffers, including Robert Kohler and Julian Caballero, kept the project alive, looking for advances in technology that would permit such a system and seeking support for research into areas relevant to its development.31
By the end of the 1960s, several crises had demonstrated the limitations of film-recovery systems for warning of imminent attacks and the monitoring of the wars that followed. There was an appreciation that existing satellite imagery sensors were “rigid and unresponsive on timely basis.”32
On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a series of devastating air strikes on Egyptian air bases. The attacks followed the mid-May withdrawal of U.N. troops from the Sinai and Gaza, the closure of the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping, the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, and the U.S. government’s assessment that a serious international effort to open the canal was unlikely.33
Over the next six days, Israeli forces racked up devastating victories against Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air and ground forces on three fronts. By noon on June 5, Egypt had lost 309 of its 340 serviceable aircraft, including all thirty of its TU-16 bombers that could be used against cities. Three Israeli Defense Force armored corps broke into Egyptian territory, took the Gaza Strip, and penetrated to the heart of the Sinai.34
In response to the Jordanian strafing of a small Israeli airfield, the Israeli air force struck back, catching thirty Jordanian planes on the ground. Israeli ground forces rolled through to the West Bank in a matter of days. Syria had also struck against Israel on the opening day of the war, bombing an oil refinery, Israeli positions at the Sea of Galilee, and an air base. An Israeli air strike followed, all but eliminating the Syrian air force. On June 9, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan instructed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to seize the Golan Heights, from which Syria had been conducting artillery attacks in peacetime. By noon the next day, the Syrian town of Kuneitra had fallen into IDF hands, and the road to Damascus was open.35
From the beginning of the war, the United States was monitoring events as closely as possible. But neither CORONA nor KH-7/GAMBIT satellites made a contribution. A KH-7 had been launched the day before the war. In addition, a CORONA mission that began May 9 continued for sixty-four days, including the entire period of the war. In an attempt to get better coverage, technicians altered the orbit of one of the satellites, but the returned film was apparently of poor quality. Not surprisingly, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later did not recall that satellite reconnaissance played any role in U.S. intelligence gathering during the war.36
Former JCS chairman Maxwell Taylor, then a member of the PFIAB, was among those whose interest in the possible value of real-time photography was stimulated by the war. After a July briefing by Helms, he sent the CIA a series of questions concerning intelligence collection capabilities in the context of the Six-Day War, leading Dirks, then head of OSP’s Design and Analysis Division, to explain CORONA capabilities during crisis situations. In a memo, Dirks noted that “I particularly emphasized the problems associated with using recovery film type systems in a crisis situation.”37 During a joint CIA-NSA-DIA briefing on August 31, Taylor indicated his continuing interest in the question of satellite reconnaissance in crisis situations. In particular, he inquired about the relationship between technological developments and the prospect of obtaining imagery in near real-time to support decisionmakers during a crisis.38
Less than a year after that briefing, on August 20, 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact forces stormed into Czechoslovakia to put an end to Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face.” In the months leading up to the invasion, attention in the West had turned to the question of whether the Soviets would use brute force, as they did in Hungary in 1956. A memorandum by the CIA’s Office of Strategic Research on August 2 noted, “It appears the Soviet high command has in about two weeks time completed military preparations sufficient for intervening in Czechoslovakia if that is deemed necessary by the political leadership.”39 Although a minority of analysts in each of the major analytical agencies (CIA, DIA, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research) believed that the Soviets would invade, a majority in each of those agencies expected the Soviets to exercise restraint.40
In an attempt to accumulate hard data on Soviet plans, the intelligence community relied on monitoring the Soviet press, diplomatic reporting, clandestine agents, and signals intelligence. KEYHOLE satellites also could provide important data. Signs of impending invasion that might show up in satellite photography included increased activities at airfields, troop departures, extensive logistics activities, and, most dramatic, the massing of troops near the Czech border.
A KH-8/GAMBIT launched on August 6 performed poorly and was deorbited after nine days. As a result, the CIA was forced to rely solely on the KH-4B launched on August 7. A film package returned prior to August 21 proved reassuring. It showed no indications of Soviet preparations for an invasion.41 But on August 20, Warsaw Pact troops, led by those from the Soviet Union, entered Czechoslovakia and brought an end to the Prague Spring.
When, subsequent to the invasion, the second and last of the CORONA film buckets was recovered and analyzed, the imagery showed “unmistakable Soviet preparations for invasion,” according to Roland Inlow, former chairman of the Committee on Imagery Requirements and Exploitation. Photointerpreters could see that the Soviets had placed crosses on their mobile equipment to distinguish it from similar equipment they had given to the Czech army. The film also showed the presence of large numbers of transport aircraft “lined up wing-tip to wing-tip at an airfield near the western border.” The transports had moved to the airfield under radio silence and would be used to transport the airborne forces that secured Prague.42
The experience was not forgotten by many of those involved in the photo reconnaissance program. One former CIA official recalled that people were “still talking about it years later.” Furthermore, “a lot of good work was done in retrospect”—the photo intelligence did prove valuable in developing warning indicators.43
The Sino-Soviet border hostilities of 1969 marked the fourth significant conflict between the countries since 1962. Notable about 1969 was not only that recent events seemed to highlight the limitations of film recovery systems and the potential value of a real-time system, but that technologies that might permit development of such a system had matured. Thus, in 1969, Leslie Dirks traveled up the Washington-Baltimore Parkway to visit Westinghouse, which was producing light-sensing diodes. Dirks felt that until CCDs were available, those diodes could be used in a real-time electro-optical system, recording the light levels of small segments of a scene; this information could be converted into electronic signals, transmitted to a relay satellite, and then converted on the ground to a photograph of the scene viewed by the satellite seconds earlier.44
Dirks’s investigation of technological developments that could make real-time imagery possible was complemented by two 1969 studies concerning its utility and impact. A June 1969 study, “The Implications of Near-Real Time Imagery on Intelligence Production and Processes,” examined the impact on the CIA of the acquisition of a real-time capability, including the disruption to staffing and schedules. A slightly later study, focused on fifty different crises (including Suez, Cuba, the Six-Day War, and Czechoslovakia) and categorized the crises by their rise, duration, location, and decline; the warning available; and the demands for information. It also addressed what information could have been obtained in each situation, how it might have changed perceptions of the crisis, and the potential utility of such information. It attempted to determine how different degrees of timeliness could have aided decisionmakers.45
The study’s conclusions were sufficiently positive to encourage the DS&T to begin a full-scale effort to develop a real-time system along the lines envisioned by Dirks. Not surprisingly, the CIA and Air Force were soon in competition. As had been the case for many years, the Air Force sought incremental improvements to currently operating systems rather than quantum leaps. Thus, Program A proposed development of FROG—Film-Readout GAMBIT. As its name indicated, FROG would take the film-return KH-8/GAMBIT satellite and add a film-scanning capability, in the manner of SAMOS.46
FROG had been under development since at least the mid-1960s. In an August 1966 memo, Bruce C. Clarke, then the special assistant for special projects to the Deputy Director of Intelligence, noted the system’s projected capabilities. It would have a thirty-to-ninety-day lifetime, the ability to transmit imagery three to four times a day, several ground stations in the United States, and a resolution of three to five feet. For targets at certain latitudes, there might be no more than a twenty-minute gap between photographs being taken and the image being received on the ground. For other targets, there might be a five-day gap resulting from the locations of the target and closest ground station along with the movement of the earth and the satellite. FROG was, according to Bud Wheelon, “a really dumb idea,” whose only purpose was to block the CIA program.47
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird apparently disagreed, selecting FROG as the next-generation KEYHOLE system. FROG had the advantage of being a modification of an existing system and thus could be brought into operation more quickly than a more revolutionary approach. But Laird’s decision, if not reversed, would probably mean that it would be a long time before any revolutionary change was made. That prospect did not sit well with Carl Duckett and some of the eminent scientists who served as advisers to the CIA and NRO.48
Duckett journeyed to Capitol Hill to talk to Senator Allen Ellender, the powerful Louisiana Democrat and chairman of the Appropriations Committee. Duckett persuasively explained the need for a more revolutionary system than the Air Force was proposing.49
When a panel headed by former deputy chief of defense research and engineering Eugene Fubini concluded that the CIA’s advanced concept was not feasible, a member of that panel who strongly disagreed, Richard Garwin of IBM, convened a meeting of the advisory Reconnaissance Panel, of which he was vice-chairman and Edwin Land was chairman. The panel concluded that the CIA’s concept was quite feasible. Garwin, along with Stanford physicist Sidney Drell, visited the White House to talk with Henry Kissinger. And Edwin Land talked to the President, advising him that there was nothing simpler than a tube with a mirror in front of it, which was the essence of the CIA approach.50
Further consideration took place at a 1971 meeting of the PFIAB, whose members included Edwin Land, William Baker of Bell Labs, Nelson Rockefeller, Gordon Gray, John Connally, and Maxwell Taylor. Usually Henry Kissinger and his deputy attended, representing the President. But this meeting also drew Nixon himself, along with James Schlesinger—then of the Office of Management and Budget and a supporter of the FROG concept. At that meeting Land said that FROG would be “the cautious choice,” whereas the “adventurous choice, and one which would be a quantum technological advance, is to push the development of an electronic imaging system which can be read out through a relay satellite while the sensor is over the target.” Nixon promised to take a “hard look.”51
Nixon’s ultimate decision to approve the CIA approach was, according to an individual present, “a direct consequence” of the meeting. The decision pleased Duckett, Helms, and especially Leslie Dirks—but not Ralph Jacobson of the Air Force Office of Special Projects, who saw FROG, a potential $2 billion program, vanish into thin air.52
Proposals to turn the CIA’s U-2Rs over to the Air Force had been considered almost yearly, since NRO director John McLucas first suggested the action in 1969. In December of that year, President Nixon decided to maintain a CIA program through 1971 and requested that the issue be reviewed by the 40 Committee, which had succeeded the 303 Committee in reviewing sensitive intelligence operations for the NSC. In August 1970, the committee recommended that the CIA continue flying the spy planes through 1972. On August 12, 1972, the committee made the same recommendation.53
Overseeing those operations was Brig. Gen. Wendell L. Bevan Jr. A 1943 West Point graduate, Bevan had flown thirty World War II missions, and gone on to serve at Air Force headquarters, as assistant air attaché for Central America, and as a reconnaissance wing commander. He flew 111 combat sorties, including twenty over Vietnam, on both fighter and reconnaissance missions. In June 1971, Bevan was snatched from his position on the Joint Staff to become OSA’s fifth director. He would also be its next to last.54
Pressure to place the entire U-2 fleet under single management continued. A memo from the Secretary of Defense to the DCI, undated but apparently sent in spring 1973, noted that “the Air Force’s U-2R fleet has been under considerable operational and resource pressure to satisfy current mission needs,” including overflights of Cuba. It also asserted that a consolidation would eliminate duplicative functions and could save over $40 million. Thus, Schlesinger proposed that the four U-2Rs assigned to the CIA be transferred to the Air Force. In June 1973, he informed the 40 Committee that the CIA role in U-2 operations could be terminated without difficulty. On August 30, the committee approved the CIA plan to terminate its U-2 activities on August 1, 1974.55
Operations in the final year included those over the Middle East, a result of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Two U-2s from Detachment G (based at Edwards Air Force Base in California) deployed to Britain’s Akrotiri base on Cyprus on October 7 and 8 in anticipation of being ordered to monitor the conflict, but no tasking ever arrived.56 Eventually, the war did lead to CIA U-2 flights over the region when the participants in the conflict agreed to U.S. monitoring of the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli- Syrian disengagement areas. On April 21, a U-2 from Detachment G arrived at Akrotiri and conducted six overflights between May 12 and July 28, with each side being provided the photographs as well as reports specifying the deployment of the other’s forces.57
During those Middle East overflights, Detachment H on Taiwan ceased its operations against China, partially as result of the U.S.-PRC rapprochement. In June, the Republic of China officially agreed to termination of the TACKLE program. On August 1, 1974, the Air Force assumed responsibility for monitoring the Arab-Israeli cease-fire, ending the CIA’s U-2 program. The 1130th Air Technical Training Group (Detachment G) at Edwards was disestablished, and the CIA’s Office of Special Activities, with the OXCART in mothballs and the U-2 in the hands of the Air Force, was phased out.58
In July 1972, Sayre Stevens replaced Robert Chapman as director of ORD. It was a change that, according to an Inspector General’s report completed that July and issued in October, was overdue. The report was critical of Chapman’s management style, noting that “the arrangements for overseeing the work of ORD seemed to us to be very loose and unstructured . . . many of the tasks that occupy [staff members] are self-generated as a consequence of a personal interest in a particular subject.” As a result, “many [technical officers] have been allowed to drift into fields of activity . . . which offer little or no prospect of benefiting the Agency.” As Stevens recalled many years later, ORD had become too much of a “hobby shop.”59
The report also noted that ORD’s project officers “are very much isolated from the rest of the Agency and have little familiarity with the work of the offices whose missions they are trying to support.” That isolation resulted in very different views of the value of ORD’s work—“many of ORD’s completed R&D projects are evaluated as successes by ORD’s definition but as failures by [their] customers . . . some of them achieved the technological objectives that were sought, but there was no requirement for the product at the time it became available.”60
Stevens’s mission was to rejuvenate the 105-person office (which was located not at CIA headquarters but on several floors of the CIA facility in Rosslyn—the Ames Center Building). Over the three years and two months that Stevens and then James Hirsch, who came from OEL and returned there in 1976, ran ORD, they sought to move away from the “sterile” system under which ORD’s scientists would come up with their “sandbox projects” and then seek to generate interest somewhere in the directorate or rest of the agency. Instead, they wanted ORD to identify the specific needs of both analysts and operators and seek to develop means of fulfilling those needs.61
One program, the Large-Area Crop Inventory Experiment (LACIE), also known as Project UPSTREET, was intended to help analysts produce more precise predictions of Soviet agricultural production. The project was conceived and developed under Stevens and implemented under Hirsch. The impetus for it was the Soviet Union’s disastrous 1972 grain harvest. Soviet purchase of far greater quantities of grain on the international market led to an increase in the cost of bread and other grain-based products in the United States.62
Prior to 1974, the standard means of estimating a Soviet harvest was applying statistical analysis, specifically a technique known as regression analysis, to the data collected by U.S. agricultural attachés. However, when a particular area experienced a bad harvest, the attachés were prohibited from traveling there. And in the absence of the required data, the reliability of the estimates suffered.63
Stevens, at the suggestion of the group in ORD that focused on improving analytical methodologies, sought to make use of a resource that had first become available in 1972—the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS), which would become better known as LANDSAT. In contrast to the high-resolution imagery satellites developed by the CIA and Air Force, the first LANDSAT satellite, which operated in a 570-mile orbits, produced imagery with a resolution of about 100 feet.64 However, the satellite was able to cover wide areas in a single photo and carried a multispectral scanner that could produce images using four different channels. The data could then be used to produce “false-color” images in which cloudy water would appear blue, while living vegetation would show up as bright red.65
From 1964 to 1968, ORD had developed an airborne multispectral system that was used for predicting and assessing crop yields, which provided an impetus for LANDSAT. Aerial reconnaissance of the Soviet Union was not possible, but LANDSAT imagery was—and if full use was made of its multispectral capabilities, LANDSAT could aid analysts trying to determine how well or poorly the Soviet Union’s socialist farming system had done in a given year. That imagery would be combined with meteorological data and other information in a computer simulation model that “grew” the Soviet grain crop up through its harvest. The model started with a maximum estimate for grain production and then adjusted the estimate in reaction to data obtained from LANDSAT and other sources.66
The experiment, carried out between 1974 and 1977, proved useful in determining wheat acreage, data that could then be used in producing estimates before harvesting began. Because of budget limitations, LANDSAT images were replaced by weather satellite images, but the basic methodology remained in use.67
During Stevens’s tenure, ORD also pioneered soft-copy imagery exploitation—extracting data from imagery on computer screens rather than through the traditional method, an analyst examining film on a light-table. ORD sought to implement an idea that had been discussed in the scientific literature—to scan photographs (such as those sent back on film from the KH-8 and KH-9 satellites) into a computer, then enhance and manipulate them. At the time, computers were not capable of performing such functions without long delays—but by the early 1980s, computer technology would advance sufficiently.68
Under Hirsch, ORD pioneered computer networking for the agency. Initially, twenty users were hooked into CIA mainframes. Three and half years later, there were only forty participants. But the idea took off after that, with more new employees being familiar with computers, and the number tied into CIA mainframes would grow exponentially.69
Of course, various hardware programs continued—particularly unmanned aerial vehicles programs like AQUILINE. Stevens later recalled that when he joined ORD, it had about eight ongoing airplane programs—something the Inspector General’s report considered a sign of poor management. There were also microprocessed electronics “which didn’t weight anything” and were “small as hell.”70
One area in which ORD had difficulty in making an impact was support of clandestine operations. The office was, in Stevens’s words, “kind of a Johnny-come-lately research organization” in supporting such operations. It was in severe competition with the “very spooky” technical services unit. Attempts by the research and development office to simply hand off a product to the Operations directorate usually didn’t work, and TSD/OTS would wind up reengineering ORD’s invention.71
In June 1973, OTS chief John McMahon and Carl Duckett were briefed by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Puthoff had obtained a doctorate from Stanford University, was the holder of a patent for a tunable infrared laser, and had coauthored an influential textbook on quantum electronics. Targ, a physicist whose father was a devotee of the paranormal, had spent the previous decade conducting laser research.72 But the SRI scientists did not come to Langley to brief Duckett and McMahon on the use of lasers for intelligence purposes. Rather, the two senior CIA officials heard about a very different, and unconventional, area of research—psychic spying.
Four years earlier, Puthoff had experienced a number of personal and professional changes. Separation from his wife, a visit to the Esalen Institute, and boredom with teaching in Stanford’s electrical engineering department had been followed by his moving over to SRI, which had close ties to Stanford University but was funded largely by government contracts. Puthoff joined SRI to assist with a laser-related project, but when funding dwindled, he sought permission from his boss and obtained $10,000 from the part-owner of a fried-chicken franchise to test for the existence of psychic abilities.73 Puthoff ’s turn toward fringe science was not exactly a radical departure. For several years, he had been an active member of the Church of Scientology, and he provided the church with a letter referring to Scientology as a “highly sophisticated and highly technological system more characteristic of the best of modern corporate planning and applied technology.” In addition, he wrote that he found Scientology “to be an uplifting and workable system of concepts which blend the best of Eastern and Western traditions.”74
In April 1972, Targ met with personnel from the Office of Scientific Intelligence to discuss the subject of paranormal abilities, and stated that he knew individuals who claimed they witnessed Soviet research into psy-chokinesis—the alleged movement of objects using only a mind-generated force—and made films of such activities available to the CIA representatives. In turn, OSI contacted both the research and development and technical service offices, whose past research (including in the case of TSD, research into ESP) made them candidates to fund further investigation.75
The first test subject was Ingo Swann, a New York artist who had been involved in psychic experiments at the City College of New York. In June 1972, Puthoff invited him to SRI to demonstrate his alleged abilities. For the first test, Swann was taken to a superconducting shielded magnetometer at Stanford University that was being used in quark experiments. According to accounts that accept the existence of psychic abilities, when Swann directed his attention to the interior of the magnetometer, there was a disturbance in its output signal, indicating a change in the internal magnetic field. In addition, other signal variations were observed in response to his mental efforts, variations never witnessed before or after his visit. A description of the events was transmitted in a letter to OSI and in discussions with OTS and ORD representatives.76
TSD followed up by arranging for an experiment, costing less than $1,000, in which Swann was asked to describe objects hidden by TSD personnel—specifically, a live brown moth placed in a sealed box. Reportedly, Swann stated that “I see something small, brown, and irregular, sort of like a leaf, or something that resembles it, except that it seems very much alive, like it’s even moving!” The results led then TSD head Sidney Gottlieb to approve another $2,500 in funding and suggest development of a more detailed research agenda.77
Just as was the case with the MKULTRA experiments, part of the interest was in determining what results the Soviets might be achieving in their work and how those results might be used in operations against the CIA and the United States. In July 1972, the Defense Intelligence Agency published one of what would be several studies dealing with Soviet bloc research in the parapsychology field. The study examined purported Soviet efforts with respect to ESP, pyschokinesis, astral projection, clairvoyance, and other reputed paranormal phenomena.78
By October 1972, TSD authorized a $50,000 Biofield Measurements Program and appointed Kenneth Kress to monitor the activity. Over the next eight months, experiments progressed from attempts to “remote view” objects hidden in boxes to viewing sites in the San Francisco Bay area to which SRI employees had been sent as “beacons.” In February 1973, halfway through the contract, a review of the results led several ORD officers to favor contributing personnel and funding from their office. At about the same time, a third remote viewer, Pat Price, joined the project. Price was a small-building contractor, who had served as a local councilman in Burbank in the 1950s and briefly had been the town’s police commissioner. He had met Puthoff at a lecture in Los Angeles a few years earlier, and had run into Puthoff and Swann in late 1972 while he was selling Christmas trees.79
In late April 1973, a management review involving OTS, ORD, and Executive Director William Colby allowed the project to continue, although Kress was told not to increase the scope of the project or anticipate any follow-on funding. There was a potential for significant embarrassment, and OTS already had enough problems—it was being investigated for possible involvement in Watergate.80 But this guidance did not prevent a somewhat different approach. Swann had suggested that instead of relying on a “beacon” individual at sites to be viewed (which certainly would not be feasible with regard to the sensitive Soviet and Chinese sites), the viewer be given geographic coordinates and asked to view the facility or activity at those coordinates. Such a procedure was dubbed Scanate—Scanning by coordinate.81
That approach was a step in the direction McMahon wanted the effort to go—away from experimentation and toward application. He considered parapsychology an “extremely attractive” approach to intelligence collection and argued that standard intelligence sensors operated “in narrow bands.” Thus, there was reason to expect, in his view, that information in other bands could be obtained if “the right receiver” could be developed. OTS, however, was not in business to conduct pure research but rather to support the CIA’s clandestine operators.82
In summer 1973, Puthoff asked an OSI official to give him “coordinates of a place I don’t know anything about” for him to pass on to the remote viewers. The official responded, “I’ll do you one better. I’ll get you the coordinates of some place even I don’t know about.” A colleague in the CIA provided the OSI official with a set of coordinates, without further explanation.83
In late May, Ingo Swann sat at one end of a table in the SRI conference room, wrote down the coordinates read by Puthoff, and began his 3,000- mile psychic journey. After six minutes, he had produced an account that included rolling hills, a city to the north, lawns similar to the ones found at a military base, and a flagpole. He also spent an hour at home the following morning viewing the target, although the effort didn’t add much to his description.84
On June 1, two days after Swann’s at-home viewing, Price was given the same coordinates as Swann. On June 4, Price’s report, dated June 2, of his viewing was received in the mail. The result was a more detailed account of the site, although one that was consistent with Swann’s report. Beyond descriptions of the terrain and the assertion that it was a former missile base, Price claimed that he saw an underground area used for record storage as well as to house computers, communication equipment, and large maps. He also saw personnel from the Army 5th Corps of Engineers and the Army Signal Corps.85
Subsequently, he was asked to revisit the site and report on any information concerning code words stamped on documents at the site. According to Price, there was a file cabinet on one wall. The first two words on its label were “Operation Pool . . .” with the final word unclear. Files inside the cabinet were labeled CUEBALL, 14 BALL, 4 BALL, 8 BALL, and RACKUP. On the top of one desk were papers labeled FLYTRAP and MINERVA, and the code name associated with the site seemed to be HAYFORK or HAYSTACK. Price also came up with the names of personnel—a Colonel R. J. Hamilton, Major General George Nash, and possibly a Major John C. Calhoun.86
The OSI officer took the information to the colleague who had provided him with the coordinates, who said that Swann and Price were not even close, that their reports were “bullshit”—the coordinates corresponded to his summer cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. However, the OSI officer remained intrigued with the similarity of the descriptions and decided to find out if there was an installation near his friend’s retreat similar to that described by the two remote viewers.87
Indeed, the OSI staffer discovered a huge facility at Sugar Grove, West Virginia. Nominally a U.S. Navy communications facility, it actually was a National Security Agency intercept site, with a variety of eavesdropping antennae, including a sixty-foot receiving dish for pulling in the traffic from INTELSAT and other satellites. Operations were directed from a two-story underground building.88 The intelligence mission was secret, but the facility, given its ostensible function, was not.
The results of Swann’s and Price’s psychic journeys to the West Virginia mountains were the subject of an October 1 report to the CIA. The following month, a “Top-Secret/Codeword Eyes Only” memo evaluated selected results of the experiments. A map drawn by Swann was “correct,” while the terrain was “exactly as drawn” by Price, and was “not otherwise accessible to non-base personnel.” Elevations given by Price were correct to within 100 feet, and there was “an astonishing similarity between [Price’s] description of the facility, some dissimilarities, but most of the important ones do match.”89
The code words elicited by Price were “current or past active COMINT descriptives.” An initial survey showed all the code words to be inactive by 1966, but subsequent investigation turned up two that were relevant to the site but unfamiliar to current personnel. In addition, the site reference (code name) was also among the words reported by Price. One individual named by Price was an NSA security officer, although the memo noted that it was not known whether “he was present during [Price’s] alleged ‘visit.’” The other individuals named were also DOD personnel but were not familiar to personnel at the site who were asked.90
The same memo also evaluated summer remote-viewing sessions that involved a Soviet installation in the Urals and a joint French-Soviet meteorological station on Kerguelen Island in the southern Indian Ocean. Price had “discovered” the Urals site at Mount Narodnaya on his own, without the apparent provision of coordinates. He described an underground facility, helipads, a railway, and a radar installation 30 miles to the north of the site with a 165-foot dish and two small dishes.91
The CIA memo referred to Price’s description as generally correct with regard to “topography and location of radar dishes.” There was a discrepancy between the number of dishes “viewed” by Price and those shown in KH-4 satellite imagery from 1972. There was only one radar dome visible, and that was 60–100 miles from the facility as opposed to 30 miles. There was no evidence on the satellite imagery of a railway or helipads. Despite the discrepancies, Price’s descriptions of the site, the Abez space tracking facility, ranged from “similar to identical.” The memo also commented that the odds were “over one million to one” that Price could have provided the description based on coincidence or guess, even with the inaccuracies—although there was no explanation as to the basis upon which those odds were calculated.92
The description of the Indian Ocean facility was produced by Swann after Puthoff had been given the coordinates by his OSI contact. In addition to its acknowledged function, the site was rumored to double, at least for the Soviets, as an intercept or missile tracking station.93 The CIA assessment noted that the “descriptions are rather precise, and correct to the limits of KH-4 photography” and that “description of installation functions correct.” Other descriptions were not verifiable on the basis of information available to the CIA.94
The memo’s author noted that he had no “explanation in fact or in principle” for the results and verified that [Price] “is a highly gifted subject capable of obtaining accurate ‘visual’ information at a distance by non-ordinary means.” He went on to state that “whether this information is obtained by paranormal ability or not remains open to speculation.”95
An attached memo from Puthoff ’s OSI contact noted that he was informed that Puthoff’s laboratory would likely be terminated “unless at least a modest level of support can be obtained . . . from a reputable Governmental agency such as CIA.” The OSI official also noted that the SRI vice-president for research informed him that SRI could find no evidence of fraud. Nor could the CIA official, although he refused to offer an ironclad statement with regard to experiments in which he had not participated.96
The memo, however, did not discuss a number of issues that would be expected to arise in evaluating the extraordinary claims arising from the remote-viewing experiments—in particular with regard to the Sugar Grove site. Neither Swann nor Price conducted his remote viewing under circumstances in which his lack of access to outside information could be verified. In addition, there was no concern expressed, at least in the memo, about Puthoff ’s having worked at NSA in the early 1960s—which might have given him access to information about Sugar Grove, including about code words and personnel. Suspicion might have been heightened by Price’s reporting of a number of obsolete code words—the type of error that could be explained by his having been provided the information by someone who had access at an earlier time but not any longer. Nor did there appear to be any examination of public information, such as media coverage about the targets, information that certainly was available about the existence of a facility at Sugar Grove.97
In any case, the summer 1973 experiments were reviewed by Colby, who had replaced Schlesinger as DCI in September; McMahon; and Sayre Stevens, who had become director of ORD in July 1972 and was far less enthusiastic than McMahon about such activities. He even told Duckett he “was out of his mind” to approve such research.* Nevertheless, a jointly funded ORD-OTS program commenced in February 1974. The premise behind the program was that paranormal phenomena such as remote viewing existed; the objective was to develop and exploit them for intelligence purposes. ORD funds were used for research into measurable physiological or psychological characteristics of individuals believed to have psychic capabilities and the establishment of protocols for verifying such abilities. OTS funding was used to assess the operational utility of paranormal capabilities.98
It was not long before a number of problems developed with the program, including the objection of ORD scientists that the tests being conducted by SRI were not sufficiently rigorous.99 Such objections were also raised by the broader scientific community. Later in 1974, Puthoff and Targ published some of their remote-viewing experiments in the prestigious science journal Nature. However, an accompanying editorial comment noted that “there was agreement that the paper was weak in design and presentation, to the extent that details given as to the precise way in which the experiment was carried out were disconcertingly vague.” Further, all the referees felt that the details of the various safeguards taken to rule out fraud were “uncomfortably vague.”100
By the time the paper was published in fall 1974, there were new directors of both OTS and ORD. In August, John McMahon took another step in his rise through the agency, becoming Associate Deputy Director for Administration. He was replaced by former FMSAC head David Brandwein, who was skeptical about the value of the program. Meanwhile, Stevens became Duckett’s deputy in June. He was replaced as head of ORD by James V. Hirsch, who had graduated from MIT with a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1959 and had been lured away from General Electric by the directorate’s ELINT office in 1968. Hirsch told Kress that he could not accept that paranormal capabilities existed, but, realizing his bias, would accept the advice of his staff.101 That willingness would give the project further life.
But an experiment conducted in summer 1974 and evaluated in the fall confirmed Brandwein’s and Hirsch’s skepticism. That experiment, the result of the push by Duckett and McMahon for viewing of sensitive targets, began on July 9 at SRI, four days after the United States had obtained satellite imagery of a target of special interest—located at 50 degrees, 9 minutes, 59 seconds north, and 78 degrees, 22 minutes, 22 seconds east. Targ and Puthoff informed Pat Price of the coordinates.102
Of interest to the CIA at those coordinates was an installation the agency had designated URDF-3 for Unidentified Research and Development Facility-3. The Air Force designated the same site, which was sixty miles southwest of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in Kazakhstan, as a PNUTS—possible nuclear underground test site. The chief of Air Force intelligence, Maj. Gen. George Keegan, and key aides believed the site could well be a center for particle-beam research. Concern that such activity might be taking place was first aroused in the late 1960s, when satellite images showed workers assembling four steel spheres nearly sixty feet in diameter. The spheres were then lowered into underground chambers that had been dug out of rock. In the particle-beam scenario, they would serve to contain nuclear low-yield explosions that would create the energy required for producing the particle beam’s “lightning bolt.”103
Price was shown maps of the area and told only that the target was a scientific military research and test facility and was 25–30 miles southwest of the Irtysh River. He was instructed to start with a view of the general area as it would be seen from 50,000 feet and get the layout of any complexes or buildings.104
The July 9 session, the first of four over four days, lasted about two hours. From the beginning, Price made the assumption, which was incorrect, that the facility was related to ongoing Soviet space launch and recovery activities. He gave what the experiment’s evaluator, a Los Alamos scientist, judged to be “an almost perfect description of someone’s first look at the Operations Area of URDF-3”—as low one-story buildings partially dug into the ground.105
Price also reported seeing nine other items that the evaluator noted “simply don’t appear at or near URDF-3.” The imagined objects included a road from the river to the target area, a 500-foot-tall antenna, an array of outdoor telephone poles, an outdoor pool, an airstrip twelve miles from URDF-3, a small village to the northeast, a city sixty miles southwest of the facility, and a three-story building (which Price claimed was the dominant building in the complex).106
On the night of July 9, Price completed and turned over, presumably to Puthoff, drawings of part of a perimeter fence and a rail-mounted gantry crane; the drawings were then passed to the CIA monitors the next day. The fence, Price stated, was electrified, but he did not mention its unique shape or the existence of four perimeter fences at URDF-3. His drawing of the gantry crane was evaluated as “remarkably close in detail to the actual gantry crane at URDF-3.” Then, on the afternoon of July 10, Price described a complicated relationship involving three gantry cranes at the facility, which the evaluator wrote “does not exist at URDF-3.”107
Price also reported by phone to Targ that he saw a 55-foot-tall dome-shaped building as well as a 65- to 75-foot-tall cement silo-like building south of the dome-shaped building. However, there were no buildings at URDF-3 that resembled either of the buildings Price described. In the general area where Price claimed the buildings were located were a partially earth-covered tank and a tall cylindrical tank or tower.108
For the evaluator, it seemed impossible to imagine how Price came up with a likeness to the actual crane unless he either saw it through remote viewing or was “informed of what to draw by someone knowledgeable of URDF-3.” The evaluator also noted that “the experiment was not controlled to discount the possibility that [Price] could talk to other people—such as the Disinformation Section of the KGB.” (Price did speak to Targ, with only the SRI experimenter’s side of the conversation audible to the CIA monitors.) But the evaluator also found Price’s repeated reporting of objects that did not exist at URDF-3 as “difficult to understand.” He suggested one rather obvious explanation—if Price “mentions enough specific objects (such as three different types of gantry cranes when there is really only one), he will surely hit on one object that is actually present.” He went on to ask, “if the user of Price’s remote viewing talents had no way of checking, how could he differentiate fact from fiction?”109
The third day produced “the most negative evidence yet and tends to discredit Price’s ability to remotely view URDF-3.” That evidence was Price’s response to a request that he investigate whether four buildings that he described as separate were really the surface elements of a single underground building. He “looked” underground as requested and reported, “No, that’s a concrete apron, and there’s nothing subterranean right in that particular area.” In fact, the four separate buildings were four sections of a 50-foot-deep underground building.110
The overall judgment of the evaluator was that “the validity of Price’s remote viewing of URDF-3 appears to be a failure . . . the only positive evidence of the rail-mounted gantry crane was far outweighed by the large amount of negative evidence noted in the body of this analysis.” The evaluator also said it was unfortunate that much of the experiment was conducted over the phone with only the SRI experimenter’s voice being recorded. He suggested that “future experiments be more tightly controlled to discount the possibility of the subject discussing the material with people not involved in the experiment.”111
(Only years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, would American scientists tour the facility and discover what the Soviet scientists were working on there. They were not trying to avoid nuclear testing restrictions or build a particle-beam weapon. Rather, research at URDF-3 was geared to developing a nuclear-powered rocket for space flight.)112
In 1974 and in succeeding years, Puthoff and Targ claimed the experiment a success, pointing to the description of the large crane.* ORD officers did not agree, feeling that in the absence of control experiments, Price’s successes could be described as lucky guessing. Such skepticism led OTS to issue a challenge to SRI—do something of genuine operational value. A number of ideas were elicited from personnel in OTS and the Operations directorate. The idea selected was to seek to aid Division D in its job of installing audio collection systems.113
The targets chosen were the code rooms of two Chinese embassies, one of which was in Africa, whose interiors were known to the audio teams because they had made surreptitious entries several years earlier. Price was instructed to view the embassies remotely, locate the code rooms, and extract information that could enable a member of the audio team to determine whether Price was likely to be of operational value in future undertakings.114
According to project officer Ken Kress, Price “correctly located code-rooms, produced copious data, such as the location of interior doors and colors of marble stairs and fireplaces that were accurate and specific.” At the same time, “much was also vague and incorrect.” One operations officer did conclude, according to Kress, that remote viewing “offers definite operational possibilities.”115
Not everyone was as enthusiastic. The experiments were followed by a review by the Operations directorate, OTS, and ORD. ORD project officers felt that the results “were not productive or even competent” and therefore decided to terminate funding to SRI. James Hirsch, then ORD director, later recalled that the experiments were conducted without proper scientific protocols—that CIA officers present during the experiments knew where the code rooms were and thus were subject to the “unconscious elicitation of information.” OTS also ceased funding SRI’s experiments—but it did sign Price to a personal services contract, and Price was assigned to work with an OTS psychologist.116
Several OTS staffers who had volunteered to attempt remote viewing were chosen and given the geographic coordinates of a site in Libya. They described new construction that “could be an SA-5 missile training site.” According to Kress, the “Libyan desk officer was immediately impressed” and told him that an agent had reported essentially the same story.117
The OTS psychologist passed a second set of Libyan coordinates to Pat Price, who quickly responded with a report describing a guerrilla training site along with a maplike drawing of the installation. He also described an alleged related underwater sabotage training facility several hundred kilometers away on the coast. The data were passed to the Libyan Desk, which evaluated part of the report immediately and part after obtaining special reconnaissance coverage. According to Kress, some of Price’s information was verified by reconnaissance, and his description of the underwater facility was similar to an agent’s report. A follow-up request to Price to provide information on activities inside the facilities as well as on plans and intentions went unanswered when Price, whose paranormal abilities apparently didn’t extend to precognition, died of a heart attack a few days later.118
Price had been the last vestige of the CIA’s remote-viewing effort, and his death soon ended the CIA’s efforts to employ parapsychology for intelligence purposes—although not the efforts of other agencies or the CIA’s study of Soviet efforts. In August 1977, Adm. Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s DCI, was asked about CIA support of parapsychology research after the Washington Post ran an article about the government’s support of psychic research. Turner noted that the CIA had a man gifted with “visio-perception” of places he had never seen but, he added with a smile, the man had died two years earlier, “and we haven’t heard from him since.” According to Gene Poteat, the CIA’s support of psychic research was a “dumb exercise” that produced “lots of laughing,” but it was born out of a knowledge that the Soviets were conducting such experiments and an attitude of “let’s not leave anything uncovered.”119*
Before its transformation into OTS, the technical services division also was largely responsible for electronic agent communication systems—which for many decades had meant radio. During World War II and many years after, counterespionage agencies around the world monitored illicit radio signals that might reveal the identity, location, and activities of foreign agents. During the war, U.S. intelligence officers behind enemy lines sometimes transmitted data via a system designated JOAN-ELEANOR—receivers and tape recorders carried on an aircraft flying overhead.120
The space age brought new possibilities. Communications could be sent to a satellite. Depending on the satellite’s orbit, the message could either be stored onboard and then “dumped” when the satellite flew over the appropriate ground station or simply relayed immediately to a ground station. By the late 1970s, the Soviet Union was operating a network oflow-earth satellites, code-named STRELA, to communicate with illegals in the United States and elsewhere.
The first U.S. effort in the field dated back to 1965–1966. The system, designated BIRDBOOK, was, by subsequent standards, primitive. The intelligence officer or agent would carry the briefcase antenna system into a suitable building, encode the message, load it, go to a windowsill on an upper floor of a building directly under the path of the satellite, open the antenna, and point it in the direction of the satellite. The satellite would send an unlocking signal, and the transmission would begin. To verify that the signal had been properly received, the opening and closing portions were transmitted back by the satellite. The whole process had to be completed in less than five minutes, so that the Committee for State Security (KGB) would be unlikely to locate the site.121
That effort was, according to John McMahon, “not all that successful.” 122 Two years later, plans for a new system involved only one satellite in low-earth orbit. In addition to collecting transmissions from agents, the CIA gave some consideration to using the satellite to transmit misleading data that would be intercepted by the Soviets. According to Victor Mar-chetti, “the Russians would go bananas trying to figure out what it meant, when actually it meant nothing.” But there was some concern that Soviet fears might lead the Soviet Union to take drastic action, including an attack on the satellite. In addition, there were doubts that the technology existed to develop the system properly.123
By late 1972, the concept for an agent communications satellite system had changed dramatically. In addition, the science and technology directorate, and particularly the Office of Special Projects, had taken the lead in managing the design of the planned system. Les Dirks, then the deputy director of OSP (and soon to become director of OD&E), was charged with supervising the project. A possible system was described in a December 14, 1972, TRW submission, “Proposal for Covert Communications Satellite Study.” That study, along with related studies, had been designated Project PYRAMIDER. So secret were the studies that the CIA specified that only individuals holding BYEMAN clearances—those cleared to know of NRO projects—were eligible to work on PYRAMIDER.124
Dirks’s office envisioned three basic types of signals that the satellite should be able to receive. The most important were those from human assets, whether officers or agents, in the field. The system would also be used to receive signals from emplaced sensors, which might detect seismic waves from a nuclear blast or telemetry from a missile test. In addition, the satellite system should be able to serve as a backup communications system to installations and facilities in the event that regular communications were knocked out or otherwise impaired.125
The CIA had a number of other requirements: The system should “provide maximum protection of the user against signal detection and direction finding leading to determination of user location.” Without the necessary security, the covert satellites would simply be mute witnesses as CIA intelligence assets were hauled away to a grim fate. The system also must minimize dependence on overseas ground stations. A third characteristic required was “multiple simultaneous access capability to users employing different types of traffic, data rates, modulation techniques, and radiated power levels.” And in contrast to BIRDBOOK, PYRAMIDER had to enable senders to transmit data at the time and place of their choosing. The system should also “provide protection against traffic analysis, which could imply numbers, types, purpose and location of users.”126
In attempting to satisfy such concerns, agency-contractor TRW considered a variety of approaches, both with respect to the satellite and the means of communicating with them. Transmission techniques examined included “spread spectrum,” burst, or concealed transmissions, as well as frequency-hopping. In the first case, the power level of the signal was reduced and thus harder to detect. In the second, the signal would be compressed and transmitted very rapidly—the expectation being that the extremely short transmission time would minimize the probability of detection. The contractor also examined the possibility of hiding the signal in existing radio or television signals. The apparently innocent signal when received in the United States would be stripped of its cover to reveal the secret signal. Encryption was also considered. Finally, TRW looked at frequency-hopping techniques, in which the frequency on which the signal was transmitted would repeatedly change over the course of the transmission. In its report, TRW noted that use of a frequency-hopping strategy would “reduce aircraft intercept radius in remote areas to twenty nautical miles.”127
It is not clear exactly what communications strategy TRW recommended. What is clear is that the proposed space segment would consist of three satellites in geosynchronous orbit—at 60, 180, and 300 degrees from CIA headquarters. The locations above which the satellites would “hover” would apparently be the Atlantic Ocean (about 10 degrees east), the Indian Ocean (about 70 degrees east), and the Pacific Ocean (about 135 degrees west). Signals sent to the Atlantic and Pacific satellites would be relayed straight to the CIA; those from the Indian Ocean satellite would be relayed through another satellite or from a ground station, which for the purposes of the study was assumed to be on Guam.128
The spacecraft itself would be launched from Cape Canaveral and have a 100-foot-wide concave antenna. The PYRAMIDER study was completed in July 1973. That fall, the CIA realized Congress would not provide the funding required to transform PYRAMIDER from a study to a functioning system and shelved the project.129 But that would not be the end of DS&T’s work on covert communications satellites.
On November 4, 1972, the Glomar Explorer was launched, ostensibly to mine the ocean floor for metals, especially manganese, which is important for producing steel. Of its CIA-selected 170-man crew, 40 formed the mining staff and knew of the ship’s secret mission to retrieve parts of the Soviet Gulf submarine that had imploded in 1968. After its test run, the ship returned to Los Angeles, rendezvoused with the HMB-1, and on June 20, 1974, headed out to sea on the recovery mission. At that point, Project AZORIAN became Project JENNIFER.130
New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh had learned of the Glomar Explorer’s true mission but had agreed to withhold exposing it at the request of DCI William Colby, and the cover story had held. To those interested at all, the ship would be mining manganese nodules from the Pacific depths in a purely commercial enterprise. Although several foreign ships came near to watch the Glomar at work, they didn’t stay long and floated off, their captains apparently convinced that nothing more than the advertised mission was under way.131
By the middle of July, the Glomar Explorer reached the submarine site, and the crew set to work with the guidance of a computer and bottom-placed transducer so that the barge would stray no more than fifty feet from the mother ship. Pipe from the ship was attached to giant grapplingclaws, which resembled a series of six interconnected ice tongs hanging from a long platform. The ship’s crew then began to feed length after length of pipe through the hole. By the time the claw reached the target portion of submarine (the bow and center structure) 16,000 feet below, the pipe itself weighed more than 40,000 pounds. Claw operators used television cameras equipped with strobe lights to see what they were doing.132
After fourteen-plus hours, the almost 200-foot-long target was about 5,000 feet off the ocean floor, with another 11,000 to go. But, according to accounts given by U.S. officials, two or three prongs of the claw had become entangled in the seabed. The claws were pulled through the seabed to encircle the submarine, but in the process some of the prongs were bent out of shape and thus were unable to fully support the submarine segment. Most of it fell back into the ocean, including the conning tower, three missiles, and the vessel’s code room (with the codebooks, decoding machines, and burst transmitters), and sank to the seabed. Only about a 38-foot section was retrieved. Among the items reportedly recovered were two nuclear torpedoes and the bodies of six Soviet seamen, including the submarine’s nuclear weapons officer. The journal he had kept of his training and assignments was also recovered, and it provided detailed information on Soviet naval nuclear systems operation and procedures. The Glomar returned on August 12, 1974.133
It was also discovered that the Soviets used wooden two-by-fours in the building of some of the sub’s compartments—an extremely crude method—and the exterior welding of the hull was uneven and pitted, with the hull itself an uneven thickness. Hatch covers and valves also were crudely constructed, compared with those on U.S. submarines. Two torpedoes recovered were determined to be powered by electric motors, and another two were steam-powered, which indicated that the submarine’s firing tubes were not interchangeable. Several books and journals were recovered, and some of the pages could be deciphered after chemical treatment. Apparently included was a partial description of Soviet ciphers in effect in 1968.134
The six Soviet seamen were buried at sea in a nighttime ceremony on September 4, 1974. Before the vault carrying their bodies was lowered into the ocean, the U.S. and Soviet national anthems were played, and a short address followed. The speaker noted that “the fact that our nations have had disagreements doesn’t lessen in any way our respect for [the seamen],” and that “as long as nations are suspicious of each other . . . brave men will die as these men have died in the service of their country.” (The fifteen-minute ceremony was filmed by the CIA, and in 1992, DCI Robert Gates gave a tape of the ceremony to Russian President Boris Yeltsin.)135
The Glomar Explorer never got a second chance at the rest of the submarine, although the CIA wanted one. On February 7, 1975, a Los Angeles Times story, “U.S. Reported After Russian Submarine/Sunken Ship Deal by CIA, Hughes Told,” revealed the project, although the story was pushed onto page eighteen at Colby’s request. Similarly, the New York Times buried the story on page thirty. But the CIA had to believe that even if KGB officials didn’t read newspapers beyond page one, they would not have missed Jack Anderson’s discussion of the project on national television. As a result, Colby later wrote, “There was not a chance that we could send the Glomar out again on an intelligence project without risking the lives of our crew and inciting a major international incident.”136
In early November 1975, just after getting off a plane at Washington’s National Airport, Colby was summoned to a Sunday morning meeting with President Gerald Ford. Ford told the DCI he was “going to do some reorganizing of the national-security structure.” Henry Kissinger would have to adjust to being merely Secretary of State; the position of national security adviser would be filled by his deputy, Brent Scowcroft. Colby’s predecessor as DCI, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, was also being fired—due to a lack of rapport with Ford and Kissinger. Colby was “offered” a new job—ambassador to NATO, which he would decline. Colby’s mistake was that he had been too willing to provide Frank Church’s select Senate committee, in the midst of its high-profile, public investigation of the CIA, with information that the White House and Kissinger would have preferred remain secret.137
Colby stayed on at the CIA for a few months until his replacement, George Bush, returned from Beijing, where he had headed the U.S. liaison office. For Bush, the directorship would be another in a series of national security jobs on his way to the presidency. But by the end of his one year in office, the ten-year tenure of Carl Duckett as head of DS&T would be over. When Bush took over the agency, he was told that he had two alcoholics to deal with, including Duckett. Bush, according to Duckett’s deputy, Sayre Stevens, “treated Carl delicately, with genuine concern,” and “gave Carl every chance in the world.”138
But Duckett found it impossible to stop drinking. His alcoholism may have been fueled by family problems as well as his disappointment in not having been made either director or deputy director. He had expected that promotion when Richard Helms departed in 1973. Since Schlesinger’s appointment was clearly a short-term one, he held out hope that he would be next in line—only to find Colby grabbing the brass ring.139 Subsequently, he acknowledged that the reports of his drinking led to a discussion with Bush. He would claim that Bush’s unwillingness to promote him to deputy director was the true cause of his departure in June 1976.140
But the combination of his drinking and his tendency to be indiscreet proved to be a lethal combination for his career. On March 11, 1976, Duck-ett participated in an informal seminar in front of local members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The briefing was part of a campaign of increased CIA openness to offset the unfavorable publicity from press and congressional disclosures. One hundred and fifty individuals paid $6.50 for cocktails, a light buffet, and close to two hours of discussion with high-ranking CIA officials. Although the briefing was unclassified, they were asked not to take notes or quote the officials to the press.141
Among the topics of discussion was the state of the Soviet space program, which was, according to the CIA representatives, in a “shambles” following a series of launch failures. When asked about Israel’s nuclear capability, Duckett didn’t hesitate but responded that the CIA estimated Israel had ten to twenty nuclear weapons available for use. If the disclosure of such secret information had stayed with members of the group, perhaps there would have been no repercussions.142
But in attendance were several reporters, including Arthur Kranish, editor of Science Trends, a Washington newsletter. On March 15, the Washington Post published an article by Kranish titled “CIA: Israel Has 10–20 A-Weapons.” He did not name Duckett as the source, but there were plenty of witnesses.143
Bush issued a public statement accepting “full responsibility” for the disclosure of the highly classified information. It didn’t help the situation that Duckett was rumored to have been drinking at the time of his indiscretion. Not long afterward, his request for retirement, for reasons of health, was received and accepted by the DCI.144
*In a 1999 interview, Stevens said he would not assert that such phenomena were impossible, but that as a means of intelligence, they were “useless” and “absolute bullshit.” (Interview with Sayre Stevens, Springfield, Virginia, March 18, 1999.)
*In a 1996 article, Targ stated that “the psychic description that we and our viewer provided to our sponsor was so outstanding that it alone assured our funding for the next several years.” (Russell Targ, “Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s: A Memoir,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 10, 1 [Spring 1996]: 77–88 at 77.)
* ORD’s efforts were terminated in 1977 by its new director, Philip Eckman, although he did allow Ken Kress to attend committee meetings dealing with the military-run psychic research program. The support of some influential congressmen for the program made it impossible, Eckman recalled, to just “put a thumb in their eye.” He commissioned a reputable experimental psychologist to do a year-and-a-half study reviewing experiments going back to J. B. Rhine. The psychologist concluded that whenever there were adequate controls, there were no positive results. Eckman also recalled that ORD personnel reviewed the remote-viewer notes and concluded they were gibberish—that a description one person could interpret as being of a house, another might believe to describe a bowling alley. (Interview with Philip K. Eckman, Alexandria, Virginia, May 17, 2000.)
*A review of one of the books on the Glomar Explorer, written by an official knowledgeable about technical intelligence projects, referred to “the JENNIFER (sic) project”—indicating that the term as employed in public accounts is misspelled. Logical alternatives include JENIFER and GENNIFER. (John Milligan, Review of “The Jennifer Project,” Studies in Intelligence 23, 1 [Spring 1979]: 45.)