The Wizards of Langley (31 page)

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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