13 October 2007

Uncle Joe

The Cold War was a necessary evil. It has not been popular to say that for a while, though Secretaries Gates and Rice probably were thinking a lot about that in Moscow this week.

As one of the legion of Warriors from the struggle, I have been waiting for the parade that never came. The end of it let the Jihadis out of their hermetically-sealed bottle, and maybe we are headed for something really awful. But we were then, too, if you would care to remember.

That goes to Uncle Joe Stalin, and that weasel Lenin, though if we load it all on his stooped shoulders, we should probably be blaming the Czar for all the woes.

And that would let Kaiser Willy and his withered arm off the hook for destroying Europe, and slaughtering a generation, and preparing the soil that grew that monster Adolph his abomination of evil so foul that we had to partner with Uncle Joe.

If that is a little simplistic, I'm sorry. The horror of the Second installment of Kaiser Willy's War was so savage and technologically advanced that it concluded with the real possibility that life on the planet could be ended. Europe was prostrate, raped and savaged. Japan and Germany were rubble. Twenty or thirty or forty million Russians were disappeared, and millions more were displaced in the wreckage.

Britain was exhausted. Only American stood, somewhat bemused, looking across the wasteland at Uncle Joe, who despite the carnage, smiled thinly and tucked a shiny pistol in his thick leather belt.

Among the casualties of the great conflict was the truth. It was perfectly understandable. Military operations required security for success, and the wonder weapons that were being developed needed to be protected. The system to do so emerged with dramatic suddenness. The atomic project- code-named for the Manhattan Engineering District and managed by the Army Corps of Engineers- was so secret and so huge that it gobbled up huge chunks of three states, had major facilities in ten, and was completely undisclosed.

When you consider that annihilation, or at least the real possibility of it was the alternative, it makes perfect sense.

The atom blasts that ended the conflict are the great pivot points in the history of the West. Since then, the existence of human society in the way we think normal is purely optional.

Perfectly rational people were terrified by the prospect. Some idealists considered that Uncle Joe could bring about a new type of society, one that did not feature capitalism raw in tooth and claw. Some of them considered that the secret of the Bomb had to be shared, so that the Americans could not dictate the terms on which the new world would operate.

When you consider that landscape, it is understandable that folks were a little jumpy. Uncle Joe truly was a paranoid and truly was a murderous monster. It is also only paranoia if people are not in fact out to get you.

That had just been demonstrated in more blood than had ever been spilled in all the wars in history.

This was serious, dead serious.

In October 1945, the wartime OSS was abolished and its functions transferred back to State, War and the Navy.   Harry Truman realized that there was a need for a centralized intelligence system, and even as the war was lurching into its last year, Major General “Wild Bill” Donovan had lobbied FDR for the establishment of a new organization independent of the Pentagon and reporting directly to the President. Under his plan, a civilian agency would coordinate all the intelligence services, with authority to conduct covert operations overseas.

The military Departments opposed the idea, of course, and Justice and State had other ideas about who should be running the show.

The Bomb had changed everything, though, and pressure was growing to establish a new Service with the clear mandate to deliver atomic weapons from the sky, anywhere on earth. Armies and Navies were irrelevant; the doctrine contained in Giulio Douhet's seminal thesis “Command of the Air” was triumphant: Air Power and the Atom Bomb made war impossible.

CIA was established under the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947, effective on 18 September 1947. The charter was to “coordinate the nation's intelligence activities and correlate, evaluate and disseminate intelligence which affecting national security.”

There was the proviso that it would also have "other duties," as assigned, by the National Security Council, and the Director of Central intelligence was made responsible for protecting sources and methods of intelligence collection. There is a lot of latitude contained in those two collateral duties, as we all found out later.

In the lobby of the New Headquarters Building at Langley two black-finished models hang from the ceiling. One of them is a delicate airplane, an oddly graceful thing that appears to be a cross between an F-104 Starfighter and a glider. The other is an ominous elongated shape that looks like a spaceship.

They are among the proudest of the accomplishments of the Agency, and they provoke emotion yet. The older of the two is the famed U-2, the Dragon Lady. The other is the A-12, the highest-flying fastest bad-ass airplane that has ever flown, the fabled Blackbird.

Well, I think it is. There were rumors about another one, code-name Aurora, but if it exists or existed, it is still a secret. We will get around to that, eventually, but the cult of secrecy that was born in World War Two and institutionalized around the Secret of the Atom was hardening.

Alger Hiss was accused of espionage by Whittaker Chambers in 1948. The chilling realization was spreading that Uncle Joe had penetrated the American Government in virtually every Agency. The Army Security Agency- later known as NSA- had been decrypting troubling secret message traffic from the Soviet embassy in Washington. It was so secret that the results of the program could no be revealed for nearly fifty years, and gave progressives everywhere the ability to deny that it was anything more than a paranoid delusion.

The Army did the work across the street from Big Pink, by the way, in a stately building that belongs to the State Department now. It was known then as Arlington Hall, and codebreakers were learning was most alarming. The program had started in 1942, and the messages showed that Uncle Joe had agents everywhere, even in the Manhattan Engineering District. The last name of the program- it had many- was a nonsense word called VENONA.

Outside that particularly dark secret chamber, the intelligence community generally believed the Soviet Union would not have an atomic device until 1952 or later. When the Russians exploded the device known as “Joe-1” in August of 1949, the unease transitioned to something that bordered on panic. Apparently the device closely resembled the implosion-trigger used in the third bomb developed at Los Alamos, the Fat Man. Not even Sputnik had that sort of impact.

Things were moving faster than had been estimated. The US required improved strategic reconnaissance to better determine Uncle Joe's capabilities and intentions. The existing surveillance aircraft were primarily converted bombers, vulnerable to anti-aircraft artillery, missiles, and fighters.

The thought was that an aircraft capable of flying at 70,000 feet would be beyond the reach of Soviet fighters and missiles and possibly undetectable to radar as well. That could permit the overflight of Russian airspace. There was precedent, since the famous British Mosquito fighter was able to fly over Germany throughout the war. The aircraft was light as a feather, constructed of wood, and fast as the devil. It delivering urgent mail to Moscow right over the Reich, and took pictures along the way able to fly higher than the German guns or fighters could reach.

This was a strategic mission, and though there was a brand new Air Force, it was the Central intelligence Agency that provided the requirement and the funding. The process was laundered through the new Military Department. The Air Force quietly released a “request for proposal” to the aerospace community. Officials at the Lockheed Aircraft concern heard about it, and asked gifted engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson to come up with a design.

Johnson was responsible for such iconic designs as the twin-boomed P-38 fighter, and the P-80, America's first jet. He was known to bring projects in on time and on budget. Accordingly, he was given a free hand and virtually unlimited funds. His workshop became a separate division, and nicknamed “the Skunk Works,” after the distillery in Al Capp's "L'il Abner" comic strip.

People drank in those days, and Capp was a militant anti-communist, even though he did not know about the VENONA intercepts. Progressives decried the witch-hunt for the Commies, who were under every bed. Actually, it was only a few beds, but Uncle Joe managed to have many of them here in Washington.

Johnson's design, called the CL-282, was the exotic glider-like airplane that was so innovative that it leapt off the runway at 70 knots, and did not even have conventional landing gear. The Air Force thought it was preposterous, but civilians enlisted to participate in the design review thought it had possibilities. Edwin Land, the man who invented instant photography and made a commercial fortune under his Polaroid brand name, took it to DCI Allen Dulles.

Dulles went to President Eisenhower, and Kelly Johnson soon had a $22 million dollar contract for twenty aircraft. Land said his company could construct a camera capable of identifying an object a little over two feet from an altitude of 60,000 feet.

Kelly Johnson could make things happen. CIA and Lockheed began to search for men who could fly an exceptionally exotic aircraft on exceptionally sensitive missions. They found them in the military, and when selected, they quietly resigned from the Service and joined the Lockheed Corporation.

One of them was named Gary Francis Powers.

Tomorrow: Article 128

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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