14 October 2008

Rocket Science

It is a pleasant Sunday in Northern Virginia, and I don't have to work until later in the day. I am thinking about taking a drive up the Parkway and look at the trees along the Potomac. In the Fall I often stop at Fort Marcy, the old Civil War earthwork near the Dolly Madison Parkway exit, near the George Bush Center for Intelligence.

There is another reason to go that way, since the leaves are starting to come down and I might be able to see the Blackbird General Hayden managed to acquire from the Air Force to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the CIA. He is the first military officer to lead the place since the very earliest days of the Cold War, before Alan Dulles, the greatest American spymaster of them all, even if his Russian opposition had him thoroughly compromised from the beginning.

Director Dulles authorized the Blackbird, which was one of the most amazing Cold War machines, and there were a lot of them. Some of them, like the U2, are still flying.

The folks in Minnesota are still angry with General Hayden for having the Air Force spirit the historic airplane away from them to be put on a pole outside the New Headquarters Annex at the Agency. Not that it is really new; but the people that work on the compound are careful to make the distinction. The old part of the building is the Original Headquarters, and I enjoyed working there. Wide halls. Lots of glass. Nice building.

Not a great deal of history, though. The little museum on the first floor, near where the airplane models hang, is woefully short on some of the things the Building has been up to over the last half century. Blackbird is supposed to fix part of that.

That is where we should all do a little remembering. I had a chat with a friend last night. He served in World War Two, and someone asked him to give a speech. He was in the process of collecting his thoughts on the matter, and he asked if I might have an idea on a topic that the younger intelligence folks might be interested in.

I said it might be useful to explain why things are so screwed up, why we are hamstrung by security procedures that date to his first war, a system so dense and obscure that only our main enemy was able to penetrate it.

There are two parts to the way we handle our secrets. One of them is purely physical. The Manhattan Project created a vast secret infrastructure of fences and guards that installed a that had not previously existed. It was quite extraordinary, and considering that the bulk of the installations and laboratories are still out there, still fenced, shows something about nuclear staying-power.

The other part of the equation was more intellectual and problematic. The Truth was considered so important to Victory, that in Churchill's words, it had to be protected by a bodyguard of lies. So in addition to the barbed ire and guns, there was a cloud of code-words and cover stories that   cloaked everything.

The biggest secrete was about the emerging field of cryptology. The ULTRA program is a convenient short-hand means of describing a system of systems that is much more complicated and fraught with technical nuance that there is time to deal with here. It is   still sensitive. I made an older woman blanche when I mentioned that I knew what she did in the War, since it was now unclassified. She had been an operator of one of the decryption engines, and when she left active duty a fierce officer told her if she ever mentioned it she would be hunted down and jailed.

She is still looking over her shoulder, fifty-two years later.

When the official determination was made that it was OK to talk about what happened, only some did. Gordon Welchman was one of the pioneers at Bletchley Park, the British manor in which the Nazi codes were broken. He talked about what happened in his book about what happened in Hut Six on the compound years after it was all done and de-classified. It must have been quite a relief to get it out, while he still lived.

He was long retired and living in the US at the time, doing a little part-time contracting. Some bureaucrat still stripped him of his clearance, all those years later.

So, let's just agree that this is some very powerful stuff, even the parts that are lying around in plain sight.

Let's just imagine the world as it was being born. The CIA was brand new, established with consulting from such luminaries as Kim Philby, the British expert on the Soviets who had not yet been unmasked as a Soviet spy. The Americans needed a counter-intelligence capability against the Red Army, which apparently intended to stay in the part of Germany and Middle Europe it had conquered, forever.

Winston remarked his speech to Westminster College in 1946 that an iron curtain had fallen across Europe. Harry Truman was there at this side. Russian historians date the beginning of the Cold War from this speech, which shows you what the perceptions were on the part of the Kremlin.

Distrust of Britain had died with FDR. The Russians were clearly the new threat. After all, they had only entered the war in June of 1941 when Hitler double crossed Uncle Joe and sent his armies east against his former secret ally.

Only parts of the Government knew just how serious the new confrontation was going to be. More were deeply suspicious of Moscow, including former wartime ambassador Averill Harriman, and first Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.

Not to mention the Spooks across the street from Bib Pink at the Army Security Agency who had moved beyond ULTRA to decrypt Soviet embassy communications that revealed the massive extent of the spying effort against the Americans.

In addition to information that incriminated former State Department Golden Boy Alger Hiss, the links between German refugee and naturalized British physicist Klaus Fuchs, liaison to the Manhattan Project, and Soviet intelligence were alarming in the extreme. They ran through some earnest communists who were eager to help the cause.

By 1949, Uncle Joe had the bomb. Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg were part of the web of espionage that began with Fuchs and ran through his handler at Los Alamos, Harry Gold direct to the Kremlin. A former machinist at the Lab, Sergeant David Greenglass was also implicated in the Gold ring.

The government had to prove the case against Greenglass and the Rosenbergs without the critical Soviet coded messages. Release of that information would be held as a deep secret for another fifty years after the Rosenbergs were tried, convicted and executed.

Alger Hiss maintained his innocence to the end, and the partisans of the Rosenbergs, including their sons, are still in denial, even with the proof of at least Julius' active participation.

Whether death was the right answer for their crimes is another question. Compromising the secret of the Bomb seems like a fairly big deal, but as the Manhattan Project alumni said at the time, it was just a matter of applying basic physics.

That is not what they were doing out West. The engineers were doing magic with rockets and airplanes. They were doing magic at White Sands and at Groom Lake. The latter had several interesting code-words and cover-stories, since it blended the physical and intellectual secrets all in one place.

It wasn't like building the Bomb. This stuff was actual rocket science.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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