16 October 2007

Angel

I sat up this morning when I got to the Times. I have been wandering through the Air Force cover for the CIA Blackbird program, still a little giddy about my encounter with Article 138, the stealthy Mach-three spy plane parked in the lot next to the New Headquarters Building at Langley.

The Times article said second-highest-ranking member of the Air Force's procurement office was found dead Sunday at his house out in Loudoun County. I shuddered at the commute he must have endured each day, slogging the thirty miles from the country-side down to the Pentagon.

They said that Charlie shut the door on the garage and climbed into the car, turned on the engine and went to the Long Sleep.

The Senate was after him, apparently because the Air Force had arranged a deal to pay him a pretty good monthly check though an independent institute while he was sitting around waiting for his security clearances to be processed.

We all go through that process, which is a left-over from the Cold War. Things take time. Charlie was a retired Air Force officer, so you would think the Government might have got to know him over the last few decades. But no matter; the stupidity of the system is one of the reasons we all make good money for having clearances in place.

The Air Force has had a lot of trouble with the things they buy of late. Senior acquisition executives have been convicted of cozy relationships with the aerospace giants that produce the airplanes they fly.

Some of it is corrupt, I know, but it is hard to tell where the government stops and where industry begins. I remember when the first commercial satellite imagery became available. The people that built the systems all came from “you know where.”

The existence of the National Reconnaissance Office used to be a secret. Even when they were acknowledged, the phone book was limited to the numbers in the front office. When I lectured new employees about the Intelligence Community, I used to joke that the whole organization was two Air Force lieutenants and the Lockheed-Martin Corporation.

It was not that far from the truth. The culture of secrecy that makes a qualified individual have to take a semi-bogus job in order to keep his mortgage paid while waiting to go to work is a symptom of a system that does not work.

I feel sorry for Charlie's family, since there is not point in feeling sorry for him this morning. He obviously was a man for whom scandal was worse than death.

His passing is a sort of bookend, in a way, and part of the Blackbird saga. In 1950, the FBI arrested Julius Rosenberg and his wife for espionage. He was an electrical engineer who had worked for the Army Signal Corps. He was a spy, and his wife helped him.

In today's terms, she might be called an “enabler,” but then, they just called her another spy. The government executed them in 1953 after a spectacular trial that did not quite reveal everything the Government knew from the tippy-top secrets involving the penetration of the Soviet Embassy codes.

The case aroused much controversy, since the truth could not be told. Many claimed that the political climate made a fair trial impossible, and that the evidence offered was not conclusive.

Of course it wasn't. The real evidence could not be released for another thirty years, until after the Soviets imploded. At the time, though, the Soviets were ten feet tall and they had The Bomb.

Their security was impenetrable, or at least it seemed that way, since the Western spy services were riddled with moles. The CIA operation in Germany had been built around Hitler's old Abwehr organization. It was hopelessly compromised. The Soviets had emplaced two agents in Britain's MI-5 and MI-6, the internal and external security services who had risen to senior grade. In fact, both were credible candidates to head both services. Of course it was hard to penetrate Stalin's Russia.

In fact, the only way to get a look at what the Soviets might be doing their captured German rocket technology and stolen nuclear secrets was from above, high in the sky. As the Rosenbergs were waiting for execution, the very best minds in the photographic industry were at work on advanced cameras.

What the CIA did not have was an airplane to carry them.

Accordingly, on a sunny December afternoon in 1954, a small group of CIA officers and a few blue-suiters drove up to the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation offices in Burbank, California. They wanted to talk to Robert Gross and one of his most gifted engineers, Clarence ("Kelly") Johnson.

The Government people wanted to discuss a secret airplane project, one that could do some remarkable things and reveal the Soviet secrets. The project was so sensitive that the Commander of the Strategic Air Command, cigar-chomping General Curtis LeMay was not let in on the secret.

After the conversation, Kelly Johnson began to clear out a hangar to bring in two dozen bright young fellows to work on the project that had no official name. For lack of anything better, they called it “Angel.”

Eighty days after he began, Johnson had built his first aircraft, which was given the designator of “utility” aircraft. The U-2   was an efficient machine that could cruise at 90,000 ft. In August 1955 the first flight was conducted, and the overhead reconnaissance program was in business.

On its first flights overseas, the U-2 performed impressively. From the spring of 1956 until May 1960, the U-2 flew at will over the Soviet Union. It brought back detailed film of test ranges, industrial targets and air defenses. For the first time, the CIA was able to make an assessment of the Russian missile program, and the weapons of mass destruction that could be placed on the top of the rockets.

The view from up there was commanding, and the Russians were furious. There was no more important matter for them than to protect their skies. Kelly Johnson knew it was only a matter of time until the Russians figured out a way to get to the Angel, which was not much more than an incredibly high-soaring glider.

In August of 1959, the CIA awarded a contract to Jonhson's Lockheed lab for the development of a Mach 3 aircraft, with the working code name of “Archangel.” Johnson had decided that this would not be an incremental improvement that would be vulnerable to the Russians in a few years. This was going to be something really special; the fastest and highest flying thing in history.

It was to be called the A-12. In January of 1960, the contract to build a dozen A-12 aircraft was awarded.

In May of that year, a pilot named Gary Francis Powers manned up his Angel at a secret base in Pakistan. He flew most of his mission profile over Russian successfully. As he approached Sverdlovsk, however, a salvo of the new SA-2 GUIDELINE missiles detonated close enough to damage the engine of the Angel.

Powers began to drift down to the altitude where mortal Russians flew, and there his Angel was mortally wounded.

The subsequent crisis with the Soviets was a huge embarrassment, though Powers was eventually exchanged for Soviet master-spy Colonel Vilyam Fisher, also known as Rudolf Abel.

The Archangel program continued, though President Eisenhower began to think that there had to be some alternative to active overflight of the Soviet Union. The interesting thing is that is comes back to the acquisition process. The rapid prototyping of Kelly Johson's day is long gone, though the relationship between the few defense contractors is cozier than ever.

And the Russians are just as clever as they always were, and quite as active as in the bad old days. The funny thing is that Julius Rosenberg did not just pass along the secrets of the atomic bomb. He managed to steal the schematics to the proximity fuze, which was quite useful for air defense applications.

In fact, in May of 1960, the Soviet designers had just succeeded in adapting it to the nose of the SA-2.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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