Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

“Mission Success” Level? SARDONIC CACKLING.

4. March 20, 1971—The fourth and final mission of the D-21 ended in a whimper, much like the program itself. For some reason unknown to the operation’s planners, the drone went down over China during its photographic run to Lop Nur.

“Mission Success” Level? BITTER RESIGNATION.

It took them four months after the final mission to make a decision, but in July 1971 the CIA formally terminated the Tagboard/Senior Bowl program. The failure of the project to yield results was a major factor, but ultimately it was only one of several reasons for the decision to kill Tagboard. Perhaps a more significant reason was the growing secret—and then later, open—attempt by the Nixon administration to establish a relationship with China. The D-21B flights were seen as an unacceptable risk to the possibility of rapprochement between the People’s Republic and the United States. And this was especially true at a time when newer and more capable reconnaissance satellites could pick up the slack.

Kelly Johnson was unhappy about the end of his drone project, but he was smart enough to understand the big picture. Still, the news stung a bit: “It was a sad occasion for us all. We will probably see the day when we will greatly rue the decision taken to scrap the program.”

AND THEN WHAT?

The remaining D-21Bs were secretly shipped out of Lockheed’s test facility at Groom Lake and retired to the U.S. Air Force “boneyard” at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona. In 1977, a civilian journalist just happened upon them accidentally and forced their public acknowledgment. Without this bit of happenstance, we might never have heard about this extraordinary program.

The wreckage of the drone that went down somewhere in the eastern Soviet Union was recovered by the Soviet military. They attempted to reverse-engineer the technology and make their own drone (they called it the Raven, or Voron in Russian), but they saved themselves the eventual anguish and never built the thing. It turns out that the D-21B had self-destructed over Siberia. We only found out when in 1986 a KGB officer slyly gave a piece of the drone to the CIA.

The wreckage of the drone from the fourth mission, the one that went down inside China, was apparently recovered by local authorities and then closely studied by the Chinese military. It later wound up at the China Aviation Museum near Beijing, where it was finally put on display in 2010.

Lockheed test pilot Bill Park continued to fly advanced experimental aircraft into the late 1970s. At one point he even landed a U-2 reconnaissance plane on an aircraft carrier (which is insanely difficult). But during a test flight of the first Have Blue prototype (the aircraft that evolved into the F-117 stealth fighter of Operation Desert Storm fame) in 1978, Park was on approach and beginning to land. At the very moment the landing gear touched the ground, the aircraft unexpectedly pitched up. Park kicked the throttle up and climbed out to circle for another attempt, but the plane had smacked the ground fairly hard and Park’s landing gear were no longer operable. After trying in vain to get the landing gear to work, he was forced to climb again and wait until his fuel ran out (if you are going to crash a plane, it’s better not to do so with it full of explosive jet fuel). Then he ejected from the plane. He survived the ejection, but suffered a concussion during the violent lurch from the aircraft. He was knocked unconscious (luckily his parachute was designed to automatically deploy), and his limp body smashed against the desert floor. He broke his leg and cracked a vertebra. When the rescue teams arrived, his heart had stopped beating. He was successfully resuscitated, but forced off of flight status. He stayed with Lockheed until his retirement in 1989, finishing his career as director of flying operations at the company’s top-secret Skunk Works (for decades led by none other than Kelly Johnson). In 1995, Park was one of five test pilots inducted into the Aerospace Walk of Honor.

Finally, it is possible—some might say likely—that the failure of the Tagboard program led to the delay of any full-scale deployment of unmanned systems by the CIA. Of course this is counterfactual, and we have no idea if the D-21 had any real impact. But it’s hard to imagine how this project could have had a positive influence on anyone thinking about increasing the CIA’s investment in drone technology. Finally, during the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s, CIA director James Woolsey sponsored the UAV that would eventually be known as the Predator, and reinvigorated the CIA’s love affair with drones—twenty years after the cancellation of Tagboard. You don’t need more than a quick glance at the front page of the newspaper on any given day to see where that ended up.

The Clash. Genius.

In one simple yet mind-blowingly catchy chorus, they summed up the Cold War debate about how to best keep our leaders alive and in charge during the age of ballistic missile technology—and they did it in two languages.

Should I stay or should I go? In the age of nuke-laden bombers, the question wasn’t all that complicated. National leadership would have hours of warning prior to an attack. Enough time to make a comprehensive assessment of the strategic situation, converse with military and political leadership, and then still get the hell out of Dodge before the nukes arrive (if you fail to shoot them down along the way).

But in the age of the ballistic missile, things changed. No longer were we thinking in terms of the hours it might take for a relatively slow airplane to fly halfway around the world. Now it was minutes. An intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched from the Soviet Union could arrive in Washington, New York, Boston, or Miami in about thirty minutes. A submarine lurking off the East Coast of the United States could send its missiles (SLBMs—submarine-launched ballistic missiles) to their targets in even less time, perhaps as quickly as five to ten minutes. And if ground-based missiles were deployed closer to the United States (let’s just randomly pick a place… Cuba, for instance), then Soviet medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs) could be raining down on American cities, with little to no warning, by the hundreds.

This, of course, means that on the very brink of World War III, the American leadership wouldn’t have the luxury of taking the time to figure everything out before they had to make key decisions. A lot of the most important choices of World War III would have to be made after the missiles had started to hit their targets. So keeping the key people alive to make those decisions was paramount. Would it be better to hunker down somewhere safe(ish) and hope to ride out the attack? Or was it better to get moving, and stay moving, so that the Soviets couldn’t get a bead on you? Bobbing. Weaving. Never still. Never an easy target. A thermonuclear game of tag.

At best, you have thirty minutes to decide. At worst, in just five minutes the spot where you are standing will be superheated to a million degrees in a microsecond.

So ya gotta let me know (me tienes que decir).

Should I stay or should I go?

The first step towarda national command post came during the Korean War. The U.S. Air Force set up an office in the Pentagon to try and heighten the nation’s readiness against a strategic (read: nuclear) attack from the Soviet Union. Early warning technology was developed, like the DEW Line—“Distant Early Warning”—a series of radar stations that spread from the Aleutian Islands to Alaska, Canada, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. These were designed to spot enemy bombers long before they arrived in the United States, and to give civilian and military leadership the time to react and respond in plenty of time before bombs began falling on Washington, DC.