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The life of an Air Force intelligence analyst was tedious but memorable, writes STAN ANGRIST
Transcripts, photos and squirrels: The life of an intelligence analyst was tedious but memorable.
In this story you will learn about events that took place more than 60 years ago. I want to make clear at the outset that my experiences in the military were far better than what most people experienced, especially those in combat. I was fortunate in almost every respect of my military service. Then and now, I am very grateful for that.
In April 1955, I was called to active duty in the Air Force, having been commissioned upon graduation from Texas A&M University a few months earlier. My assignment was to WrightPatterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. I was assigned to the Air Technical Intelligence Center or ATIC, a spook shop of sorts. Our job was to collect and analyze information about airplanes and missiles worldwide in order to assess any potential threat to the U.S. While our charge was to watch developments worldwide, we were, in fact, interested only in one country — the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union was a closed society, and collecting information about it was anything but easy.
In the period between graduation and active duty, I worked at Canadair, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Dynamics, making a very small contribution to the design of a turboproppowered airplane called the CL-44. The plane ultimately found modest success in the Canadian air force and the commercial market as well. So, I had a little technical experience in aviation.
I was initially assigned to ATIC’s missile division. It was headed by a lieutenant colonel who didn’t quite know what to do with a green second lieutenant. Fortunately, he found me a job.
As World War II ended, German missile scientists and engineers, some of whom were Nazis, realized that they had experience valuable both to the Allies and the Soviets. Those who could made their way westward so they would be picked up by the Allies. However, for a host of reasons, many of them got picked up by the Soviets. Most of those recruited by the Allies wound up in Alabama or similar locations where they worked on the U.S. missile program and later the space program. This group included the wellknown Wernher von Braun.
Scientists picked up by the Soviets were taken to the Soviet Union, where they worked on its then-primitive rocket program. Starting in 1950, the Soviets allowed them to start to return to Germany. At that time, there was no wall separating West Germany from East Germany. These engineers had no jobs and not many skills the rebuilding of Germany needed.
But the grapevine works very efficiently, and they soon learned that if they went to the U.S. Air Force base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, they could make a little money. The Air Force paid a handsome daily rate if they would sit and relate in detail the work they did in the Soviet Union. And talk they did. These reports would then be translated and sent to Wright-Pat, where they wound up on my desk. My job was to decide if there was anything of value in this huge stack of transcripts. A bigger problem for me was staying awake during the long, hot summer afternoons of reading.
The U.S. was vitally interested in what the Soviets were doing in missile design and development, so there was an intense effort to find out what was happening behind the Iron Curtain.
It is safe to say that in the 1950s, we probably had few agents working for us on the ground there. So the CIA came up with a plan to photograph areas where it believed missiles were being developed and tested. It asked aviation defense contractors to develop a reconnaissance plane that could fly high enough so that it couldn’t be shot down by Soviet air defense fighters. Thus the U-2 was born.
A strange-looking and tough-to-fly airplane that could soar at altitudes up to 70,000 feet was quickly designed by Lockheed in its legendary “Skunk Works,” where secret projects were undertaken. These airplanes frequently took off from a base in Pakistan and would end their flights thousands of miles later in other countries. They collected photographs with remarkable resolution of great swaths of the Soviet Union. The CIA jealously guarded the results of these flights, and I only got to see one set of photos in an exhibit the agency set up in our shop for one day. I was never told the purpose of the exhibit, nor were we asked to do any analysis on the photos. The program ended when Francis Gary Powers was shot down by a Soviet missile in May 1960.
One of my last jobs in the missile division involved another high-tech project.
Even with the photos from the U-2, we had no performance information on Soviet missiles. In 1954, the Air Force asked General Electric to design and build what was then the world’s largest and most powerful operational radar. The contract stipulated that the equipment was to be operational at a U.S. Air Force base in southeastern Turkey by June 1, 1955, which GE succeeded in doing.
The radar looked at the Soviet missile development site at Kapustin Yar, which was about 920 miles north and east of the radar. With some nifty mathematical tricks, it was possible to estimate from the data collected a Soviet missile’s latitude, longitude, altitude and velocity with a fair amount of precision. The data initially were collected on 35 mm film and quickly arrived at Wright-Pat, where on occasion I helped with analysis. The radar or improved versions of it continued to operate from that base through the 1960s and 1970s. It was certainly the most interesting work I ever did in the missile division. * Because most of my work was tedious, I started to look at other shops in ATIC for a possible move. It seemed to me that the aircraft division did interesting work, so I approached its head and asked if he could use additional help and, of course, he said yes. He explained that for me to transfer I would have to ask the colonel, my boss, for permission. Much to my surprise, he readily agreed.
Our work in the aircraft division was guided by the Soviet calendar.
The Soviets had two military parades a year — one on May 1, a day celebrating the communist workers’ “solidarity with working people everywhere,” and the other on Nov. 7, celebrating the Bolshevik uprising that, according to the Julian calendar, took place on Oct. 25, 1917. The Soviets abandoned the Julian calendar in the 1920s.
The parades consisted of a large number of troops marching by a reviewing stand in front of the Kremlin in Moscow, plus trucks towing caissons carrying missiles and airplanes flying over the troops and missiles at very low altitudes. On the roof of our embassy, all of our military attaches would set up cameras to photograph the airplanes and missiles. One building over, the Soviets were on the roof taking photos of our people.
Our films quickly would be put into a diplomatic pouch and sent to us at Wright-Pat. Using photogrammetry, we estimated the dimensions and capabilities of the planes. We got used to putting in long hours around those two dates, resulting in detailed briefing books on the planes.
* About 18 months before I reported for duty, a disaffected North Korean pilot flew his MiG-15 fighter from North Korea to a U.S. Air Force base in South Korea.
That plane eventually wound up at Wright-Patterson, where every pilot passing through wanted to fly it. Of course, the pilots were not familiar with the characteristics of the MiG, and one of them cracked the nose wheel.
A pilot friend of mine who also worked in ATIC thought we should take a look at the plane, which was parked alongside one of the runways. As we approached the plane, I noticed something stenciled in large letters under the canopy — the word “Secret.” That stopped me in my tracks. Surely it was not to be kept secret from the Soviets; after all, they built it. Nor should it be kept secret from the North Koreans; they had been flying MiGs for years.
Was it to be kept secret from the U.S. Air Force? That didn’t make sense either. I finally decided it was stenciled “Secret” to keep it away from the squirrels that abounded in the woods adjacent to the runway. Goodness knows what they could do with a plane like that once they got their paws on it.
Today, the plane is on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson. Go take a look at it — they have taken the “Secret” off.