Interview with Robert Lou Benson, NSA

Interviewer: Tell me in your own words about the sabotage school in Barcelona, during the Civil War. What was that really?

Lou Benson: Well the sabotage school was apparently supervised by the KGB which was then called the NKVD.

Interviewer: And what was the point of it?

Lou Benson: Well, this was in the course of the Spanish Civil War; the Russians were supporting the loyalists. The patriotic or rather the legally elected Government of Spain in 1936 there was a rising against the Republic by General Franco's Forces. And the Civil War resulted. There was an intervention by the left and the right, so to speak. The Soviets came in on the side of the Republic, and the Nazis and the Italians on the side of what became called the Nationalists, Franco's Government.

Interviewer: If the KGB were basically running the sabotage school in Barcelona?

Lou Benson: Yes.

Interviewer: What was their gain? What was the point?

Lou Benson: Well, it was, I mean, to fight Franco's Forces, and that was one technique, of course sabotage, operating behind Franco's lines. But that was the military purpose of it. It undoubtedly gave them an opportunity to process people from the International Brigades who might be invited in. But its purpose was fight against Franco's forces and on behalf of the Republicans.

Interviewer: But also there's a good, a good opportunity -- to, to recruit.

Lou Benson: To recruit. I would think so, yes.

Interviewer: Now moving back to the United States. Um, the Soviet's, um, had -- what part did the American Communist Party play in selecting, screening, recruiting Americans who might be useful to the Soviets? To the KGB?

Lou Benson: If we look at the spy scene in Venona, and the agents, let's call them, Soviet Agency scene in Venona, they were essentially all Communists, or very closely allied with Communist Party members, called "the travellers," and that sort of thing. The party did in fact provide candidates who would recommend the specially trusted Communists to the Soviet Intelligence Services. For instance, Earl Browder, who was the leader of the American Communist Party, in Venona we see him from time to time discussing candidates and the KGB coming to him to discuss candidates. The party used a man named Bernie Schuster, again seen in Venona, as a liaison between the party and the KGB. Then Schuster would conduct what would be called background investigations. If a particular party member seemed like a good candidate to work for the KGB because of his access to classified information, or for some other reason the KGB wanted a person in a certain place, Schuster would check them out. We can only guess from the messages, Venona messages, but he apparently would check party records, and he would interview other party members and then make a recommendation as to whether this person would be suitable for the KGB.

Interviewer: And the KGB used these Americans to do it's work for it?

Lou Benson: The KGB used American Communists. Yes.

Interviewer: Now they were front organisations, legitimate organisations but with a covert purpose, TASS and Amtorg. In your own words could you tell me what those were and what they did?

Lou Benson: TASS was the Soviet Press Organisation in the United States, and in other countries where they were accredited. It served as a legitimate press relations and news service purpose and provided a cover for the KGB and GRU. So on the staff of any TASS unit in any country was KGB and GRU officers. The same could be said for Amtorg, which was the Soviet Government's trading organisation in the Western Hemisphere. There were similar trading organisations in other areas that had different names. Amtorg existed to further Soviet economic interests and legitimate trade purposes. Once again it provided a front, a cover, under which the KGB and GRU officers could operate.

Interviewer: Before the war they were interested in commercial intelligence or industrial intelligence. What kind of things did they collect?

Lou Benson: In the inter-war years there's no question, at least in the United States, the KGB and GRU had a great interest in what might be called industrial espionage, collecting trade secrets and so forth. I feel some of the targets were very mundane, but it was important to the Soviet Union and the Soviet economy. Things like synthetic rubber, sugar refining, processors, patrolling and refining processes, automobiles, automobile engines and, in a more, much more secret area of course, the development of American military aircraft. The espionage against these kinds of targets could be carried out in any number of ways. It could be the using the KGB and GRU officers under the cover of TASS and Amtorg but they could also be under the cover of the Embassy or the Soviet legations.

Interviewer: What do the term's legal and illegals mean?

Lou Benson: In Soviet intelligence usage, a legal would be a KGB or GRU Officer, intelligence officer, operating under a legal cover, let's say in the United States, perhaps on the staff of the Ambassador, -- perhaps on the staff of TASS or Amtorg, or the Consulate, as a First Secretary of the Consulate. That person, the legal, is concealing his true purpose, but he has a legal connection to the Soviet mission in the United States or in another country. An illegal traditionally was also a sworn KGB or GRU officer who would enter the target country, illegally, using false documentation, and then would assume a certain identity and perhaps might work as a salesman, which is what Colonel Akhmarhov, the illegal Chief in the United States did. He worked, I think, selling furs.

Interviewer: Tell me how Colonel Akhmarhov operated?

Lou Benson: Lieutenant Colonel Isak Akhmarhov was the Chief of the KGB illegals in the United States during the World War II. He was in this country on a second tour as an illegal, from 1942 to 1945. He'd also been here during the 1930s. He entered the United States illegally, using false documentation, and he was called the illegal resident. Resident is the Soviet term for station chief the United States, and in Britain you would use the term station chief perhaps for CIA or British Secret Service. They call that person a resident; he was the illegal resident. There were legal residents under diplomatic cover in New York, Washington, and San Francisco. So in theory he had parallel networks. You had a network run by the illegal resident, and you had multiple networks run by the legal residents. Of course it was all illegal. It was all against the law, but these were the terms of the time. And the terms are still in use.

Interviewer: How many kinds of code names did Akhmarhov have?

Lou Benson: Akhmarhov is his true name. In the United States he used four or five aliases at different times, such as, I believe, Michael Green, and perhaps Michael Adamack. He had a communications cover name, which is what we see in the Venona messages. That was Albert. When he met his agents he used what one might call a street name. Just a first name, Bill, John. His agents didn't know his alias. They didn't know his real name. They just knew him as Bill, and they knew his wife as Catherine.

Interviewer: Was Colonel Abel another illegal?

Lou Benson: Colonel Abel was an illegal. He was also a KGB officer, a sworn officer, of that service. I don't know how he entered the United States; I don't know if we do now. He certainly was using an alias in the United States, and he had a front, a cover business as a photographer

Interviewer: Now tell me about Venona. What exactly was Venona?

Lou Benson: Venona's just a made-up code word. Made up by the United States and Great Britain. It was the third of a series of code names. Earlier it was called Drug and Bride. It stood for the fact that we were able to read a certain set of Soviet Intelligence Service communications that had been sent during the 1940s.

Interviewer: Now where were these sent from? And how were they collected?

Lou Benson: The messages were between the KGB and GRU establishments abroad and the Centre in Moscow. For the most part they were passed by commercial international radio, by legitimate commercial companies, but of course they were turned into the message company, the cable company in cipher. So Western Union then would radio to Moscow a cipher telegram which they were told was perhaps of the Embassy, or the Consulate to Moscow. In other words a legitimate diplomatic communications. There were in fact diplomatic communications. There were trade communications. But there were also the communications of the GRU, the KGB and Naval Intelligence, the intelligence services operating in the United States.

Interviewer: How were these cables collected, as copies from Western Union?

Lou Benson: In general, yes. During the war, generally speaking, these messages were acquired through censorship. On the day after Pearl Harbour certain emergency laws and regulations went into effect, and every cable going to or from the United States a copy had to go to the censor. The censor would turn over these messages to Arlington Hall. There were occasionally messages that were intercepted, on different circuits, for instance, between the KGB in Tokyo and the KGB in Moscow. Of course that had to be intercepted but it turns out none of those were read anyway.

Interviewer: What exactly was Arlington Hall? What were they trying to do there?

Lou Benson: Arlington Hall is just a convenient name for the Army Signal Intelligence Service. It had formally been in the War Department building in downtown Washington, but with the onset of war larger quarters were needed. A girl's school was acquired in Arlington, Virginia, and then a couple of large temporary buildings were put up behind the girls' school. Army Corp engineers worked day and night, and during 1942, army signal intelligence moved into Arlington Hall. We just tended to call that organisation Arlington Hall, though it was merely the name of the former school.

Interviewer: Is that where they were trying to crack Venona?

Lou Benson: All Army, I should say. Most Army code breaking work was done at Arlington Hall. It was the Headquarters for the Army's world-wide signal intelligence operations. So Venona, what became called Venona was being worked on at Arlington Hall. Yes. It was a small effort to begin with.

Interviewer: The first break in cracking the code or one of the first breaks was Cecil Philips. Can you describe what happened?

Lou Benson: Well, Cecil Philips came to Arlington Hall in 1943. I think it was when he was eighteen years old, after he had finished two years at college. He went onto the Russian program surprisingly or worked on Mayday, 1944, and in November, 1944, he made some observations in studying Russian diplomatic traffic that essentially was the basic break in Venona. He made the basic solution that led to this whole thing unravelling. The reason was the material he was studying turned out to be KGB. He did not know that at the time. He found a way to exploit this material, or to identify it to make what we would call matches. The fact that it happened to be KGB was -- is one of the most important parts of this whole story.

Interviewer: What was the nature of the break through?

Lou Benson: What he did is he took the first few groups of messages and the last few groups of a message. I think it took some hundreds of messages and studied them and wrote them down. He found in one set of messages that there appeared to be too many sixes. If these were truly random numbers, one-tenth of the numbers in these groups should have been sixes. In fact there it was more than that, much more than that. After further study and discussion, what Cecil realised was that these numbers were what's called free key, that they were not encrypted. That they had been taken directly from a one-time pad and not added to anything not added to the code groups. Had these numbers been added to code, this bias in favour of sixes would have disappeared. We cannot explain why there was this bias in favour of sixes, because these were essentially random numbers, but they weren't absolutely random. His noticing it led to the unravelling of the whole thing.

Interviewer: The person who made the break through, I think, in language is Meredith Gardner. What did he do?

Lou Benson: Meredith Gardner was a -- a linguist, a linguistic genius, who during World War II had worked on Japanese Army problems, particularly military attaché. He spoke or could read a dozen or so languages and he had taught himself Russian. After the second world war, he was assigned to the Russian section, and taking advantages of the cipher breaks that had been made by Cecil Philips, and a large modest sized group of people, he was able to start attacking the underlying code. Now here was a codebook that the United States had never seen and has never seen to this day. But using his understanding of the Russian language, he reconstructed that codebook. The code group had ten thousand groups, probably by mid 1948, through analysis, he recovered ninety per cent of those code groups.

Interviewer: And what did that enable them to, to do?

Lou Benson: Well that enabled him then, to put the code groups into the messages, and translate, and then you would have the text of a Russian espionage message. So first you have to deal with that cipher, which is from the one-time pad. You have to strip the cipher off. Then you get down to the code. Then you've had to figure out what the code means. That code or code book is a dictionary really with -- with numbers.

Interviewer: One of the first great discoveries Gardner made was he saw this list of names appear. What list of names was this?

Lou Benson: During 1946, Meredith Gardner was able to decrypt to some extent, oh, a handful of messages, maybe four or five. In one of these messages that he translated he broke out from the code and so forth, he found a list of names which he recognised as people who had been involved in the atomic bomb program of the United States. Also it did include some foreign names such as Eisenberg I believe.

Interviewer: Who was he?

Lou Benson: He was, as I recall, a German Physicist who the US believed was probably heading the Nazi atomic bomb effort. So this was a list of physicists, involved in the development of this new weapon.

Interviewer: What could that tell American Intelligence?

Lou Benson: It was suggested that there was a Soviet agent inside the Manhattan Project.

Interviewer: Doing what?

Lou Benson: This agent was supplying the Soviet Union with classified information concerning the Manhattan project and the development of the atomic bomb.

Interviewer: What conclusion was drawn from the existence of this list of names?

Lou Benson: When Meredith Gardner saw this list of names, he recognised a number of names of famous physicists who were involved in the Manhattan Project. Meredith realised that this message was dated in, I believe, 1944, perhaps early '45. Now in 1944, any association of people with the Manhattan Project was at that time top secret. So it suggested to him somebody had acquired top secret information and had passed it on to Soviet intelligence.

Interviewer: So the Manhattan project was no longer secure?

Lou Benson: Correct.

Interviewer: Now, what further discoveries did this cracking the code as it were, lead to? For example did was Fuchs tracked down?

Lou Benson: Klaus Fuchs is found in Venona under a couple of cover names such as Charles or Rest. A particular message that Meredith Gardner solved was sent by the KGB in New York in 1944 to Moscow Centre, and it referenced a particular document, a particular study, that had been produced at Los Alamos in the Manhattan Project. It was learned that the author of that particular study was Klaus Fuchs, so that at least entered Klaus Fuchs' name into the tracking of Soviet agents. It began the investigation into atomic bomb espionage. As other messages were studied, it became apparent that the cover name Charles was a Soviet agent, and the cover name Charles was Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs was subsequently interrogated by security service and by FBI. He made confessions to both. His confessions then led in to other people and further confessions and the break up of a particularly important espionage network. Now the people who were rolled up here are also all in Venona so the investigation proceeds in a couple of directions. Studying these people later learned about Harry Gold, the Greenglasses and the Rosenbergs. Studying them in Venona, but then also taking Klaus Fuchs' confession and going after the next person, getting a confession from Harry Gold, then getting the identification of the Greenglasses, and then getting their confession and the identification of the Rosenbergs.

Interviewer: Did the Russians have any agents who had access to Venona? Who could feed back to them what was going on?

Lou Benson: A man named William Wiesband, who had been in Army signal intelligence during the second world war, and was assigned to Arlington Hall from the Mediterranean Theatre Operations later 1944. He was a Russian speaker. He spoke quite a number of languages. In 1945, probably the very beginning of 1945, he was assigned to the Russian Program which we speak of it as Venona. In those days, it simply would have been called the Russian Program if it were spoken of at all. He had the opportunity to observe certainly the early developments in this program. Meredith Gardner upon breaking out the atomic scientist's message called Wiesband over and said take a look at this message. He was subsequently determined from the investigation of a man named Jones York, found in Venona, that Wiesband apparently was a veteran KGB agent who had handled Mr. York and perhaps others.

Interviewer: So it was penetrated almost from day one?

Lou Benson: If in fact Wiesband was still working for the Soviets in the beginning of 1945, he could have reported on the progress of the attack on Russian diplomatic communications which of course included the KGB's communications.

Interviewer: Now of course Kim Philby also had access to Venona?

Lou Benson: Kim Philby was assigned to MI6 in Washington. In 1949, and he continued in that post until 1951. Part of his legitimate duties were to receive and study Venona translations. We know that from 1949 to '51, perhaps monthly, perhaps every couple of weeks, he did receive Venona translations. Kim Philby also visited Arlington Hall a couple of times. There was nothing particularly notable about the visits. Allegedly, he didn't pay much attention to what was being said. The important thing is he was receiving the translations. He was also undoubtedly was learning from the FBI about the progress of the investigations. Of course he liased with his counterpart in the Security Service. So he would have had full knowledge of the privacy investigations as well as the progress of the code breaking, and the discovery of new cover names from circumstances.

Interviewer: And how could he use that knowledge?

Lou Benson: Presumably Philby would have passed this information back to the Soviets by whatever channel he was using. It's a certainty that information Philby got from Venona led to the tip-off of Burgess and Donald Maclean and their flight to the Soviet Union. Maclean's cover name was Homer in Venona. He was identified, but before the next move could be made, he and Burgess fled. This is probably the most important counter intelligence development of the Venona story. Regardless of the fact that they supposedly got away with it, in fact, it broke up the most important espionage group any country could ever have had. Maclean's access to UK and US secrets was without parallel. It went far beyond just diplomatic matters, military and so forth. So when they fled, of course, we know the story that people began looking at Philby. Effectively that was the end of that group.

Interviewer: So it's seen as a kind of a victory that they fled, but in reality it was felt the end of the whole enterprise. It was a defeat for them?

Lou Benson: As a matter of fact, yes. It's hard to imagine how anything could have been more disappointing to the Soviets. They had extraordinary agents in the highest places, and they lost them.

Interviewer: Did the knowledge of what was going on in Venona help the Soviets tip off people, like possibly the Cohens, that they should flee?

Lou Benson: It's very hard to say until the Soviets tell their side of the story. How they made use of the information they got from Philby in tipping off and extracting their agents, we know, in the case of Burgess and Maclean what happened. They certainly had ample opportunity to tip off other people, such as the Rosenbergs, Cohens and so forth. They did tip off the Rosenbergs late in the game, and Julius Rosenberg tried to get his network out of the United States. Some got out. Some didn't. Lona Cohen's cover name was probably Lesley. She appears just in a single message of, I believe, early 1945, where KGB New York says they have not been in touch with Lesley for several months and are thinking of reactivating her to do some support work. I don't recall if it was as a courier, or it could be the keeper of a safe house. Morris Cohen is definitely not identified in Venona. He was, after all, in the army at that time. KGB would have had trouble contacting him. Some people think that the unidentified cover name, Volunteer, is Morris Cohen, but we don't know.

Interviewer: Now, we know that Lona Cohen was acting as a courier going down to Los Alamos, or out to Albuquerque where she met a scientist. Who was she meeting? Does Venona tell us the name of the person?

Lou Benson: There is nothing in Venona to really say anything about what the Cohens were doing. Because the single message concerning Lona Cohen as cover name Lesley simply refers to the fact the KGB has not been in touch with her in recent months, but they were going to reactivate her for some type of courier duties or to be the keeper of a safe house. So from Venona we would really not learn much about what Lona Cohen is doing. If Morris Cohen is the unidentified cover name Volunteer, there's a little bit more, but even there the references to Volunteer don't tie to atomic bomb espionage. So Venona is a very modest source of information on the Cohens.

Interviewer: What does Venona tell us about the man that Lona Cohen was meeting in Albuquerque?

Lou Benson: Reportedly, but not from Venona, Lona Cohen was meeting with Ted Hall who was a young physicist at Los Alamos. He's very prominent in Venona. In 1944 he got in touch with the Russians, and was recruited by the KGB by an officer, an agent officer, named Sergei Kurnakov. He is seen in a number of Venona messages. Now the first message where there's a description of Kurnakov's meeting with Hall, his true name is used. The Venona message speaks of Kurnakov having a meeting with Theodore Hall. It says he's nineteen-years-old and a physicist. That he's involved in the Manhattan Project, and how he got in touch with the Soviets through a couple of tries, he and a friend of his made contact with the Soviets. Thereafter we see messages that refer to that meeting, and they speak of a cover name Mollad, and the equation was immediately made that Mollad and Hall were the same person. United States and the UK, therefore, had the identification of Hall, and Hall equals Mollad by the end of 1949 and certainly not later than probably the first half of 1950.

Interviewer: Does that mean that Hall's effectiveness ceased?

Lou Benson: Yes, in the case of Mr. Hall. I would have to draw on some recent books, particularly Joe Allbright's Commercial Consuls Book, Bomb Shell, where by 1950 Hall was not working for the government. I mean he had left what became the Atomic Energy Commission, shortly after the war. According to information, apparently, Hall may have provided to Mr. Allbright, he may have had further contact with the Russians, but he's not working for the US Government at that time. He's perhaps a graduate student at the University of Chicago at the time he comes under investigation.

Interviewer: How many code names are there in Venona? And how many people are still unidentified?

Lou Benson: If we consider the Venona messages that are to and from the United States, it would probably appear that there are at least just say one hundred and twenty-five Americans who were Soviet Agents to the KGB or the GRU. In other words their names are known in or through Venona, either directly from the messages or by analysis and investigation. Some of these people have cover names. Some of these people appear by their true names. Then we have an additional, let's say, a hundred cover names that have not been identified, a hundred cover names that appear to be Americans. That's, approximate. One of the reasons cover names cannot be identified is if they only appear in a couple of messages. So there is no context. It might suggest the person wasn't all that important. And that's hard to say. There are a few unidentified cover names that would appear to be important.

Interviewer: Are these important in terms of the atomic bomb program?

Lou Benson: Among the unidentified Venona cover names is one Pers, who appears in about five Venona messages. Pers is apparently a physicist. He's definitely working on the atomic bomb, or he might be at Oak Ridge, he has never been identified. There are others, other figures that appear in some of the messages concerning the atomic bomb espionage, but it's hard to know quite what to make of them.

Interviewer: Is Pers, probably a significant plan?

Lou Benson: I think Pers probably was a significant espionage figure for the Soviets. But again we only have five messages. But he does provide technical data, or he has access to technical data. In just a modest number of messages the Russians themselves have said that Pers was an important agent, but, of course, they declined to give the name of that person.

Interviewer: So Pers could still be alive?

Lou Benson: It's possible. We really don't know who Pers is.

Interviewer: And he's still not caught?

Lou Benson: If he's alive, he or she is not caught.

Source: Red Files: Secret Victories of the KGB

The Cold War Atomic Intelligence Game, 1945-70 - From the Russian Perspective - part 3

Part 1

Part 2

Counterintelligence Operations

The USSR's Communist Party and the government called on the KGB to maintain an enhanced counterintelligence posture at nuclear facilities. A 1947 resolution of the USSR Council of Ministers regarding security at the warhead R&D facility in Sarov, for example, directed that, "[I]n order to prevent infiltrations of Object No. 550 (code-name of the R&D center] by spies, saboteurs, and other enemies . . . the USSR Ministry of State Security (comrade Abakumov) is obligated to step up its operational and chekist work at Object No. 550 and in the areas of Mordov republic and Gorky region adjacent to the special regime zone."

In response, the KGB established a Department K in its headquarters in Moscow and "K" units in the regions. The KGB worked with nuclear facilities to develop suitable cover stories to conceal their true missions, monitored information protection measures, and implemented countermeasures against technical collection systems (see below). It also conducted classic counterintelligence operations involving the penetration of foreign intelligence organizations, working against suspected and confirmed foreign intelligence officers in the Soviet Union, and monitoring nuclear facilities and their surroundings.

According to KGB analysis, its success in preventing the insertion of clandestine agents inside the Soviet Union from the late 1940s to early 1950s forced Western intelligence services to rely on intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover and agents entering the country via such other legitimate channels as tourism, scientific meetings, and cultural exchanges. This allowed the KGB to focus its operational resources on a relatively small number of targets. In 1961, KGB surveillance against Canadian and British diplomats led to the exposure of Col. Pen-kovskiy, who had provided the West with information on a range of nuclear-related matters. Later on, according to the KGB's 1967 Annual Report:

[I]n the course of counterintelligence countermeasures with regard to enemy intelligence officers under diplomatic cover and other foreigners under suspicion of being affiliated with the enemy's special services, a number of Soviet citizens who established contact with the aim of passing secret information were discovered and unmasked. Among those persons brought to justice were . . . a technician [named Malyshev] from an installation of special significance of the Ministry of Medium Machine-Building.

Technical Countermeasures

The effectiveness of the KGB's counterintelligence operations, on one hand, and improvements in US signals intelligence, overhead imagery, and nuclear test monitoring capabilities, on the other hand, led the US atomic energy intelligence program to rely increasingly on technical collection systems. KGB historians observe that the 1950s marked the beginning of the massive use of novel espionage technologies. In the nuclear energy area, for example, "[T]o locate Soviet atomic facilities . . . American, British, and Canadian intelligence officers and their agents were armed with state-of-the-art radio-electronic equipment, . . . radio-navigational systems . . . . Massive application of modern means of science and technology was a characteristic feature of activities by imperialist intelligences during that period [1953-58]."

In response, the KGB "took measures . . . to bring to further perfection the protection of state secrets from the radio-technical and aerial-space means of reconnaissance of the enemy." At a test site, for example, operations on nuclear devices in the field were conducted under a tent to prevent visual observation. Furthermore, "[T]he organs of military counterintelligence of the KGB did significant work on camouflaging . . . depots of nuclear weapons and other objects from the enemy's space reconnaissance." Moreover, most communications between nuclear facilities and the complex's headquarters in Moscow were by teletype or telephone and involved the use of landlines and microwave systems. These were considerably more difficult to intercept than short-wave radio transmissions, the target of the National Security Agency's listening stations at that time. Particularly sensitive documents, such as production data for the nuclear warhead assembly complex, were hand-delivered by couriers.

Radiological analysis of radioactive residues from Soviet atmospheric tests, collected by the US atomic Energy Detection System (USAEDS), was the primary tool for tracking the progress of the USSR's nuclear weapons R&D program and its atomic capabilities during the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, benchmarked by US nuclear test data, the analysis of Soviet nuclear test residues allowed scientists from US national laboratories to determine the Soviet devices' "design space," yield, efficiency, materials, and other parameters. After 1963, when the United States and the Soviet Union signed the partial test ban treaty prohibiting nuclear explosions above the ground, each country made a transition to underground nuclear testing. The end of atmospheric testing was a major setback to the US intelligence effort. According to National Intelligence Estimate 11-2A-65, "[O]ur estimates of Soviet nuclear weapon technology . . . are based almost entirely upon analysis of the tests through 1962 . . . and upon extrapolation from that analysis." The radiological method remained useful to some extent because of radioactive venting from Soviet underground explosions. However, Soviet efforts to reduce venting eventually made the US radiological method ineffective against Soviet targets.

In 1973, the increasing threat from Western technical collection systems caused the Soviet government to establish a new organization, the State Technical Commission, with the main mission of developing and implementing a comprehensive system of countermeasures against technical espionage.

Gauging the Effectiveness of Soviet D&D

During the Cold War, US intelligence agencies invested considerable resources and effort to understand and predict Soviet nuclear technologies and policies. Despite the fact that the United States was off by several years in predicting the first Soviet atomic explosion in August 1949, it subsequently enjoyed numerous and remarkable achievements. For example, from the first Soviet explosion through the test series of 1961-62, US intelligence detected and correctly characterized many milestone designs of Soviet fission and thermonuclear weapons. Much of this success was based on the fact that atmospheric nuclear explosions by nature were so powerful that they were physically impossible to contain or conceal.

The Soviet Union also was unable to hide from overhead imagery systems its huge nuclear weapons production infrastructure. By 1965, the US intelligence program had correctly identified and characterized facilities with more obvious nuclear signatures, including all fissile material production centers, some uranium processing facilities, the Sarov warhead R&D center, the serial warhead assembly facilities in Lesnoy and Trekhgorny, and the component manufacturing plant in Zarechny. It appears that some facilities, especially those lacking distinct signatures, escaped detection. It is not clear, for example, that the CIA was aware in the 1960s of the non-nuclear warhead component manufacturing facilities and R&D institutes in Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, and Nizhni Novgorod.

Soviet D&D measures were very effective in preventing the United States from learning what was going on inside the buildings it could easily see from space. For example, US intelligence had a hard time assessing the Soviet program to produce enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and reactors. According to a 1954 National Intelligence Estimate:

Only meager evidence is available that is relevant to the isotope separation phase of the program . . . . The absence of sufficient evidence from which to estimate installed or planned isotope separation capacity continues to be one of the most serious gaps in intelligence information on the Soviet atomic energy program.

More than 10 years later, in 1965, US intelligence observed that while it had reasonably accurate estimates of power inputs into the Soviet gaseous diffusion plants—based on data obtained from overhead imagery and electric grid analysis—its assessments of plant efficiencies and, as a result, production capabilities, were very uncertain. Reliable estimates of plant efficiency would have required detailed knowledge of the Soviet gaseous diffusion technology and plant operations, which stand-off collection systems simply could not deliver.

Perhaps even more importantly, the USSR succeeded in preventing US intelligence from detecting its transition to the more advanced centrifuge uranium enrichment technology. A 1964 National Intelligence Estimate judged that "[T]he present size of the Soviet gaseous diffusion complex . . . tends to indicate that significant U-235 production by the ultracentrifuge and other methods is unlikely." In fact, a pilot centrifuge facility had begun operation in Novouralsk in 1957. By 1962, the initial phase of a much larger complex at that site had commenced operations, and by 1964 the entire industrial centrifuge enrichment facility had been completed and was fully operational.

The Soviet government worked hard to keep the centrifuge effort secret. The critical point was the repatriation of the German scientists who had participated in the project. According to Nickolai Sinev, the Soviet chief centrifuge designer during the 1950s:

Immediately upon his return from the USSR, Gernot Zippe [a talented engineer from Austria] . . . patents in the West the Soviet invention [the design of a subcritical centrifuge] . . . . Having learned about this plagiarism, the Soviet atomic management decided not to react to this information—to keep quiet in order not to give any indication that the USSR was working on a new, progressive method of uranium enrichment. Let them think that the USSR . . . continued using the inefficient gaseous diffusion method. Indeed, that was the price of the concealment for over 30 years of the industrial deployment of a new economic uranium enrichment technology in the USSR.

Another participant in the centrifuge program adds bitterly that "the damage to morale and economic damage done by the notorious regime of secrecy, which did not allow the USSR to patent abroad the Soviet centrifuge design, was [enormous]."

In Conclusion

Throughout the Cold War, the United States and its allies mounted a massive atomic energy intelligence effort against the Soviet Union. It was countered with a highly effective, defense-in-depth system of countermeasures. The precise score of this competition is unlikely ever to be established. It is clear, however, that long-range, stand-off technical systems proved to be the best collection sources for the United States, allowing for successful tracking of many aspects of the Soviet nuclear program. Overhead imagery enabled the detection and analysis of critical elements of the Soviet nuclear infrastructure. The USAEDS system, designed to monitor radioactive effluents from nuclear explosions and nuclear material processing, yielded important data on the development of Soviet nuclear weapons science and technology. Because of denial and deception countermeasures, however, the USSR's nuclear program was an exceptionally hard target. The lack of reliable on-the-ground intelligence made it difficult for the West to understand important developments inside the Soviet nuclear complex, which resulted in significant intelligence gaps.

Source

The Cold War Atomic Intelligence Game, 1945-70 - From the Russian Perspective - part 2

Part 1

Personnel Isolation

The isolation of construction workers and facility personnel to prevent potential recruitment by foreign spies was another critical security task. The construction force was particularly difficult to control. At least 15 of 114 GULAG camps supported the construction of nuclear facilities. In late 1947, over 20,000 prisoners were working in Ozersk, and about 10,000 were in Sarov. There were over 18,000 prisoners in Novouralsk during 1950-51. Over 27,000 were in Zheleznogorsk in 1953.

The Soviet government adopted several measures to minimize the security risk posed by the prison labor force. The KGB's policy was not to send prisoners with sentence terms of less than five years or those with sentences expiring in less than three years to nuclear sites. After completing nuclear construction projects, the prisoners finished their terms at the Vorkuta camps in Siberia, which were famous for their remoteness and harsh conditions. When released from the camps, the prisoners were sent to far away regions in the north and to Central Asia. Only in 1955, after several cooling-off years, were some of them allowed to return to central Russia. According to a journalist's account: "[T]he news spread quickly throughout all GULAG camps that [a nuclear construction assignment] was effectively the same as a death sentence."

Soldiers comprised the other large segment of the nuclear construction force. Once they completed their service, they all had to sign a 25-year non-disclosure agreement. The KGB, the agency in charge of construction, was directed to retain discharged soldiers and to hire them as civilians to work on other special projects.

German and Austrian scientists and engineers, who became involved in the Soviet nuclear program after World War II, presented the Soviet security apparatus with a particularly delicate problem. The program needed their expertise. Yet, it was clear that most of them eventually would go home and become accessible to Western intelligence organizations. Moscow decided to concentrate them to the extent possible at NKVD-run facilities (such as the Sukhumi laboratory on the Black Sea); to exclude German scientists from work that was directly related to nuclear weapons R&D and production; and to institute a two-year cooling-off period prior to repatriation. Even so, German scientists gave the West much of the initial data on the facilities, personalities, and technical directions of the Soviet project.

Tens of thousands of workers and engineers were required to operate the newly built facilities. Personnel selection was under the control of the Communist Party's Central Committee, the Council of Ministers, and regional party organizations. There was a process of double selection of personnel based on recommendations by those already working in the program and background investigations by the KGB and its predecessor organizations.

Closed cities made the job of insulating and controlling nuclear workers relatively straightforward. Upon arrival, new residents received instruction in security procedures and signed a nondisclosure agreement, which, among other things, prohibited them from disclosing information about the city and the nuclear facility; the names of nearby towns, rivers, lakes, and other landmarks; the transportation routes to the area; and other information that could help in locating the city. New workers were also encouraged to limit correspondence and social contacts with people outside the closed cities. Personal phone contacts with the outside world were prohibited. All correspondence was censored. Generally, people lived and worked behind barbed wire, all aspects of their lives penetrated and controlled by the security services. According to Yuli Khariton, a famous warhead designer from Sarov, "Beria's people were everywhere."

Initially, closed-city residents could leave their areas only for business. On rare occasions, they could go to sanatoriums for medical treatment or leave for family emergencies. Every such trip had to be approved by the security director, and its duration was checked by security officers.

In the 1950s, these security rules were somewhat relaxed. By 1954, facility directors, in coordination with the KGB, could grant permission to selected workers to leave their cities for vacations, medical treatment, or study. Nonetheless, workers willing to spend their vacations inside a city received bonuses amounting to 50 percent of their monthly salaries. All travelers still had to have their travel routes approved and sign nondisclosure agreements. Blanket permission to leave the cities was not issued until 1957, when all residents were issued passes permitting them to leave for one day any time they wanted. By that time, the Soviet Union already possessed a credible nuclear deterrent (including nuclear-armed medium-range ballistic missiles) against the West.

Keeping Technology Secret

Secrecy was a hallmark of Soviet nuclear science and technology. As late as the 1980s:

[C]lassification stamps Secret and Top Secret concealed everything even remotely connected with our activities and achievements in high technologies . . . . The stamp For Official Use (DSP) was on every piece of conceivably interesting science and technology information. Only after the Chernobyl disaster . . . was the censorship system forced into permitting publications in the open literature about the real state of the nation's atomic industry.

Even within this generally secretive environment, the nuclear weapons program existed inside a cocoon of secrecy of its own. Nuclear materials and operations had codenames, which were different at different facilities and which were changed periodically. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, natural uranium was assigned such names as strontium, lead, tar, phosphorus, bismuth, titanium, kremnil, A-9, Azh-9, BR-10, and P-9, while HEU had the codenames of kremnil-1 and moist kremnil.

Compartmentalization of information and operations was near absolute. Mikhail Gladyshev, former chief of the plutonium purification shop at the Mayak complex in Ozersk, has remarked:

[A]ctivities of the "regime services," headed by Beria, were very stern and bordered on insanity . . . . Often, there was a threat to the safety of workers . . . . As you see, our work had double risks—losing health and losing freedom. This was the difficult fate of those who made the atomic bomb.

Information about production outputs was particularly sensitive. According to Gladyshev:

[W]e put the [plutonium] paste in a box and transferred it to the consumer plant. How much plutonium was in that box we didn't know and it was not recommended for us to know. Even later, when I was the plant's chief engineer, the plans for plutonium production were known only to the facility's director, and all documents were prepared in single copies.

Supported in large part by the fear of punishment—an important consideration, given Stalinist repressions and campaigns to unmask spies and saboteurs—the regime of secrecy was further cemented by genuine patriotism and the sense of purpose among nuclear workers.

Continue reading - Counterintelligence Operations

The Cold War Atomic Intelligence Game, 1945-70 - From the Russian Perspective

Since its inception in the early 1940s and through much of the Cold War, the Soviet atomic project was the focus of a massive intelligence effort by the United States and its allies. Of primary interest were the issues of uranium availability; the production of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium; nuclear warhead R&D and testing; and the nuclear weapons production and management infrastructure.

Washington needed such information to assess the Soviet nuclear strike capability. Estimates of the Soviet inventories of HEU and plutonium when put together with data on warhead designs would allow CIA analysts to gauge the size and composition of the Soviet nuclear weapons stockpile. Information on Moscow's knowledge of nuclear weapons effects was needed to evaluate the capability of the Soviet Union to design warheads for air-defense and anti-missile missiles and to develop hardened warheads capable of surviving US ballistic missile defenses. Analysis of the impact on the Soviet nuclear weapons program of testing moratoriums and the proposed limited test ban treaty was critical when Washington was developing its position on these issues in the 1950s and 1960s.

In pursuing these objectives, the US atomic energy intelligence effort was global in scope. It involved a wide range of covert operations, exploitation of open source materials, and the use of technical collection systems. While much has been written about US operations against Soviet targets (including in Studies in Intelligence), relatively little attention has been given to the USSR's elaborate countermeasures intended to prevent the West from learning about its nuclear program. Based on public information, this article seeks to examine the Soviet nuclear denial and deception (D&D) campaign from 1945 until 1970.

This period is of particular interest. The 1950s and 1960s were the formative years of the Soviet nuclear program. By the end of this period, Moscow had a mature nuclear weapons technology base and a thoroughly integrated and redundant weapons complex, the configuration of which remained largely the same until the end of the Cold War. In many ways, these were also the most dangerous years of the Cold War. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis and other dramatic events of that period were of critical significance in shaping approaches to national defense, foreign policy, and intelligence that served each country for the balance of the Cold War confrontation.

Protecting Nuclear Secrets

The nuclear weapons program, the crown jewel of Soviet military power, has always been a closely guarded secret. During its early years, the program was directed by the Special Committee chaired by Lavrenti Beria, the head of the Soviet NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs). State security generals were appointed to key management positions at nuclear research institutes and production facilities. The NKVD, which eventually became the KGB, played a key role in nuclear safeguards and the physical protection of nuclear facilities. The NKVD also was charged with nuclear construction and had the power to establish and run its own nuclear R&D and production facilities. For example, the Bochvar Institute of Inorganic Materials (VNIINM), responsible for the development of plutonium production and processing technologies, was established in 1944 as the NII-9 research institute in the NKVD system—it was not transferred to the broader nuclear program until October 1945.

The pervasive role of state security organizations in the Soviet atomic effort was due to the program's high priority for national security; the requirement for absolute secrecy; the ability of nuclear managers with state security backgrounds to get things done; and the NKVD's vast resources, which included funding, materiel, and a workforce drawn from the GULAG prison network.

Beria was executed following the death of Stalin in 1953, and subsequent purges of many former and active NKVD/KGB officers reduced the state security presence in the nuclear complex. The program itself was reorganized in June 1953 to become the USSR Ministry of Medium Machine Building (Minsredmash, the predecessor of today's Ministry of Atomic Power, Minatom), and it started to resemble other ministries of the Soviet military-industrial complex.

The emphasis on secrecy and security in the nuclear area remained, however. To thwart foreign intelligence operations, the Soviet Union built an elaborate, multi-layered system of denial and deception, the main elements of which included the restriction of access to nuclear facilities and personnel, strict information protection measures, an enhanced counterintelligence posture, and technical countermeasures.

Denial of Access

Secrecy considerations were paramount in the development of the nuclear infrastructure. While some research and design laboratories were established in Moscow and other open cities, the more critical fissile material production centers and nuclear weapons research and production facilities were built in 10 closed nuclear cities, which are now known by their Russian acronym ZATO. The construction of the first-line nuclear weapons R&D center (Sarov) and fissile material production facilities (Ozersk, Novouralsk, and Lesnoy) began during 1946-47. Subsequently, they were joined by a cluster of second-line facilities (Snezhinsk, Trekhgorny, Seversk, Zheleznogorsk, Zelenogorsk, and Zarechny), most located in the Urals and western Siberia.

To conceal operations from foreign spies and increase survivability against an atomic bombardment, nuclear cities were built in densely forested areas deep inside the USSR's land mass. The cities did not appear on maps. In non-secret documents, they were assigned the names of nearby towns and a numerical suffix. The use of post-box numbers continued until the early 1990s.

D&D considerations at times were decisive in determining the design and location of new nuclear facilities. For example, secrecy was the main factor in moving the first plutonium production complex (now the Mayak complex) from the initially proposed remote location near the Ufa River to its current location in Ozersk, near Lake Kyzyltash. According to a letter from the atomic project's science director Igor Kurchatov to Beria:

[I]n considering issues related to the construction of Plant 817 [the code-name of the Mayak complex] it was established that water in cooling towers would have a temperature of about 80o C. The resulting steam, which would be inevitably produced in large quantities (especially during winter), would thereby compromise the concealment . . . siting the plant near a lake would simplify the problem considerably because large quantities of water would allow cooling without cooling towers . . . and steam formation would be avoided . . . . The site near Lake Kyzyltash was proposed to the Special Committee. The [main] argument against this site . . . is that the lake could serve as a navigation landmark for aerial reconnaissance. I consider this argument unconvincing because the site is located in the part of the Urals, which, within a small area, contains a very large number of similarly shaped lakes. I therefore urge you to consider moving Plant 817's site to Lake Kyzyltash.

This was how the closed city of Ozersk and the plutonium complex, a source of several major environmental disasters in the Urals, was established.

The closed cities represented an integral part of the layered security system built around nuclear weapons facilities. Each city occupied a large restricted area—232 square kilometers in the case of Sarov, for example—that was surrounded by double fences. Inside the restricted area were a town for the facility workforce, large wooded areas, and several isolated technical areas that housed primary research and production facilities, testing areas, and support infrastructure. Technical areas within the restricted area were surrounded by their own double or triple fences, which were patrolled by armed guards.

A layer outside the perimeter was designated as a special regime zone, where every resident had to have a permit and a passport. Temporary residence—even overnight accommodation of non-residents—was prohibited. Non-residents could not even pick mushrooms and berries or hunt in the zone. Ex-criminals and other undesirable elements were prevented from residing in the special regime zones.

Critical nuclear facilities were on the government's priority list for "active air defense measures."5 All military and civilian over-flights were prohibited. The U-2 plane piloted on 1 May 1961 by Gary Powers over the plutonium complex in Ozersk (and shot down shortly thereafter by an SA-2 surface-to-air missile near Yekaterinburg) was the first airplane over this facility in the almost 15 years of its operation.

Continue reading - Personnel Isolation

CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 - part 4

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Part 2

Part 3

The 1970s and 1980s: The UFO Issue Refuses To Die

The Condon report did not satisfy many UFOlogists, who considered it a coverup for CIA activities in UFO research. Additional sightings in the early 1970s fueled beliefs that the CIA was somehow involved in a vast conspiracy. On 7 June 1975, William Spaulding, head of a small UFO group, Ground Saucer Watch (GSW), wrote to CIA requesting a copy of the Robertson panel report and all records relating to UFOs. Spaulding was convinced that the Agency was withholding major files on UFOs. Agency officials provided Spaulding with a copy of the Robertson panel report and of the Durant report.

On 14 July 1975, Spaulding again wrote the Agency questioning the authenticity of the reports he had received and alleging a CIA coverup of its UFO activities. Gene Wilson, CIA's Information and Privacy Coordinator, replied in an attempt to satisfy Spaulding, "At no time prior to the formation of the Robertson Panel and subsequent to the issuance of the panel's report has CIA engaged in the study of the UFO phenomena." The Robertson panel report, according to Wilson, was "the summation of Agency interest and involvement in UFOs." Wilson also inferred that there were no additional documents in CIA's possession that related to UFOs. Wilson was ill informed.

In September 1977, Spaulding and GSW, unconvinced by Wilson's response, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Agency that specifically requested all UFO documents in CIA's possession. Deluged by similar FOIA requests for Agency information on UFOs, CIA officials agreed, after much legal maneuvering, to conduct a "reasonable search" of CIA files for UFO materials. Despite an Agency-wide unsympathetic attitude toward the suit, Agency officials, led by Launie Ziebell from the Office of General Counsel, conducted a thorough search for records pertaining to UFOs. Persistent, demanding, and even threatening at times, Ziebell and his group scoured the Agency. They even turned up an old UFO file under a secretary's desk. The search finally produced 355 documents totaling approximately 900 pages. On 14 December 1978, the Agency released all but 57 documents of about 100 pages to GSW. It withheld these 57 documents on national security grounds and to protect sources and methods.

Although the released documents produced no smoking gun and revealed only a low-level Agency interest in the UFO phenomena after the Robertson panel report of 1953, the press treated the release in a sensational manner. The New York Times, for example, claimed that the declassified documents confirmed intensive government concern over UFOs and that the Agency was secretly involved in the surveillance of UFOs. GSW then sued for the release of the withheld documents, claiming that the Agency was still holding out key information. It was much like the John F. Kennedy assassination issue. No matter how much material the Agency released and no matter how dull and prosaic the information, people continued to believe in a Agency coverup and conspiracy.

DCI Stansfield Turner was so upset when he read The New York Times article that he asked his senior officers, "Are we in UFOs?" After reviewing the records, Don Wortman, Deputy Director for Administration, reported to Turner that there was "no organized Agency effort to do research in connection with UFO phenomena nor has there been an organized effort to collect intelligence on UFOs since the 1950s." Wortman assured Turner that the Agency records held only "sporadic instances of correspondence dealing with the subject," including various kinds of reports of UFO sightings. There was no Agency program to collect actively information on UFOs, and the material released to GSW had few deletions. Thus assured, Turner had the General Counsel press for a summary judgment against the new lawsuit by GSW. In May 1980, the courts dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the Agency had conducted a thorough and adequate search in good faith.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Agency continued its low-key interest in UFOs and UFO sightings. While most scientists now dismissed flying saucers reports as a quaint part of the 1950s and 1960s, some in the Agency and in the Intelligence Community shifted their interest to studying parapsychology and psychic phenomena associated with UFO sightings. CIA officials also looked at the UFO problem to determine what UFO sightings might tell them about Soviet progress in rockets and missiles and reviewed its counterintelligence aspects. Agency analysts from the Life Science Division of OSI and OSWR officially devoted a small amount of their time to issues relating to UFOs. These included counterintelligence concerns that the Soviets and the KGB were using US citizens and UFO groups to obtain information on sensitive US weapons development programs (such as the Stealth aircraft), the vulnerability of the US air-defense network to penetration by foreign missiles mimicking UFOs, and evidence of Soviet advanced technology associated with UFO sightings.

CIA also maintained Intelligence Community coordination with other agencies regarding their work in parapsychology, psychic phenomena, and "remote viewing" experiments. In general, the Agency took a conservative scientific view of these unconventional scientific issues. There was no formal or official UFO project within the Agency in the 1980s, and Agency officials purposely kept files on UFOs to a minimum to avoid creating records that might mislead the public if released.

The 1980s also produced renewed charges that the Agency was still withholding documents relating to the 1947 Roswell incident, in which a flying saucer supposedly crashed in New Mexico, and the surfacing of documents which purportedly revealed the existence of a top secret US research and development intelligence operation responsible only to the President on UFOs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. UFOlogists had long argued that, following a flying saucer crash in New Mexico in 1947, the government not only recovered debris from the crashed saucer but also four or five alien bodies. According to some UFOlogists, the government clamped tight security around the project and has refused to divulge its investigation results and research ever since. In September 1994, the US Air Force released a new report on the Roswell incident that concluded that the debris found in New Mexico in 1947 probably came from a once top secret balloon operation, Project MOGUL, designed to monitor the atmosphere for evidence of Soviet nuclear tests.

Circa 1984, a series of documents surfaced which some UFOlogists said proved that President Truman created a top secret committee in 1947, Majestic-12, to secure the recovery of UFO wreckage from Roswell and any other UFO crash sight for scientific study and to examine any alien bodies recovered from such sites. Most if not all of these documents have proved to be fabrications. Yet the controversy persists.

Like the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the UFO issue probably will not go away soon, no matter what the Agency does or says. The belief that we are not alone in the universe is too emotionally appealing and the distrust of our government is too pervasive to make the issue amenable to traditional scientific studies of rational explanation and evidence.

Source - CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90, Central Intelligence Agency

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CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 - part 3

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Part 2

The 1960s: Declining CIA Involvement and Mounting Controversy

In the early 1960s, Keyhoe, Davidson, and other UFOlogists maintained their assault on the Agency for release of UFO information. Davidson now claimed that CIA "was solely responsible for creating the Flying Saucer furor as a tool for cold war psychological warfare since 1951." Despite calls for Congressional hearings and the release of all materials relating to UFOs, little changed.

In 1964, however, following high-level White House discussions on what to do if an alien intelligence was discovered in space and a new outbreak of UFO reports and sightings, DCI John McCone asked for an updated CIA evaluation of UFOs. Responding to McCone's request, OSI asked the CD to obtain various recent samples and reports of UFO sightings from NICAP. With Keyhoe, one of the founders, no longer active in the organization, CIA officers met with Richard H. Hall, the acting director. Hall gave the officers samples from the NICAP database on the most recent sightings.

After OSI officers had reviewed the material, Donald F. Chamberlain, OSI Assistant Director, assured McCone that little had changed since the early 1950s. There was still no evidence that UFOs were a threat to the security of the United States or that they were of "foreign origin." Chamberlain told McCone that OSI still monitored UFO reports, including the official Air Force investigation, Project BLUE BOOK.

At the same time that CIA was conducting this latest internal review of UFOs, public pressure forced the Air Force to establish a special ad hoc committee to review BLUE BOOK. Chaired by Dr. Brian O'Brien, a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, the panel included Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer from Cornell University. Its report offered nothing new. It declared that UFOs did not threaten the national security and that it could find "no UFO case which represented technological or scientific advances outside of a terrestrial framework." The committee did recommend that UFOs be studied intensively, with a leading university acting as a coordinator for the project, to settle the issue conclusively.

The House Armed Services Committee also held brief hearings on UFOs in 1966 that produced similar results. Secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown assured the committee that most sightings were easily explained and that there was no evidence that "strangers from outer space" had been visiting Earth. He told the committee members, however, that the Air Force would keep an open mind and continue to investigate all UFO reports.

Following the report of its O'Brien Committee, the House hearings on UFOs, and Dr. Robertson's disclosure on a CBS Reports program that CIA indeed had been involved in UFO analysis, the Air Force in July 1966 again approached the Agency for declassification of the entire Robertson panel report of 1953 and the full Durant report on the Robertson panel deliberations and findings. The Agency again refused to budge. Karl H. Weber, Deputy Director of OSI, wrote the Air Force that "We are most anxious that further publicity not be given to the information that the panel was sponsored by the CIA." Weber noted that there was already a sanitized version available to the public. Weber's response was rather shortsighted and ill considered. It only drew more attention to the 13-year-old Robertson panel report and CIA's role in the investigation of UFOs. The science editor of The Saturday Review drew nationwide attention to the CIA's role in investigating UFOs when he published an article criticizing the "sanitized version" of the 1953 Robertson panel report and called for release of the entire document.

Unknown to CIA officials, Dr. James E. McDonald, a noted atmospheric physicist from the University of Arizona, had already seen the Durant report on the Robertson panel proceedings at Wright-Patterson on 6 June 1966. When McDonald returned to Wright-Patterson on 30 June to copy the report, however, the Air Force refused to let him see it again, stating that it was a CIA classified document. Emerging as a UFO authority, McDonald publicly claimed that the CIA was behind the Air Force secrecy policies and coverup. He demanded the release of the full Robertson panel report and the Durant report.

Bowing to public pressure and the recommendation of its own O'Brien Committee, the Air Force announced in August 1966 that it was seeking a contract with a leading university to undertake a program of intensive investigations of UFO sightings. The new program was designed to blunt continuing charges that the US Government had concealed what it knew about UFOs. On 7 October, the University of Colorado accepted a $325,000 contract with the Air Force for an 18-month study of flying saucers. Dr. Edward U. Condon, a physicist at Colorado and a former Director of the National Bureau of Standards, agreed to head the program. Pronouncing himself an "agnostic" on the subject of UFOs, Condon observed that he had an open mind on the question and thought that possible extraterritorial origins were "improbable but not impossible." Brig. Gen. Edward Giller, USAF, and Dr. Thomas Ratchford from the Air Force Research and Development Office became the Air Force coordinators for the project.

In February 1967, Giller contacted Arthur C. Lundahl, Director of CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), and proposed an informal liaison through which NPIC could provide the Condon Committee with technical advice and services in examining photographs of alleged UFOs. Lundahl and DDI R. Jack Smith approved the arrangement as a way of "preserving a window" on the new effort. They wanted the CIA and NPIC to maintain a low profile, however, and to take no part in writing any conclusions for the committee. No work done for the committee by NPIC was to be formally acknowledged.

Ratchford next requested that Condon and his committee be allowed to visit NPIC to discuss the technical aspects of the problem and to view the special equipment NPIC had for photoanalysis. On 20 February 1967, Condon and four members of his committee visited NPIC. Lundahl emphasized to the group that any NPIC work to assist the committee must not be identified as CIA work. Moreover, work performed by NPIC would be strictly of a technical nature. After receiving these guidelines, the group heard a series of briefings on the services and equipment not available elsewhere that CIA had used in its analysis of some UFO photography furnished by Ratchford. Condon and his committee were impressed.

Condon and the same group met again in May 1967 at NPIC to hear an analysis of UFO photographs taken at Zanesville, Ohio. The analysis debunked that sighting. The committee was again impressed with the technical work performed, and Condon remarked that for the first time a scientific analysis of a UFO would stand up to investigation. The group also discussed the committee's plans to call on US citizens for additional photographs and to issue guidelines for taking useful UFO photographs. In addition, CIA officials agreed that the Condon Committee could release the full Durant report with only minor deletions.

In April 1969, Condon and his committee released their report on UFOs. The report concluded that little, if anything, had come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years and that further extensive study of UFO sightings was unwarranted. It also recommended that the Air Force special unit, Project BLUE BOOK, be discontinued. It did not mention CIA participation in the Condon committee's investigation. A special panel established by the National Academy of Sciences reviewed the Condon report and concurred with its conclusion that "no high priority in UFO investigations is warranted by data of the past two decades." It concluded its review by declaring, "On the basis of present knowledge, the least likely explanation of UFOs is the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings." Following the recommendations of the Condon Committee and the National Academy of Sciences, the Secretary of the Air Force, Robert C. Seamans, Jr., announced on 17 December 1969 the termination of BLUE BOOK.

Continue reading - The 1970s and 1980s: The UFO Issue Refuses To Die

CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 - part 2

Part 1

The Robertson Panel, 1952-53

On 4 December 1952, the Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC) took up the issue of UFOs. Amory, as acting chairman, presented DCI Smith's request to the committee that it informally discuss the subject of UFOs. Chadwell then briefly reviewed the situation and the active program of the ATIC relating to UFOs. The committee agreed that the DCI should "enlist the services of selected scientists to review and appraise the available evidence in the light of pertinent scientific theories" and draft an NSCID on the subject. Maj. Gen. John A. Samford, Director of Air Force Intelligence, offered full cooperation.

At the same time, Chadwell looked into British efforts in this area. He learned the British also were active in studying the UFO phenomena. An eminent British scientist, R. V. Jones, headed a standing committee created in June 1951 on flying saucers. Jones' and his committee's conclusions on UFOs were similar to those of Agency officials: the sightings were not enemy aircraft but misrepresentations of natural phenomena. The British noted, however, that during a recent air show RAF pilots and senior military officials had observed a "perfect flying saucer." Given the press response, according to the officer, Jones was having a most difficult time trying to correct public opinion regarding UFOs. The public was convinced they were real.

In January 1953, Chadwell and H. P. Robertson, a noted physicist from the California Institute of Technology, put together a distinguished panel of nonmilitary scientists to study the UFO issue. It included Robertson as chairman; Samuel A. Goudsmit, a nuclear physicist from the Brookhaven National Laboratories; Luis Alvarez, a high-energy physicist; Thornton Page, the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Operations Research Office and an expert on radar and electronics; and Lloyd Berkner, a director of the Brookhaven National Laboratories and a specialist in geophysics.

The charge to the panel was to review the available evidence on UFOs and to consider the possible dangers of the phenomena to US national security. The panel met from 14 to 17 January 1953. It reviewed Air Force data on UFO case histories and, after spending 12 hours studying the phenomena, declared that reasonable explanations could be suggested for most, if not all, sightings. For example, after reviewing motion-picture film taken of a UFO sighting near Tremonton, Utah, on 2 July 1952 and one near Great Falls, Montana, on 15 August 1950, the panel concluded that the images on the Tremonton film were caused by sunlight reflecting off seagulls and that the images at Great Falls were sunlight reflecting off the surface of two Air Force interceptors.

The panel concluded unanimously that there was no evidence of a direct threat to national security in the UFO sightings. Nor could the panel find any evidence that the objects sighted might be extraterrestrials. It did find that continued emphasis on UFO reporting might threaten "the orderly functioning" of the government by clogging the channels of communication with irrelevant reports and by inducing "hysterical mass behavior" harmful to constituted authority. The panel also worried that potential enemies contemplating an attack on the United States might exploit the UFO phenomena and use them to disrupt US air defenses.

To meet these problems, the panel recommended that the National Security Council debunk UFO reports and institute a policy of public education to reassure the public of the lack of evidence behind UFOs. It suggested using the mass media, advertising, business clubs, schools, and even the Disney corporation to get the message across. Reporting at the height of McCarthyism, the panel also recommended that such private UFO groups as the Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators in Los Angeles and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization in Wisconsin be monitored for subversive activities.

The Robertson panel's conclusions were strikingly similar to those of the earlier Air Force project reports on SIGN and GRUDGE and to those of the CIA's own OSI Study Group. All investigative groups found that UFO reports indicated no direct threat to national security and no evidence of visits by extraterrestrials.

Following the Robertson panel findings, the Agency abandoned efforts to draft an NSCID on UFOs. The Scientific Advisory Panel on UFOs (the Robertson panel) submitted its report to the IAC, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the Federal Civil Defense Administration, and the Chairman of the National Security Resources Board. CIA officials said no further consideration of the subject appeared warranted, although they continued to monitor sightings in the interest of national security. Philip Strong and Fred Durant from OSI also briefed the Office of National Estimates on the findings. CIA officials wanted knowledge of any Agency interest in the subject of flying saucers carefully restricted, noting not only that the Robertson panel report was classified but also that any mention of CIA sponsorship of the panel was forbidden. This attitude would later cause the Agency major problems relating to its credibility.

The 1950s: Fading CIA Interest in UFOs

After the report of the Robertson panel, Agency officials put the entire issue of UFOs on the back burner. In May 1953, Chadwell transferred chief responsibility for keeping abreast of UFOs to OSI's Physics and Electronic Division, while the Applied Science Division continued to provide any necessary support. Todos M. Odarenko, chief of the Physics and Electronics Division, did not want to take on the problem, contending that it would require too much of his division's analytic and clerical time. Given the findings of the Robertson panel, he proposed to consider the project "inactive" and to devote only one analyst part-time and a file clerk to maintain a reference file of the activities of the Air Force and other agencies on UFOs. Neither the Navy nor the Army showed much interest in UFOs, according to Odarenko.

A nonbeliever in UFOs, Odarenko sought to have his division relieved of the responsibility for monitoring UFO reports. In 1955, for example, he recommended that the entire project be terminated because no new information concerning UFOs had surfaced. Besides, he argued, his division was facing a serious budget reduction and could not spare the resources. Chadwell and other Agency officials, however, continued to worry about UFOs. Of special concern were overseas reports of UFO sightings and claims that German engineers held by the Soviets were developing a "flying saucer" as a future weapon of war.

To most US political and military leaders, the Soviet Union by the mid-1950s had become a dangerous opponent. Soviet progress in nuclear weapons and guided missiles was particularly alarming. In the summer of 1949, the USSR had detonated an atomic bomb. In August 1953, only nine months after the United States tested a hydrogen bomb, the Soviets detonated one. In the spring of 1953, a top secret RAND Corporation study also pointed out the vulnerability of SAC bases to a surprise attack by Soviet long-range bombers. Concern over the danger of a Soviet attack on the United States continued to grow, and UFO sightings added to the uneasiness of US policymakers.

Mounting reports of UFOs over eastern Europe and Afghanistan also prompted concern that the Soviets were making rapid progress in this area. CIA officials knew that the British and Canadians were already experimenting with "flying saucers." Project Y was a Canadian-British-US developmental operation to produce a nonconventional flying-saucer-type aircraft, and Agency officials feared the Soviets were testing similar devices.

Adding to the concern was a flying saucer sighting by US Senator Richard Russell and his party while traveling on a train in the USSR in October 1955. After extensive interviews of Russell and his group, however, CIA officials concluded that Russell's sighting did not support the theory that the Soviets had developed saucerlike or unconventional aircraft. Herbert Scoville, Jr., the Assistant Director of OSI, wrote that the objects observed probably were normal jet aircraft in a steep climb.

Wilton E. Lexow, head of the CIA's Applied Sciences Division, was also skeptical. He questioned why the Soviets were continuing to develop conventional-type aircraft if they had a "flying saucer." Scoville asked Lexow to assume responsibility for fully assessing the capabilities and limitations of nonconventional aircraft and to maintain the OSI central file on the subject of UFOs.

CIA's U-2 and OXCART as UFOs

In November 1954, CIA had entered into the world of high technology with its U-2 overhead reconnaissance project. Working with Lockheed's Advanced Development facility in Burbank, California, known as the Skunk Works, and Kelly Johnson, an eminent aeronautical engineer, the Agency by August 1955 was testing a high-altitude experimental aircraft--the U-2. It could fly at 60,000 feet; in the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew between 10,000 feet and 20,000 feet. Consequently, once the U-2 started test flights, commercial pilots and air traffic controllers began reporting a large increase in UFO sightings.

The early U-2s were silver (they were later painted black) and reflected the rays from the sun, especially at sunrise and sunset. They often appeared as fiery objects to observers below. Air Force BLUE BOOK investigators aware of the secret U-2 flights tried to explain away such sightings by linking them to natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions. By checking with the Agency's U-2 Project Staff in Washington, BLUE BOOK investigators were able to attribute many UFO sightings to U-2 flights. They were careful, however, not to reveal the true cause of the sighting to the public.

According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States. This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project. While perhaps justified, this deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories and the coverup controversy of the 1970s. The percentage of what the Air Force considered unexplained UFO sightings fell to 5.9 percent in 1955 and to 4 percent in 1956.

At the same time, pressure was building for the release of the Robertson panel report on UFOs. In 1956, Edward Ruppelt, former head of the Air Force BLUE BOOK project, publicly revealed the existence of the panel. A best-selling book by UFOlogist Donald Keyhoe, a retired Marine Corps major, advocated release of all government information relating to UFOs. Civilian UFO groups such as the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) immediately pushed for release of the Robertson panel report. Under pressure, the Air Force approached CIA for permission to declassify and release the report. Despite such pressure, Philip Strong, Deputy Assistant Director of OSI, refused to declassify the report and declined to disclose CIA sponsorship of the panel. As an alternative, the Agency prepared a sanitized version of the report which deleted any reference to CIA and avoided mention of any psychological warfare potential in the UFO controversy.

The demands, however, for more government information about UFOs did not let up. On 8 March 1958, Keyhoe, in an interview with Mike Wallace of CBS, claimed deep CIA involvement with UFOs and Agency sponsorship of the Robertson panel. This prompted a series of letters to the Agency from Keyhoe and Dr. Leon Davidson, a chemical engineer and UFOlogist. They demanded the release of the full Robertson panel report and confirmation of CIA involvement in the UFO issue. Davidson had convinced himself that the Agency, not the Air Force, carried most of the responsibility for UFO analysis and that "the activities of the US Government are responsible for the flying saucer sightings of the last decade." Indeed, because of the undisclosed U-2 and OXCART flights, Davidson was closer to the truth than he suspected. CI, nevertheless held firm to its policy of not revealing its role in UFO investigations and refused to declassify the full Robertson panel report.

In a meeting with Air Force representatives to discuss how to handle future inquires such as Keyhoe's and Davidson's, Agency officials confirmed their opposition to the declassification of the full report and worried that Keyhoe had the ear of former DCI VAdm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who served on the board of governors of NICAP. They debated whether to have CIA General Counsel Lawrence R. Houston show Hillenkoetter the report as a possible way to defuse the situation. CIA officer Frank Chapin also hinted that Davidson might have ulterior motives, "some of them perhaps not in the best interest of this country," and suggested bringing in the FBI to investigate. Although the record is unclear whether the FBI ever instituted an investigation of Davidson or Keyhoe, or whether Houston ever saw Hillenkoetter about the Robertson report, Hillenkoetter did resign from the NICAP in 1962.

The Agency was also involved with Davidson and Keyhoe in two rather famous UFO cases in the 1950s, which helped contribute to a growing sense of public distrust of CIA with regard to UFOs. One focused on what was reported to have been a tape recording of a radio signal from a flying saucer; the other on reported photographs of a flying saucer. The "radio code" incident began innocently enough in 1955, when two elderly sisters in Chicago, Mildred and Marie Maier, reported in the Journal of Space Flight their experiences with UFOs, including the recording of a radio program in which an unidentified code was reportedly heard. The sisters taped the program and other ham radio operators also claimed to have heard the "space message." OSI became interested and asked the Scientific Contact Branch to obtain a copy of the recording.

Field officers from the Contact Division (CD), one of whom was Dewelt Walker, made contact with the Maier sisters, who were "thrilled that the government was interested," and set up a time to meet with them. In trying to secure the tape recording, the Agency officers reported that they had stumbled upon a scene from Arsenic and Old Lace. "The only thing lacking was the elderberry wine," Walker cabled Headquarters. After reviewing the sisters' scrapbook of clippings from their days on the stage, the officers secured a copy of the recording. OSI analyzed the tape and found it was nothing more than Morse code from a US radio station.

The matter rested there until UFOlogist Leon Davidson talked with the Maier sisters in 1957. The sisters remembered they had talked with a Mr. Walker who said he was from the US Air Force. Davidson then wrote to a Mr. Walker, believing him to be a US Air Force Intelligence Officer from Wright-Patterson, to ask if the tape had been analyzed at ATIC. Dewelt Walker replied to Davidson that the tape had been forwarded to proper authorities for evaluation, and no information was available concerning the results. Not satisfied, and suspecting that Walker was really a CIA officer, Davidson next wrote DCI Allen Dulles demanding to learn what the coded message revealed and who Mr. Walker was. The Agency, wanting to keep Walker's identity as a CIA employee secret, replied that another agency of the government had analyzed the tape in question and that Davidson would be hearing from the Air Force. On 5 August, the Air Force wrote Davidson saying that Walker "was and is an Air Force Officer" and that the tape "was analyzed by another government organization." The Air Force letter confirmed that the recording contained only identifiable Morse code which came from a known US-licensed radio station.

Davidson wrote Dulles again. This time he wanted to know the identity of the Morse operator and of the agency that had conducted the analysis. CIA and the Air Force were now in a quandary. The Agency had previously denied that it had actually analyzed the tape. The Air Force had also denied analyzing the tape and claimed that Walker was an Air Force officer. CIA officers, under cover, contacted Davidson in Chicago and promised to get the code translation and the identification of the transmitter, if possible.

In another attempt to pacify Davidson, a CIA officer, again under cover and wearing his Air Force uniform, contacted Davidson in New York City. The CIA officer explained that there was no super agency involved and that Air Force policy was not to disclose who was doing what. While seeming to accept this argument, Davidson nevertheless pressed for disclosure of the recording message and the source. The officer agreed to see what he could do. After checking with Headquarters, the CIA officer phoned Davidson to report that a thorough check had been made and, because the signal was of known US origin, the tape and the notes made at the time had been destroyed to conserve file space.

Incensed over what he perceived was a runaround, Davidson told the CIA officer that "he and his agency, whichever it was, were acting like Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamster Union in destroying records which might indict them." Believing that any more contact with Davidson would only encourage more speculation, the Contact Division washed its hands of the issue by reporting to the DCI and to ATIC that it would not respond to or try to contact Davidson again. Thus, a minor, rather bizarre incident, handled poorly by both CIA and the Air Force, turned into a major flap that added fuel to the growing mystery surrounding UFOs and CIA's role in their investigation.

Another minor flap a few months later added to the growing questions surrounding the Agency's true role with regard to flying saucers. CIA's concern over secrecy again made matters worse. In 1958, Major Keyhoe charged that the Agency was deliberately asking eyewitnesses of UFOs not to make their sightings public.

The incident stemmed from a November 1957 request from OSI to the CD to obtain from Ralph C. Mayher, a photographer for KYW-TV in Cleveland, Ohio, certain photographs he took in 1952 of an unidentified flying object. Harry Real, a CD officer, contacted Mayher and obtained copies of the photographs for analysis. On 12 December 1957, John Hazen, another CD officer, returned the five photographs of the alleged UFO to Mayher without comment. Mayher asked Hazen for the Agency's evaluation of the photos, explaining that he was trying to organize a TV program to brief the public on UFOs. He wanted to mention on the show that a US intelligence organization had viewed the photographs and thought them of interest. Although he advised Mayher not to take this approach, Hazen stated that Mayher was a US citizen and would have to make his own decision as to what to do.

Keyhoe later contacted Mayher, who told him his story of CIA and the photographs. Keyhoe then asked the Agency to confirm Hazen's employment in writing, in an effort to expose CIA's role in UFO investigations. The Agency refused, despite the fact that CD field representatives were normally overt and carried credentials identifying their Agency association. DCI Dulles's aide, John S. Earman, merely sent Keyhoe a noncommittal letter noting that, because UFOs were of primary concern to the Department of the Air Force, the Agency had referred his letter to the Air Force for an appropriate response. Like the response to Davidson, the Agency reply to Keyhoe only fueled the speculation that the Agency was deeply involved in UFO sightings. Pressure for release of CIA information on UFOs continued to grow.

Although CIA had a declining interest in UFO cases, it continued to monitor UFO sightings. Agency officials felt the need to keep informed on UFOs if only to alert the DCI to the more sensational UFO reports and flaps.

Continue reading - The 1960s: Declining CIA Involvement and Mounting Controversy