Spyfail, p.14
Spyfail, page 14
The move quickly put Milchan on the inside track with De Niro and his wide circle of friends in Hollywood just as he was reaching his apex with a Best Actor Oscar win for Raging Bull. And soon, rather than Milchan pitching De Niro, it was De Niro pitching Milchan on screenplays in which he wanted to star, while Milchan paid the bills. The first was The King of Comedy, a dark dramedy about fans obsessed with celebrities to such a degree that they stalk them like prey, and occasionally resort to violence.
De Niro had originally purchased the screenplay from Newsweek film critic Paul D. Zimmermann years earlier but had trouble interesting anyone in it. Until Milchan came along and agreed to finance the $19 million project, and thereby finally turn himself into a major Hollywood producer. At the same time, Milchan now had an outlet for his millions in dirty apartheid cash. In the film, which was directed by Martin Scorsese, De Niro was to play the stalker, a wannabe Seinfeld-like stand-up comedian, with Jerry Lewis his target as a Johnny Carson–style late-night talk show host.
During the filming of The King of Comedy, Milchan’s name began appearing in newspapers tying him directly to South Africa’s arms and propaganda scandal. The revelations greatly angered Anthony Sampson, who was close to Nelson Mandela, then still in a South African prison, and he was happy to have parted ways with Milchan over the Arms Bazaar project. “The revelations about Rhoodie are an important warning of how far a determined and embattled nation can ‘throw morality out of the window,’” he wrote in an opinion piece, quoting Rhoodie’s own words. And he wanted an explanation from Milchan. “When I rang to ask him how he had become involved in such a shady operation,” Sampson said, “he protested his innocence, a little too much.”
Unlike Sampson, the idea that Milchan made his millions weaponizing the White supremacist government at the expense of South Africa’s oppressed Blacks, and helped run the regime’s worldwide propaganda operation, didn’t seem to bother De Niro. Nor did the fact that that same blood-soaked money was financing his film and paying his salary. Unconcerned, he remained close to Milchan and went on to do two more films with him in rapid succession, Once Upon a Time in America and Brazil.
As Milchan built his cover while at the same time recruiting American spies, work at Dimona had greatly speeded up. Around the same time, a number of Dimona scientists suddenly became very interested in the capabilities of U.S. spy satellites to detect secret nuclear explosions. Among them was Avraham Hermoni, LAKAM’s chief of station in Washington and one of the key developers of the Israeli bomb. That sudden interest struck Dr. Alan Berman, the director of research at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, as very odd. “My close Israeli friend Dr. Dror Sadeh, who had worked at Dimona,” said Berman, “seemed to have more than a casual knowledge of the issues related to nuclear weapon design. Somehow, whenever I met him, or the Israeli science advisor at the Israeli Embassy in DC, Avraham Hermoni, the conversation always nudged to how American satellites could locate a nuclear detonation.”
Hermoni had reason to be curious. Two years earlier, in 1977, the Russian spy satellite Cosmos 932 returned to Earth with detailed photographs of a South African military installation deep in the Kalahari Desert. It took little time for analysts to conclude that the facility was designed for nuclear testing. And in an unusual move, the Russians passed the intelligence on to the United States, hoping that the Carter administration would be able to prevent a test from taking place—something that was in the interest of both countries. In response, U.S. spy satellites verified the Russian intelligence and pressure was immediately placed on South Africa to cancel any tests, presently and in the future, which they did. Now, in 1979, the lesson for Hermoni was to find out as much as possible about U.S. spy satellites, and then, unlike South Africa, find a way to successfully hide a nuclear test from them.
CHAPTER 14
The Bang
Sixty-five thousand miles above Earth, in the frigid blackness of deep space, a U.S. spy satellite was dying of old age. VELA 6911, shaped like a giant twenty-six-sided Christmas tree ornament hanging weightlessly in the empty void, had been launched on May 23, 1969, with an expected lifetime of seven years. A decade later, in late September 1979, it was still alive, but just barely. Its heartlike power source was growing weaker and it was losing control of its functions.
The VELA satellites were designed to act as America’s sentinels in space, watching eagle-like for any signs of nuclear detonations far below on any part of the planet—explosions that would constitute violations of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, signed by most countries in the world, which outlawed nuclear explosions in all environments except underground. It was especially watchful for rogue tests by nuclear pariah states like Israel, one of the very few countries that had refused to sign both the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention, in spite of the fact that it had a hidden arsenal of nuclear weapons and a secret biological weapons program.
But after a decade in orbit watching over about a third of the Earth, VELA 6911’s electromagnetic pulse sensors, used to discover sudden bursts of electrons indicating a nuclear blast, were no longer working. Nor was the sensor that was designed to pinpoint where in its field of vision a blast might have taken place. Nevertheless, it still had two working and unblinking mirror-like “eyes” known as bhangmeters, designed not to “see” a burst but to record its light intensity. And in the early morning blackness of September 22, 1979, at 00:52:43 UTC, the twin bhangmeters recorded what appeared to be a very bright flash, followed quickly by a second. They were the classic indicators of a powerful nuclear explosion. Somewhere down below, in a broad, isolated expanse of ocean stretching from the South Atlantic southward to the coast of Antarctica, eastward past the tip of Africa, and onward to the edge of the Indian Ocean, someone had set off a nuclear bomb. Someone who was hoping not to get caught.
At 10:15 p.m. on Florida’s Atlantic coast, an hour and twenty-three minutes after the blast, technicians in a secret office began a routine download of VELA 6911’s nuclear event detection payload memory. As they watched a fresh sheet of graph paper roll out of a gray computer, long thin styluses like a spider’s legs began swinging back and forth. In black ink, the styluses drew two hump-shaped images from each bhangmeter, representing light flashes. The first camel-like hump was caused by the initial fireball. And the second occurred a millisecond later when the bright sunlike orb was overtaken by, and hidden behind, the rapidly expanding shock wave.
The technicians worked at a secret headquarters with a bland and meaningless cover name: the Air Force Technical Applications Center. It was housed in a tan four-story brick building on Patrick Air Force Base, a few miles south of Cape Kennedy. Stretched across the front, as if ready for war, were life-size mock-ups of powerful missiles and rockets. And beyond a tall fence was the busy A1A Highway and the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The job of AFTAC was, and is, to clandestinely monitor the world for any indications of nuclear detonations, NUDETs, overt or covert.
The little-known organization was born in secret two decades earlier, in 1959, in preparation for the eventual enactment of the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Signed in Moscow in August 1963 by the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and eventually 123 other countries, including Israel, the treaty banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, under the sea, and in outer space. The only exception was for tests conducted underground. The idea was to prevent a proliferation nightmare, a race where every country expended billions to build and test ever more powerful nuclear bombs to destroy their neighbors, and eventually engulf the world in a deadly radioactive cloud.
Outside AFTAC’s radiochemistry laboratory, rotating red lights in the hallway ceilings warn that uncleared persons are in the area. Inside the entrance, the logo embedded in the floor succinctly sums up the organization’s mission. Surrounding an image of a lithium atom are the words “In God We Trust, All Others We Monitor.” It was scientists in white lab coats and blue rubber gloves in the lab who analyzed, atom by atom, environmental samples secretly collected near Dimona by John Hadden, the CIA’s chief of station in Tel Aviv. Using mass spectrometry and other techniques, they determined that the samples contained trace amounts of highly enriched uranium produced by a U.S. government plant in Portsmouth, Ohio. And Portsmouth’s only customer was the NUMEC plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, which meant it had to have been stolen by Israel.
Over the years, AFTAC’s secret Atomic Energy Detection System would encircle the world with thirty-six hundred sensors that listen, sense, sniff, and watch 24/7 for indications of a nuclear blast. “We’ve got them in space. We’ve got them at sea. We’ve got them in the air. We’ve got them on land on all seven continents, to include Antarctica,” said AFTAC commander Colonel Chad Hartman. And in Antarctica, a sensor is buried beneath the South Pole.
At 11 p.m., forty-five minutes after discovering and confirming what AFTAC determined was a “low-yield atmospheric nuclear detonation,” the organization initiated a NUDET “pre-alert.” Then, four and a half hours later, following a more thorough analysis, AFTAC declared “Alert 747” at 3:30 a.m. on September 22. They then began searching through data from other sensors for additional details, as well as attempting to pinpoint roughly where in millions of possible square miles the nuclear event had taken place. Whoever set off the clandestine explosion was either very lucky or very well informed about VELA 6911’s inoperable sensors. Nevertheless, clues began arriving from other dark recesses around the world.
Twelve hundred miles to the south in Puerto Rico, the giant thousand-foot Arecibo radio telescope picked up an unusual disturbance. An odd and powerful electromagnetic ripple on the lower surface of the ionosphere had occurred about the same time as the event detected by VELA 6911. Known as a traveling ionospheric disturbance, it originated from the southeast, the area in which the blast occurred, heading toward the northeast. “The initial examination,” wrote John Deutch, the undersecretary of the Department of Energy, “may confirm the signal from the VELA system.” And a memorandum from the National Security Council noted that “the signal from this disturbance is similar to some recorded during U.S. and Soviet atmospheric tests in the early 1960s.” And it “represents the best lead yet in the search for corroborative data.”
Another clue came from the sea. Among AFTAC’s monitoring locations was Ascension Island, a bleak and rugged volcanic speck in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. One of the most isolated places on earth, it lies near the equator halfway between Africa and South America. It is also one of the most secret places on the planet. Over the years, both the United Kingdom and the United States have turned its eighty-eight square miles into an Orwellian surveillance world. There’s a massive British GCHQ eavesdropping base that targets communications satellites far above, as well as communications to the west in South America and to the east in Africa. Then there are giant American golf-ball-like radomes hiding radar for tracking the final splashdown of ICBM missiles test fired from Florida. And under the waves are networks of eavesdropping systems that stretch out octopus-like from the island in order to listen for foreign ships and submarines thousands of miles away, and the splashdown offshore of the ICBM nosecones. Both governments also have military bases on the island, along with aircraft on Wideawake Airfield.
The long-standing joke is that the island has more antennas than people, which apparently is the way both governments want to keep it. The local authorities of the British possession have been accused of uprooting the few long-term residents and maintaining the island exclusively for highly cleared government employees and contractors. And when their contracts or assignments are up, they must leave. “There is no indigenous population, or ‘islanders,’” one official said dismissively. “On Ascension, everyone is an expat, present by virtue of an employment contract.”
Both the secrecy and isolation are critical for AFTAC and Navy intelligence in taking advantage of a discovery made years earlier: Deep in the ocean, at just the right depth, sounds thousands of miles away can be heard. Known as the SOFAR (Sound Fixing and Ranging) channel, it is a horizontal layer of water that acts as a sort of waveguide for sound. A key factor is water temperature. At the surface where the sea is the warmest, sound travels rapidly, but also dissipates rapidly. But thousands of feet down, in a layer that remains constantly cold and under high pressure, sound becomes trapped and travels more slowly, but for great distances, at about five thousand feet a second. It’s a bit like finding a clear frequency among a great deal of static on a shortwave radio.
To tap into the SOFAR channel around the world, Navy intelligence established a highly secret program known as the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS. On Ascension, as part of the system, the Navy set up two arrays of undersea microphones, known as hydrophones, one seventy-four miles south of the island and the other seventeen miles north. Each array consists of three widely separated hydrophones that are suspended at depths of between fifteen hundred and three thousand feet by cables anchored to the seafloor. Undersea cables then connect them to a small white analysis building on Northwest Bay, a small sandy beach on Ascension.
The sensors are also used by another program, the Air Force Missile Impact Location System (MILS), which pinpoints the exact splashdown location of nosecones from ICBMs test fired from Florida. Both systems are extremely sensitive and accurate. In 2006, 109 miles off the coast of New York, a power supply for underwater oceanographic equipment suffered a small accidental explosion. Five thousand miles away on Ascension Island, the SOSUS hydrophones picked up the sound, and technicians were able to calculate nearly exactly when and where the explosion took place.
About 110 minutes after the mysterious nuclear blast, Ascension Island’s SOSUS and MILS hydrophones suddenly detected a powerful signal, a “large impulsive release of energy” within “the deep South Atlantic sound channel”—that is, SOFAR. It was also picked up about 20 minutes later by another SOSUS station, this one at Argentia, Newfoundland, in Canada. Technicians were quickly able to triangulate the direction of the signal as emanating from the south-southeast. And given that hydroacoustic signals travel through the SOFAR channel at about five thousand feet per second, they could also calculate when the energy burst occurred. It took place at 00:52:00 UTC, almost identical to the time of the VELA 6911 detection, 00:53:43 UTC, which was 8:53 p.m. on the U.S. East Coast. The speed of the signal also allowed the technicians to determine that the event occurred about sixty-two hundred miles away. And given the south-southeast direction, that would have put it in a remote and isolated stretch of the South Atlantic near Antarctica. Far from any human inhabitation, or shipping and air routes, it was as close as one could come to a geographical void, terra incognita.
South of that void was Japan’s Syowa Station on the eastern coast of Antarctica. A small, ice-covered base in Queen Maud Land, where the temperature has dropped to as low as minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, its facilities included a satellite building as well as ionospheric and radiosonde stations. Among those wintering over was geophysicist Takeshi Morikawa from the Earthquake Research Institute of the University of Tokyo. At 00:52:10, almost the exact time that VELA 6911 detected the nuclear blast, a bright, colorful aurora lit up the sky above the station. A study by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory noted that “the Syowa auroral patch might have been caused by… a few-kiloton SNB [surface nuclear burst], detonated possibly at Prince Edward Island [no connection to the Canadian island of the same name] +/- 2,200 km [1,367 miles] north of Syowa.” The blast generated an electromagnetic pulse in the ionosphere about a hundred kilometers northeast of Syowa.
In Washington at the time of the nuclear blast, President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter were sitting in a pair of plush red velvet armchairs in the bordello-like red-on-red White House movie theater. It was a place he spent more time at than any other president, watching 408 films during his single term, including The Cat from Outer Space. And that night he and the first lady were viewing the old 1960 Spencer Tracy flick Inherit the Wind, about the famous 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. At 10:30 p.m., half an hour before AFTAC issued its pre-alert, they were in bed with the lights out.
At six the next morning, a pleasant Saturday with temperatures in the mid-70s, Carter received his usual wake-up call from the White House signal board operator and fifty-three minutes later walked into the Oval Office. At 9:17 he met for about ten minutes with Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security advisor. But it wasn’t until midafternoon that AFTAC developed enough corroborating detail about VELA 6911’s discovery to send out a Flash message to the White House. At 2:50 p.m. the Situation Room duty officer notified Brzezinski “that according to a JAEIC [the CIA’s Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Center] statement a possible South African nuclear explosion had occurred.” Brzezinski said he would notify the president and several other principals “and set-up a meeting of the matter ASAP.” Four minutes later he called Carter, but the first lady answered, and he left a message. They finally connected at 4:56 p.m.
Twenty minutes earlier, the emergency “Mini-Special Coordination Committee Meeting” had begun in the White House Situation Room. Among those attending was Gerald Funk, the senior Africa specialist on the National Security Council. He had been called by Brzezinski, he said, and told to “get my toucus to work, that we had a bit of a problem.” Others included the chairman of the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee.
The meeting was led by the National Security Council’s Henry Owen, who summed up the evidence. There was “strong positive evidence” and “no negative evidence” indicating a nuclear blast. The assumption, said Funk, was “that there had been in fact a legitimate sighting… that satellite had never failed to react positively and had never given a false signal.” Nevertheless, there was also deep concern that the United States may have been responsible. “Defense is to verify all U.S. strategic force locations so that we can be certain that no U.S. weapons accidentally exploded in the region,” said Owens. “Defense will also check Soviet force locations for the same purpose.”
