Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

by Vince Houghton

This is a book about desperation. That word has been so overused and misused that it has lost much of its impact. Too many stories about some local sports team “desperate” for a win, or some housewives “desperate” for . . . whatever that show was about. These pretenders have trivialized a word designed to be used only in the most extraordinary of circumstances. It should be a powerful word, reserved for the urgent and overwhelming feeling that one’s life is at risk. It’s for the truly existential threats (another misused word), to one’s country, one’s family, one’s friends, or one’s livelihood. When the stakes couldn’t be higher and the options slimmer. To feel desperate is to believe there are no good options, that everything that has been tried, or could be tried, is destined for failure. Desperation leads us to consider ideas that would have been unfathomable under normal circumstances—because desperate people make desperate decisions.

If necessity is the mother of invention, desperation is the drunk uncle.

“Outcome history” is the traditional way of viewing historical events, but it leaves much to be desired. It has severe limitations, primarily because its lessons are predicated on things that cannot be accurately quantified: fate, luck, misfortune, whatever you want to call it. If the D-Day invasion of Normandy had failed because of a freak weather system, or a lucky shot from a German soldier that took out a key American leader on the beach (or any number of other misfortunate scenarios), would we think any less of Eisenhower’s plan? Using outcome-based history: yes. And therein lies the problem. Intent can be a very powerful tool for historians.

Why are we killing ourselves trying to make an artificial cochlea for our listening devices? Why don’t we take something that already has a perfectly well-functioning cochlea, and turn it into a listening device?” “Eureka, what a brilliant idea!” exclaimed his fellow CIA scientists. (Now, I am totally just making this conversation up—this is how it plays out in my historical imagination. Of course, it’s just as likely that his colleagues referred him to the CIA’s substance abuse program. But indulge me.) “But what animal should we use? A dog would be too conspicuous. Even the evil communists would stop to see if they could find the owner of a seemingly lost dog. A rat or squirrel would be shooed away before it could get close to any important conversation. Monkeys are easy to train, but who wouldn’t be suspicious if a random rhesus monkey walked up to you in the middle of a top-secret meeting? The only animal I know we shouldn’t try to use, because it would be impossible to train, is a cat.” “A cat! That’s perfect!” And on that day, Project Acoustic Kitty—that is actually the official title—was born.

There were more goats than people in Morocco. Moroccan goats pooped. A lot. There were also a ridiculous number of flies in North Africa. In the summer, they were everywhere in Spanish Morocco. North African flies were particularly pesky. They flocked to the moisture from the eyes, noses, and mouths of humans. Flies regurgitate what they’ve previously eaten when new food comes their way. Each of these independently is a random fact. But taken together they crafted a recipe for a perfect germ warfare operation. If Lovell could lace the poop with biotoxins, the flies would provide the perfect vector to incapacitate the German army in Spanish Morocco.

It turns out we dramatically overestimated the strength of our communist adversaries. Many of their divisions existed only on paper, and our assessment of their strength did not take into account all of the problems they faced in some of the peripheral but essential aspects of warfare, such as maintenance, logistics, transportation, quality control (of soldiers and equipment), and command and control. The Soviets were far weaker than anyone thought.

And then there were atomic demolition munitions (ADMs), more colloquially known as nuclear land mines. The intended use of ADMs was to destroy key terrain features (bridges, dams, tunnels, mountain passes, irrigation and hydroelectric systems, industrial plants, factories, oil refineries, canals, railway junctions), preventing them from being used by the enemy—whether through actual physical destruction, or just by blanketing the entire area with radiological contamination. You could also use an ADM to redirect enemy forces, either away from important strategic areas, or toward your own forces waiting in ambush. Not a bad tool to have in your shed.

British researchers noticed that the mine was spacious enough to hold fully grown chickens. This was more than just an entertaining observation (like, “Hey, I bet your head could fit inside that box”)—it could be a solution to the problem. Their body heat could keep the components warm enough to ensure that they would work if called upon. Throw a chicken or two into the mine, toss in some chicken feed, and seal it up. The chicken feed actually served two purposes. The first is the obvious: It let you keep the “live” in your “live chickens.” But secondly, it keeps your chickens from getting hungry and pecking away at the electronics and essential components of an armed nuclear weapon. Can you imagine if the British turned western Germany into a radioactive wasteland because one of their chickens pecked at the wrong wire?

When did the Cold War begin? If you asked twenty diplomatic historians, you’d get twenty different answers. (The only one that is correct: 1917. And yes, I will die on this hill.)

Operation Northwoods has been (and will probably continue to be) a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists—the go-to case study for the evils of the American government. This story is just as appealing to the mild-mannered “second shooter on the grassy knoll” kind of conspiracy theorist as it is to the tinfoil-hat-wearing “the lizard people are going to drain our precious bodily fluids” kind of wacko. It’s an equal opportunity offender: It can bring out a natural, innate distrust of government in just about anyone. As much as we might like to, it’s hard to blame conspiracy theorists for latching on to this story. I certainly don’t. Because in the end, Operation Northwoods may be one of the most shameful plans in the history of the U.S. military. And that’s why it’s here. As much as we’d like to, we can’t ignore the ugly side of our history. Good and bad, right and wrong, our history is what makes us who we are. And maybe, just maybe, we can learn something from it.

The fiasco also elevated the Castro government to a newfound global status, transforming communist Cuba from an aggrieved little country to an equal in the eyes of the world. In fact, Argentinian physician turned Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara actually thanked the United States for the failed invasion.

Operation Dirty Trick took things a step further. Remember, at this point the United States had barely put two men into space. Alan Shepard’s mission was just high enough to be considered a spaceflight, and Gus Grissom’s was similar—and then we lost Grissom’s capsule to the bottom of the ocean, and almost lost Grissom too. So we didn’t have a superb track record on sending people into space and recovering them safely back on Earth. There was a fairly decent chance that John Glenn’s mission would be a disaster (and it almost was—his flight was shortened due to a mechanical malfunction). If things didn’t go well, we were ready to blame it on the Cubans. The objective of Dirty Trick was to manufacture “irrevocable” evidence that, should Glenn’s flight fail, we could show that Cuban “electronic interference” was the cause. Contingency planning at its worst.

By the end of 1962, JM/WAVE grew to become the largest CIA station in the world other than the Agency’s headquarters in Langley. It employed three to four hundred professional CIA officers, as well as an estimated fifteen thousand Cuban exiles (including Felix), all engaged in monitoring Cuba and dreaming up plans for its leader’s demise. According to some accounts, the CIA was one of Miami’s largest employers during this period (if not the largest), possibly accounting for a full third of the city’s economy. CIA spooks needed to buy houses (both personal and safe houses), cars, cover companies, furniture, groceries, marinas, hunting camps (for training), merchant shipping, exile-operated publishing houses (for producing propaganda), and more. JM/WAVE had three or four people employed just to organize and manage real estate. They even operated a gaggle of boats and aircraft, so many that the CIA maritime fleet was the third largest in the Caribbean, after only the American and Cuban navies.

Let’s start by taking a look at what Putin said to his country’s leadership: We have embarked on the development of the next generation of missiles. For example, the Defense Ministry and enterprises of the missile and aerospace industry are in the active phase of testing a new missile system with a heavy intercontinental missile. We called it Sarmat. Sarmat will be equipped with a broad range of powerful nuclear warheads, including hypersonic, and the most modern means of evading missile defence. The high degree of protection of missile launchers and significant energy capabilities the system offers will make it possible to use it in any conditions. He then spoke about Russia’s new, super-duper cruise missiles: But we did not stop at that. We started to develop new types of strategic arms that do not use ballistic trajectories at all when moving toward a target and, therefore, missile defence systems are useless against them, absolutely pointless. One of them is a small-scale heavy-duty nuclear energy unit that can be installed in a missile like our latest X-101 air-launched missile or the American Tomahawk missile—a similar type but with a range dozens of times longer, dozens, basically an unlimited range. It is a low-flying stealth missile carrying a nuclear warhead, with almost an unlimited range, unpredictable trajectory and ability to bypass interception boundaries. It is invincible against all existing and prospective missile defence and counter-air defence systems. ...

Kelly Johnson could see the air. Or at least that’s how Hall Hibbard, Johnson’s boss at the Lockheed Corporation, explained the genius of one of the greatest (if not the greatest) aircraft designers in history. Over more than five decades at Lockheed, Johnson designed (or significantly contributed to the design of) as many as forty groundbreaking civilian and military aircraft. These included the P-38 Lightning (the first production aircraft to exceed 400 mph), the Lockheed Constellation (which redefined civilian air travel), the F-80 Shooting Star (the U.S. military’s first operational jet fighter), the F-104 Starfighter (the first fighter to exceed Mach 2, or two times the speed of sound), the C-130 Hercules (which is still in operation today—the longest-serving military aircraft in history), the U-2 (which is also still in operation today), and the A-12/SR-71 (the first production aircraft to exceed Mach 3).

The X-7 would eventually evolve into the AQM-60 Kingfisher system, used as targets to test early American anti–ballistic missile surface-to-air (SAM) systems. And kick their collective behinds. The Kingfisher was too good. It was too fast to shoot down. Eventually the program was canceled, mainly because it made the military look so inept.

The fourth and final launch from the back of an M-21 was a heartbreaking disaster, so I’ll put my snark aside in deference to a brave pilot who gave the ultimate sacrifice for the security of his country. The July 30 test would be slightly different from the others. In the first three tests, the D-21 was detached from the mother ship while the M-21 was in a slight dive (0.9 g—nothing dramatic, but enough to play it safe and provide a better launch angle). The problem was, in real-world missions the crew might not have the opportunity to go into a dive to launch the drone. They might need to stay at altitude to avoid enemy fighters or SAMs. Johnson needed to know if the D-21 could successfully separate at level flight. The answer, tragically, was no, it couldn’t. For the first few seconds after launch, it looked as though everything was going according to plan. The D-21 was in the process of clearing the back of the mother ship, until it got caught in the shock wave coming off the M-21 (remember, both of these aircraft were traveling at more than two times the speed of sound). The drone lost its aerodynamics, rolled 45 degrees, and smashed back into the rear part of the mother ship’s fuselage, nearly shearing it in two. The two men in the M-21 were Lockheed test pilot Bill Park and Launch Control Officer (LCO) Ray Torick. As a test pilot, Park had been through aircraft emergencies before (in 1964, an A-12’s flight controls locked up on him and he had to eject from the plane...

“Without communications all I command is my desk, and that is not a very lethal weapon.”

According to reports, not one of the principals knew the plans in any detail, and four of the five top successors to the presidency declined to follow the continuity-of-government protocols. Hey! Four out of five. That means there was someone who both knew what to do and actually did it! Well, at least there’s that. Someone would still be alive to run the country. Who was that person, by the way, who followed protocol and went to Andrews Air Force Base to be flown to an undisclosed safe location? Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who was later indicted on federal charges of structuring bank withdrawals to evade bank reporting requirements, making false statements to federal investigators, and sexually abusing three male students when he was a teacher more than three decades earlier (it ended up being four students). He would become a guest of the government at the Federal Medical Center prison in Rochester, Minnesota. He has since been released, but has been banned from having contact with anyone under eighteen unless an adult is present. He also has to provide copies of his phone bills and credit card statements to his supervising probation officer, and is forbidden from using the internet without prior approval from a probation officer. That is who could have been the leader of the free world. We develop technologies to keep the president safe for a reason.

The way things were set up, the pilot would be only a hundred feet above the ground while waiting for launch, with the space plane’s nose facing straight up in the air. Ejecting from this low height—and since the plane was vertical, ejecting sideways—was an insane and almost certainly deadly task. So the pilot had some figuring out to do. He decided to test things out in another aircraft, a Douglas Skylancer, which could somewhat mimic the conditions on the launch pad—with some imaginative flying. He flew two hundred feet off the ground at almost 600 mph, and then pulled straight up and screamed to eight thousand feet. He flipped the plane around, got it upright, and then softly landed the aircraft. It was a crazy maneuver, and this written description doesn’t do it justice. But it proved a point—if the rocket began to explode beneath the Dyna-Soar, the pilot could just kick the plane’s engine in gear and blast off as fast as he could. The acceleration of the plane would allow the pilot to escape the fireball below and reach an altitude at which he could roll it over, turn it around, and find a good place to park. The pilot who discovered this maneuver ended up leaving the program. It’s not because he did anything wrong, or that he didn’t like the work he was doing, or even that he didn’t think the Dyna-Soar was a cool plane. He just got a better job offer. His name was Neil Armstrong.