Operation Moonglow

1

THE LAUNCH OF THE SPACE RACE,
1946–1957

At the launch range near Tiura-Tam, Kazakhstan, Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev and his team used caution. Korolev had barely slept in weeks. Anxious that the United States would beat the Soviets into space, he had moved the launch of the artificial satellite Sputnik up a few days to October 4, 1957. Just before dawn on October 3, he personally convoyed the train carrying the rocket and satellite from the assembly building.

“Let’s accompany our first-born,” Korolev told his staff.¹

They joined him, walking alongside the train track as the vehicle made its way to the launchpad. Tiura-Tam was a sparsely populated stop on a rail line among Kazakhstan’s desert steppes. When planners selected the site for the launch facility, the entire vegetation in the area amounted to three trees standing beside the train station. Plagued by frequent dust storms, soaring temperatures in the summer, and bone-chilling cold in the winter, it was a place to launch rockets but not much else.²

By the evening of October 4, the rocket was ready, but Korolev was still nervous. He had the staff check and then double-check the nearly hundred-foot-tall R-7 rocket, now standing erect on the launchpad. The stakes were too high, and Korolev was too stubborn, to let any slipups stand in his way. Earlier in the day when the unseasonably warm weather threatened the satellite’s delicate instruments, staff on the launchpad covered the payload with a large white cloth, hoping that this would bring down the temperature. It did not work. Next, they tried shooting cool air from a hose into the payload fairing, which seemed to do the trick. At last, under the illumination of large floodlights, the final checks were complete.³

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, or “SP” to his team, was about to realize his lifelong dream of spaceflight after laboring for years under unimaginably harsh conditions. As with many other early rocket pioneers, H. G. Wells’s and Jules Verne’s fantastical space exploration capers first sparked his imagination. But while his German counterpart Wernher von Braun used the workforce of Nazi concentration camps to build his beloved V-2 rocket, Korolev labored in a prison camp. In 1938, at the age of thirty-one, he had been snatched from his home in the middle of the night and sent to a gulag as part of Stalin’s purges. After nearly seven years in prison, Korolev’s health had diminished, but his devotion to spaceflight remained intact. As he stood on the launchpad at Tiura-Tam, about a dozen years had passed since he had been released from the prison camp. Here he was, a chief designer in the Soviet space program, about to launch the first satellite into space.⁴

A scant ten minutes before the launch, Korolev finally felt confident that everything was in order. He left the pad—already evacuated and silent by this time—and joined staff at a nearby bunker. Inside, nearly a dozen people sat at six command-and-control panels monitoring the rocket and satellite. Tensions were high. Only the operators sat while the rest of the personnel stood stiffly, waiting in anticipation. Korolev’s eyes moved between the various instruments and the body language of the operators, scanning them for any sign of trouble. As a deputy in the bunker recalled, “If anybody raised their voice or showed signs of nervousness, Korolev was instantly on the alert to see what was going on.”⁵

Unlike American rocket launches, the Soviet space program did not use a countdown, no three, two, one… blastoff. A voice over a loudspeaker announced the minutes until readiness and commands like “key to drainage.” When the voice said “Pusk!” (Launch!), a young lieutenant pushed a button, initiating ignition. The rocket did not spring from the launchpad at this point. Over a minute passed as steam vented around the base of the rocket, and the engines ignited and then started their preliminary thrust process, before the operator finally announced “Pod’em!” (Liftoff!).

Vibrations from the engines pounded the walls of the small bunker. At first the rocket seemed stuck, hovering over the ground. But soon the four boosters with their hundreds of tons of thrust propelled the R-7 into the inky blackness of outer space. A little over five minutes after the launch, Sputnik separated from the core rocket booster and began its first orbit.

“It’s too early to celebrate,” Korolev warned his apprehensive staff.

Not until Sputnik completed its first ninety-six-minute trip around the Earth and the radio engineer picked up Sputnik’s now iconic “beep-beep-beep” and shouted “It’s there! It’s there!” did Korolev announce that it was time to send word to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.⁶

On the evening of October 4, Khrushchev had joined Ukrainian leaders and guests from Moscow for a leisurely dinner in the large hall at the Mariyinsky Palace, a grand, bright-blue baroque-style building that hinted at the lavish tastes and lifestyles of Russia’s eighteenth-century czars. Once a favorite retreat of Catherine the Great, the palace now stood as a weathered remnant of another era. Khrushchev had decided to stop off in Kiev on his way back from vacation in Crimea, a popular resort destination on the temperate Black Sea. A heavy-set, complex character, with protruding ears and a volatility that left an impression, Khrushchev was a man of contrasts. He was complicit in Stalin’s crimes such as the ruthless mass executions of Polish nationals but also de-Stalinized the Soviet Union. He was flamboyant, brutal, and also decent; his wife once described him as “all the way up or all the way down.”⁷ That evening there was an urgent matter occupying his mind, and it was not the harried preparations under way at the Baikonur space launch facility in Kazakhstan. Rather, Khrushchev was fixated on how to oust his longtime friend—or former friend—Marshal Georgy Zhukov from power.

Zhukov was a World War II hero who personally commanded the final attack on Berlin and represented the Soviet Union at the German surrender.⁸ In June 1957 Zhukov, who by that time had become the most influential military man in the Soviet Union, thwarted an antiparty group’s attempt to overthrow Khrushchev. But now, a mere four months later, Khrushchev was suspicious that Zhukov was planning his own coup.⁹ After nearly losing his premiership in June, Khrushchev was on a mission to secure his status as the USSR’s undisputed leader. To aid this mission he had gathered the secretary of the Party Central Committee, Leonid Brezhnev, who controlled the defense industry; the first deputy minister of defense and commander of ground forces, Rodion Malinovsky; the first secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, Alexei Kirichenko; the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Demyan Korotchenko; the chairman of the Council of Ministers, Nykyfor Kalchenko; Central Committee secretaries; and his son Sergei Khrushchev.¹⁰

For much of the evening, the gathering of top officials discussed the harvest, new factories that needed new equipment, and inadequate capital investments. These were typical topics, meant to loosen the premier’s purse strings. Near midnight, after hours of conversation, an aide interrupted the meal and whispered something in Khrushchev’s ear. He nodded and then excused himself to take a phone call in a nearby room. A few minutes later the premier returned to the dining hall with a smile. He quietly sat back in his chair, paused, calmly looked around the table, and then spoke: “I can tell you some very pleasant and important news. Korolev just called.”

He paused again, this time with a secretive look. “He’s one of our missile designers. Remember not to mention his name—it’s classified.” Then Khrushchev announced the news: “So, Korolev has just reported that today, a little while ago, an artificial satellite of the Earth was launched.”

The dinner guests responded with polite if indifferent smiles. At that moment no one in the room foresaw the far-reaching and long-lasting significance of Khrushchev’s announcement.¹¹ Even the first article on Sputnik in the leading Soviet newspaper, Pravda, was buried below the fold with no mention of the imminent political and social fallout of the pathbreaking launch. It was brief, written in a clinical style with facts and figures like “the carrier rocket has imparted to the satellite the required orbital velocity of about 8,000 meters per second.”¹²

A few minutes after Khrushchev’s announcement, the aide returned to the dining hall, set up a radio in the corner of the room, and told the dinner guests that the satellite’s broadcast could be picked up on the device. He turned the knob, and Sputnik’s now famous “beep, beep, beep” filled the hall.¹³

Following the launch of Sputnik, US president Eisenhower tried to counteract the notion of a “space race” between the US and the USSR at every turn. But space exploration became the prime psychological battleground in the cold war. For more than a decade, and some would say right up until the fall of the Soviet Union, space competition served as the measuring stick for national strength, technological know-how, and the efficacy of political systems. How did spaceflight—an idea that once only existed in the imagination of a few scientists, analysts, and dreamers—receive such a lofty status within international relations in the mid-twentieth century? The answer does not simply lie in the popular appeal of spaceflight or the idea that it is in human nature to explore. The United States and the Soviet Union did not invest fortunes in space development solely to push forward the edges of human experience. So what accounts for spaceflight becoming the new political currency within the cold war world order?

The answer is found in the emergence of what a young Henry Kissinger—among other influential political theorists of the day—identified as the “new diplomacy.” In 1955 Nelson Rockefeller, Eisenhower’s special assistant for psychological warfare, asked Kissinger, at the time a recent PhD and instructor at Harvard University, to join a study panel on the “Psychological Aspects of a Future U.S. Strategy.” Kissinger articulated the tenets of this new diplomacy in a secret report to Eisenhower.

Today’s international relations, Kissinger wrote, required psychological strategy. Symbols, rhetoric, ideas, and images assumed new political potency in a changed geopolitical landscape. The existence of thermonuclear weapons rewrote the terms of how politics—especially diplomacy—was done. The risk of global annihilation, combined with technological innovations in mass media, revolutionized the influence of the public—especially public opinion—in both domestic and international politics. These factors contributed to a bifurcation of US diplomacy. Political negotiations were taking place on two interconnected planes. High-level political talks between governments were coupled with public diplomacy.¹⁴ After the first gathering of Rockefeller’s group, Kissinger would tell fellow panel member Walt Rostow, professor of economic history at MIT, that “the most important component of our foreign policy is the psychological one.”¹⁵

Many historians make the claim that it was not until Sputnik orbited overhead and the world reacted that Eisenhower saw satellite development in terms of prestige. His focus before October 4, 1957, was on reconnaissance and ballistic missile strategy, they say.¹⁶ But records from before the fall of 1957—especially from National Security Council (NSC) meetings—reveal an entirely different chronological arc. They show policy analysts attuned to the psychological implications of spaceflight years before Sputnik made its debut, and attuned to the bearing of psychology on international influence and power. Eisenhower and those who advised him, such as Rockefeller, recognized that satellites would have both military and propaganda advantages. From the very start, policy makers saw satellites as highly visible demonstrations of scientific and technological capability on the international stage.

In 1957 the small Soviet satellite—and more importantly the tenor of domestic and international response—cemented the association of space exploration and national strength for decades to come. The military undertones of space shots, the rapid spread of news coverage, the reverence for technological and scientific achievement at that time, and the political prominence of global public opinion within cold war geopolitics—the core elements of the “new diplomacy”—all played their part.

When Eisenhower took the oath of office in January 1953, the United States faced steep military and political challenges. The cold war raged. The Korean War stalled. During his 1952 presidential bid, Eisenhower charmed voters with his quiet confidence, “plain talk,” and smile. And with a meteoric military record—rising from a lowly lieutenant colonel to the commander of the Allied invasion of Europe in just five years—Eisenhower seemed well-positioned to lead the country safely through swelling nuclear-war fears. More so than any president before him, Eisenhower entered office with a fully formed national security philosophy. “To amass military power without regard to our economic capacity,” he warned the country at his first State of the Union address, “would be to defend ourselves against one kind of disaster by inviting another.” Eisenhower’s fiscally responsible national security strategy, articulated powerfully and concisely just two weeks after he assumed office, remained the defining framework of his presidential security policy.¹⁷

A free-market conservative, Eisenhower believed that government expenditures must be contained. He articulated this message frequently, cautioning his country against becoming a “garrison state” because of cold war fears.¹⁸ Instead, he advocated a “New Look,” a phrase taken from the fashion industry. In designer parlance the New Look referred to the lengthening of women’s skirts, but in Eisenhower’s defense strategy it meant “more bang for the buck.”¹⁹ Eisenhower slashed the Army and Navy budgets, arguing that the country should invest in avoiding war, not fighting one. The cold war would likely last for many years, he recognized. The US, then, must take an approach that sustained both the military and economic health of the country in the long term. And because Eisenhower was confident that the Soviet Union would never directly mount an attack on the United States, he favored investment in the psychological and political—as opposed to the military—battlefields of the cold war. He turned to the “new diplomacy.”²⁰

The New Look is often remembered as Eisenhower’s call for the massive buildup of a nuclear arsenal to defend the country while avoiding straining the budget. These weapons would have a psychological impact, deter the enemy, and in turn avoid the need for costly direct conflict with the Soviet Union. But Eisenhower’s defense policy steered a more comprehensive global governance agenda. Under the New Look, the United States nurtured international trade, funded development programs, encouraged formal and informal alliances, moderated conflicts between other countries, invested in cultural and educational exchanges, and increased overseas propaganda. The United States would pursue international influence by winning the hearts and minds of the world’s public and political leaders.²¹

Eisenhower’s experience on the European front during World World II had convinced him that psychological warfare figured prominently in the Allied victory. Propaganda and persuasion, he saw, were integral to power and influence. When he entered the White House, he pushed for an elaborate propaganda program to contain the spread of Communism. At his very first Cabinet meeting, on January 23, 1953, psychological warfare became a focus of discussion. In short order, Eisenhower appointed a special assistant for psychological warfare, put him in charge of the Psychological Strategy Board, and created the President’s Committee on International Information Activities to assess US psychological warfare programs and to make recommendations for improving and centralizing these efforts.²²