Page 196 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 196 of 237

Then there was an abrupt and unexplained return to the previous practice of secrecy. The House Information
Subcommittee sought an explanation, but NASA spokesmen said all they knew was that the tracking system was
controlled by the Pentagon, which refused to release the information.

This prompted the subcommittee's chairman, John E. Moss, the California Democrat, to observe: "The taxpayers
certainly should not be called upon to spend billions of dollars on our space programs without being given all the
facts necessary to make an intelligent judgment as to whether we are behind, ahead, or at least keeping pace with,
Russian space efforts."

Despite the fact that the policy of secrecy was perpetuating a false image of United States inferiority in space, the
administration held to its practice of suppressing the truth about Soviet failures. Despite the fact that nuclear test-
ban negotiations were threatened by public ignorance of the elaborate array of U.S. detection devices, the
administration refused to embark upon even a modest program of education.

It was a strange anomaly, indeed. The United States was seeking to hold its tongue about secrets that were no
longer secret to the Russians. In November, 1962, the Soviets, indicating their complete awareness, dropped their
long-standing demand for a ban on spy-in-the-sky satellites. This opened the way to a United States-Soviet
agreement on the peaceful uses of outer space. Why the Russian about-face? Electronic experts suggested the
Russians were developing a spy satellite of their own and did not wish to be inhibited by international
prohibitions on such devices.

Khrushchev's son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, the editor of Izvestia, seemed to substantiate this theory in a speech in
Helsinki, Finland, on September 2, 1963.

"One Western paper," Adzhubei said, "has published a picture taken of Moscow by a satellite from a height of
750 kilometers [about 465 miles] in which the Izvestia building is plainly discernible. We do not publish pictures
of this kind, but I believe that we could print a similar picture of New York taken by one of our satellites."

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* SAMOS I failed to achieve orbit on October 11, 1960. SAMOS II was a success on January 31, 1961.

* In July, 1963, the Outstanding Unit Award was presented to the 6593 Test Squadron at Hickam Air Force Base,
Hawaii. The Air Force said the squadron had achieved 70 percent success in its capsule recoveries.

* The project proved much more complicated than SAMOS, however, and in 1962. its operational date was
extended to 1967 at the earliest.

* Dr. S. Fred Singer, director of the National Satellite Weather Center at Suitland, Maryland, declared in a speech
on February 20, 1963 that TIROS had been so used to plan U-2 flights over Cuba during the missile crisis in
October, 1962.