Here you go. A very funny, highly inaccurate write up on my last duty station. It is, how ever, "open source". It sorta "misses" a LOT of reality, as all "open source stuff does.
We did NOT research chocolate pudding, we bred killer flies!
I did not like Odom, but he was GOOD.
You could read the "Puzzle Palace" as well. More "open source" junk written by a dude who got mad when he did not get promoted. Interestingly, some of the stuff in that book was just declassified. Makes that dude look stupid. But then, it is OPEN SOURCE. What else could you expect?
NASA: A Space Age facility
"One of the fabulous facilities of this Space Age is being established in beautiful Pisgah National Forest." So began an Associated Press report that appeared in North Carolina newspapers on July 1, 1963. It was big news for sleepy Transylvania County.
Two years earlier, President John F. Kennedy had announced that the United States would put men on the moon, piquing the national interest in space exploration. And now, Western North Carolina would play a direct role in the endeavor, because the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had selected Rosman for a major new satellite tracking station.
It was a scenic, if remote, locale. The mountains around Rosman are rife with rivers, streams, exposed rock formations and thick groves of trees and rhododendrons. NASA, though, chose the spot not for its natural beauty but for its geography and isolation. With no large towns, transmitters, neighborhoods or airline routes close by, it was sheltered from radio and light interference. In short, it was quiet and dark, two crucial criteria for scientists eager to peer at and listen to space with electronic eyes and ears. (And then-NASA Director
James E. Webb, a North Carolina native, probably didn't mind that the facility would be established in his home state.)
The Rosman Satellite Tracking Station conducted its first mission in November 1963, following the orbit of Explorer 18, an unmanned craft sent up to check radiation levels in space. Shortly thereafter, the station collected data from the first generation of weather and atmospheric satellites, which helped pave the way for manned space flight. Later, the Rosman facility assisted the historic Gemini and Apollo missions.
Although the station played a key role in the space program, NASA kept it surprisingly accessible. Dozens of locals worked there as guards, groundskeepers and technicians, and public visits were welcomed, as a NASA pamphlet produced in the 1970s noted. "None of the station's operations are concerned with national defense; and, therefore, no classified activities take place," the pamphlet said. "The station is open every day for casual visitors."
And so it was for 17 years. Over time, however, Rosman gradually became less useful to NASA. In the late 1970s, a new fleet of so-called "super satellites" took over the tasks formerly conducted at the station. Unlike the ground-based station, the satellites moved around, so they could handle the job better and cheaper.
In December 1979, the bad news came from Washington: NASA would pull out of Rosman in 1981. But the government had invested millions there, and it seemed both a shame and a sizable waste to let the facility lie fallow or be destroyed. The closing also threatened the local economy, since large employers were in short supply in and around Rosman.
U.S. Rep.
Lamar Gudger sounded the alarm over his district's impending loss of jobs and lobbied for the government to find a new use for the station. Gudger suggested such functions as astronomy and forestry studies, but he found no takers, either public or private.
Rosman station was in desperate need of a new tenant. But who, besides NASA, could use a remote, high-tech communications base?
NSA: Big Brother in the backwoods
Just as it had outlived one government mission, the facility unexpectedly found another. Only this time, officials wouldn't be boasting about it or maintaining an open-door policy. Rosman station was about to go top secret.
The Defense Department acquired the property in 1981. But the Pentagon brass had nothing to say about their plans for the facility, and in fact, the military ownership was just a cover. The real new occupant was the super-secret National Security Agency.
One of the best-funded but least-known intelligence agencies, the NSA conducts the government's most advanced espionage, making and breaking codes and intercepting (mostly foreign) communications. The agency tracks, records and analyzes everything from phone calls to e-mails to faxes to satellite transmissions. In recent years, it has become controversial both at home and abroad due to concerns about privacy in personal communications.
Back then, the agency's target was the country's main Cold War adversary. In the early 1980s, the NSA established listening posts to monitor the Soviet Union's most advanced satellites. According to subsequent news reports, Rosman's was the second installation in what would become a global network of similar eavesdropping bases. The first was built in Alaska; the third in Australia.
Rosman's new resident proved to be as private as NASA had been public. The NSA cloaks its work in such extreme secrecy that it's often called "No Such Agency." Only in the past few years has substantial information about its covert operations become public, thanks largely to the work of investigative reporter
James Bamford, who wrote the definitive history of the NSA, Body of Secrets (Doubleday, 2001).
Before Bamford's book, only the contours of the NSA's clandestine work were publicly known. And in Rosman and environs, the new purpose of the facility (innocuously renamed Rosman Research Station) was kept decidedly hush-hush. Some 200 locals were hired to work security and maintenance, and the NSA moved in dozens of its own specialists, according to the sporadic news reports that gently probed the site's purpose during the 1980s.
By all indications, the local employees stayed true to their secrecy oaths. When questioned by reporters, many responded with a grin and a polite "no comment." In 1985, one employee, who requested anonymity, did say this to a
Charlotte Observer reporter: "It's a research station. We make chocolate pudding, and I research it."
That same year, the
Asheville Citizen-Times found a military spokesperson who identified the facility as simply "a [Department of Defense] communications research station."
But the government's alarmed response to a little digging by local journalists hinted that something more sensitive was afoot. After a staff photographer had stopped near the station's gate and snapped a few pictures, FBI agents paid a visit to the
Citizen-Times office, according to a June 20, 1985 article in the paper that rightly concluded the station was now "shrouded in secrecy."
One media outlet that prowled around Rosman did manage to uncover the essential facts, despite encountering resistance.
NBC Nightly News sent reporter
Robert Windrem to investigate in the mid-1980s, an experience he recounted in a 2001 post to the Cypherpunks online bulletin board.
"I spent several days in Rosman and nearby Asheville researching Rosman and shooting it from the ground and the air," Windrem wrote. "We included it in a two-part series we did in 1986 called 'The Eavesdropping War' -- NBC having refused to kill the story, as requested by then-NSA Director William Odom. Odom threatened legal action if we ran the piece. They [were] particularly concerned about Rosman."
Windrem had crossed paths with one of the most ornery and secrecy-minded officials to serve the Reagan administration.
"Odom, stern, abrasive, and humorless, was widely disliked at NSA and was considered by many the most ineffective director in the agency's history," Bamford reported in
Body of Secrets. "He also developed a reputation as a Captain Queeg of secrecy, claiming that intelligence leaks to the news media had resulted in 'paralysis' and 'major misadjustments' in U.S. foreign and military policies and could lead to war." No surprise, then, that Odom took a dim view of a national news show poking around his North Carolina acreage.
Despite the official stonewalling and attempted suppression of the news, the NBC series spelled out the essentials of the NSA's activities. "We determined that Rosman had several missions," Windrem recalled in 2001. "One was intercepting communications from Soviet geosynchronous satellites, the Gorizont and Raduga." These were used to relay messages to and from both Russian troops in Cuba and Soviet missile sites in Europe. "The other mission was intercepting signals from the agent satellite network the Soviet Union maintained to communicate with its agents worldwide." (The operation to intercept Soviet signals was code-named Project LADYLOVE, according to historian
Jeffrey Richelson's 1989 book,
The U.S. Intelligence Community.)
If not for such reports from nongovernmental sources, the public would still know very little about Western North Carolina's significant place in the history of international espionage. Even today, the NSA, which moved out of the Rosman facility nine years ago, won't comment on what it did there. The NSA's public-affairs office did not respond to numerous
Xpress inquiries about the agency's activities at the site.
Land of the Sky Spies | Mountain Xpress | Asheville, NC
