Bud Wheelon, Spy Satellites for the CIA
Wheelon fought McNamara and the NRO to give CIA a piece of the overhead reconnaissance mission
Jon Niewijk is a deployment strategist at Palantir.
Just weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, a 34-year-old physicist sat in his Virginia living room watching a football game broadcast live from San Francisco. The crisis had exposed a weakness in America's intelligence capabilities: by the time spy satellite photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba had been recovered from space, developed, and analyzed, the world was already careening toward catastrophe. But that Sunday afternoon in 1963, as Albert "Bud" Wheelon watched football beamed coast-to-coast in real-time, he had an insight that would transform global intelligence gathering: if television networks could instantly transmit a game across the country, why couldn't spy satellites do the same?
This episode was just one instance among many where Wheelon pushed the edges of what was possible in surprising ways. A pioneer of much of the spy satellite technology that has bolstered American security over the past decades, he also played a key role in developing America's first intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and led Hughes Aircraft Company into the era of satellite television. Crucially, the way he achieved these innovations was through the often-heretical practice of stimulating government competition and adopting commercial advances.
Before he revolutionized spy satellites, Wheelon helped solve one of the hardest engineering problems of the Cold War: building missiles that could hit Moscow from Kansas. At just 23, fresh from completing his physics PhD at MIT, he joined the newly-formed Ramo-Woolridge corporation. He found himself working alongside legends like John von Neumann on America's first ICBMs. When his boss, Dean Woolridge, explained they needed to build a missile that could travel 5,000 miles and hit within a mile of its target, the young Wheelon replied, "That's a good idea, let's get started."
His work on missile guidance systems soon caught the CIA's attention. They brought him in to analyze U-2 spy plane photographs of Soviet missile sites, giving him experience navigating the complex relationship between military and intelligence communities. By 1962, the Agency had recruited him to lead their Office of Scientific Intelligence.
At just 34 years old and a relative outsider, Wheelon was unafraid to stick his neck out to get things done. Brash and direct, he often diverged from the career bureaucrats around him. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he insisted - correctly - that the Soviets were placing nuclear weapons in Cuba, contradicting the Agency's official position. Afterwards, when someone from the Agency's Inspector General's office came by to chastise him for breaking with the party line, Wheelon shouted him out of the room: “You ought to be glad that somebody around here is yelling fire when there is a fire going on!” Rather than being punished for his independence, he caught the eye of CIA Director John McCone, who tapped him to create and lead the new Directorate of Science and Technology.
The timing was critical. Despite its recent successes with the U-2 spy plane and CORONA, the first successful imagery satellite, the CIA’s role in overhead reconnaissance was at risk.
America's space reconnaissance program was divided into three programs overseen by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO): Program A handled Air Force satellites, Program B ran CIA projects, and Program C managed Navy ocean surveillance. This arrangement was supposed to promote cooperation while preserving each organization's strengths. Instead, it became a dogfight between the defense and intelligence communities, with the NRO stuck in the middle.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was pushing to consolidate all satellite reconnaissance under Air Force control through the NRO, sidelining the CIA. The logic seemed compelling: centralize everything under military command, eliminate duplication, maximize efficiency. With the Agency's credibility at a low point following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, momentum was on McNamara's side.
But Wheelon saw something different. From his ICBM days, he knew that competition—even messy competition—often produced better results than streamlined efficiency. The Air Force's Atlas missile program had raced against the Army's team under Wernher von Braun. While critics protested the redundancy, both teams achieved what many had thought impossible.
Now, as head of the CIA's new Directorate of Science and Technology, Wheelon fought to preserve the agency's independent satellite development capability. The battle grew so intense that CIA Director John McCone at one point threatened to have the NRO abolished entirely. The eventual compromise—letting the CIA retain its autonomy—would prove crucial. As Wheelon argued, "We should be willing to bear the burden of untidiness and duplication in the government in return for getting good reconnaissance."
He made his point with two revolutionary programs. The first came from reading about the Syncom II communications satellite in 1963. Wheelon realized that if you could park a satellite high enough, with a big enough antenna, you could eavesdrop on Soviet missile tests across half the continent. The technical challenges were immense.1 The satellite would need an antenna 75 feet across—larger than anything ever deployed in space—that would unfurl once it was in orbit. A hand-cranked model was the best proof the engineering team had that the unfurling would even work. The NRO's director called it "hideously expensive" and questioned its worth.
When the NRO balked, Wheelon used CIA's own money and kept the Air Force in the dark, refusing to clear any DoD outsiders. The resulting RHYOLITE satellite, launched in 1970, proved extraordinarily effective at gathering intelligence crucial for arms control negotiations. Much of its impact and legacy is still classified.
His second breakthrough came from that football broadcast. The satellite architecture he envisioned would beam images directly to analysts, just like television networks beamed games coast-to-coast. When others said it couldn't be done, he pointed to his TV set. The system would take 13 years to develop, but it transformed overhead imagery from a strategic, long-term intelligence tool to a system that could provide actionable, current intelligence. For the first time, analysts could receive satellite imagery in near real-time, rather than waiting weeks for film to be physically returned to Earth.
Wheelon’s leadership style helped these ambitious programs just as much as his bureaucratic machinations. He was a demanding workaholic who did not suffer fools kindly. But he paired this with skin in the game and personal investment in winning.
These qualities shone through during his oversight of the A-12 spy plane program. The CIA’s Mach 3 aircraft prototype was having such awful stability issues that the test pilot quit. To reinvigorate the project, Wheelon took a massive personal risk by taking a ride in the Mach 3 aircraft himself. This bold action galvanized the team, inspiring them to get the plane on track ahead of his flight. McCone was furious that an executive would take such a personal risk and almost fired him for it, but Wheelon kept both his job and the pair of ejection spurs he wore during the flight.
Wheelon took this same approach to the Hughes Aircraft Company after just four years in government. As head of the Space and Communications Group, he broke down traditional barriers between commercial, military, and scientific spacecraft development. A single technology division supported three business units—Commercial Systems, NASA Systems, and Defense Systems—allowing advances in one area to benefit all.
This integrated approach was a hit. When NASA needed spacecraft to explore Venus in 1972, Wheelon saw that an existing commercial communications satellite could be cut in half to create two specialized probes—an elegant solution that saved years of development and millions of dollars. Under his leadership, Hughes captured over 50% of the commercial satellite market and laid the groundwork for direct-to-home television through Hughes Communications, which would later spawn DIRECTV.
Wheelon retired in 1986, but stayed active in government and technology circles while also publishing physics papers. He was keenly aware of how American defense was changing in the wake of the Last Supper. In a 1998 interview given to the CIA, he mused: “Men of good will and great ability once did amazing things together at incredible speeds. That does not describe the defense industry today.”
In the face of another technological race with an authoritarian rival, Wheelon's career offers a lesson in winning such contests: embrace the vitality of competition rather than the false comfort of efficiency. The proliferation of new defense startups and the complex interplay between agencies like the Space Force and NRO echo Wheelon's vision of productive competition in space. Perhaps he would say something different about the defense industry if he were around today.
Further Reading
American Cryptology During the Cold War by Thomas Johnson
The Wizards of Langley by Jeffrey T. Richelson
The SIGINT Satellite Story by Maj. Gen. David Bradburn, Col. John Copley, and Raymond B. Potts
A particularly thorny problem was extracting the signal from all the noise that a geosynchronous antennae would collect. Enter fellow Hero & Heretic Bill Perry, Wheelon’s classmate at Stanford. His team used novel computing techniques to process the signals, making the whole system feasible.
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