Carl E. Duckett
Carl Ernest Duckett was an American intelligence officer known for being the founder of the Central Intelligence Agency's science and technology operations.
Background
Carl Duckett was born and raised in Swannanoa, North Carolina, an unincorporated community a few miles east of Asheville. He attended the Buncombe County schools in Swannanoa, graduating from high school in 1940. His father was a construction laborer at the Beacon Blanket Manufacturing Company, the epicenter of the Swannanoa community, and he wanted his son to start a career at the mill. Carl’s ambition, however, was to work in radio broadcasting, and he left Swannanoa to search for work in this field.With a good speaking voice, some musical talent, and a very persuasive nature, Duckett eventually found beginner employment at WMVA, a small station being established in Martinsville, Virginia. While there, he married Nannie Jane Law in 1941, and started a family. He also gained an elementary knowledge of radio electronics, and, to prepare for a better job, attended part-time for six months a course in this field at the nearby Danville Technical Institute.
In early 1943, Duckett was employed as a technician by Westinghouse Electric in Baltimore, Maryland. Apparently a fast learner, he was soon assigned to work on Army radars for anti-aircraft fire control. During this period, he also attended courses in radio engineering under the Government-sponsored Engineering, Science, and Management War Training Program at Johns Hopkins University. In 1944, he was a member of a team sent to England to advise on the use of Westinghouse SCR-584 radar equipment for V-1 ‘buzz bomb’ defense, and stayed as a field engineer during the Normandy invasion.
Drafted into the U.S. Army in October 1944, Duckett served in the Signal Corps until July 1946. As a radar specialist, he rapidly advanced from Private to Master Sergeant, with assignments that included the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, the Pacific Theater of Operations, and the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. While at White Sands, he participated in the first launch in the U.S. of a captured German V-2 rocket and gained knowledge of the telemetry equipment used in this testing.
Following his discharge from the Army, Duckett returned to radio broadcasting in Martinsville. He also received a First-Class Commercial Radiotelephone License from the Federal Communications Commission, making him eligible for higher positions in this field, and joined in establishing radio station WBOB in Galax, Virginia. After the station went on the air in April 1947, he was not only the chief engineer but also served as the station manager and an announcer/disk jockey. Highly aggressive in these activities, he was one of the founders of a Virginia-wide association of news broadcasters and represented Virginia radio stations in a meeting with President Harry S. Truman. He also promoted a bluegrass music group that made hit records and, later, performed before Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom.
Telemetry and intelligence
At the end of World War II when Duckett was discharged from the Army, he had remained in the Reserves. As the Korean War started, he was called back to active duty in October 1950, and soon received a direct commission as a Second Lieutenant. After completing the Signal Officer’s School at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, he was again assigned to White Sands. There his progressive duties included Commander of a remotely located radar station, Chief of the Radar Instrumentation Division, and Project Manager of the first test-range microwave communication system. He was promoted to First Lieutenant and remained at White Sands until reverting to Retired Reserves status in June 1953. Three years later, he received the rank of Captain in the Reserves.Upon leaving Army active duty, Duckett remained at White Sands as a civil-service employee. During a three-year tenure at WSPG, he progressed from General Schedule Grade 12 to Grade 15 in positions that included Deputy Assistant for Engineering; Chief, Plans and Programs Office; and Scientific Advisor to the Signal Officer.
The team of German scientists and engineers under Wernher von Braun, initially brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip, had worked at Fort Bliss, Texas, and tested their missiles at nearby WSPG. After being moved to Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama, in 1950, they continued to use the ranges at White Sands. While in the Army and in civil service positions, Duckett worked closely with this team and others from Redstone Arsenal, and became intimately familiar with the telemetry systems that were originally developed in Germany at the Peenemünde Army Research Center, as well as the newer American derivative systems.
Activities at Redstone Arsenal evolved from the small Ordnance Guided Missile Center in 1950, through the development of the Redstone Rocket, and the opening of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in 1956. The ABMA was responsible for a wide variety of missiles, including Jupiter, the Army’s first medium-range ballistic missile. In July 1956, Duckett accepted a civil service position with the ABMA, joining the Guidance and Control Laboratory as a telemetry specialist and serving as a Scientific Advisor to the Commanding Officer, Major General John B. Medaris.
In the mid-1950s, the National Security Agency set up a listening station near the coastal town of Sinop, Turkey, directly across the Black Sea from the Kapustin Yar range, where the Soviets were testing medium-range missiles. In early 1957, it became known that the Soviet Union was testing an intercontinental ballistic missile at their Tyuratam range and soon a listening station was opened by the Central Intelligence Agency at Behshahr in northeast Iran, some across the Caspian Sea. Tapes were made of signals obtained by these listening post, and an ad hoc activity called Jam Session was started by the CIA for their interpretation; Duckett was a Jam Session participant. They soon recognized that the Russians were using the same telemetry frequencies and formats originally developed by the Germans during World War II.
On October 4, 1957, America was shaken by the launch by the Soviet Union of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. The U.S. Air Force and the CIA assembled a highly secret Telemetry and Beacon Analysis Committee to analyze the signals recorded from the launch at Tyuratam and those heard all over the world from Sputnik. From his work in Jam Session, Duckett was asked to be a leader in the TABAC effort. It required about 18 months to calibrate the signals and understand how they related to the launch vehicle characteristics. The payoff, however, was significant; for the next two decades this provided the U.S a major window into the operation of Soviet missiles.
In mid-1958, the ABMA was absorbed into the newly formed Army Ordnance Missile Command, headquartered on Redstone Arsenal. At that time, a small Signals Intelligence Group, led by Duckett, was established as a separate unit. In early 1961, the Department of Defense formed the Defense Intelligence Agency, integrating all of the defense intelligence in the DoD. The AOMC had the DoD’s most extensive capability for analyzing missiles; thus, to support the DIA, in December the Missile Intelligence Office was made an official organization on the AOMC Commanding General’s Staff; Duckett was named Chief of the MIO.
From the start, one of the most significant activities of the MIO was the analysis of public and clandestine photographs of Soviet missiles and their launch sites, and from these and telemetry signals, estimating the missile capabilities. Sometimes models of the pictured missiles were built and tested in the AOMC wind tunnels for determining their aerodynamic characteristics.
Starting in mid-1956, the CIA began U-2 aircraft flights over the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China. These carried cameras that provided pictures with a resolution of from an altitude of and higher; they were of great value in identifying missiles being manufactured and on the launch sites. In mid-1959, the CIA initiated CORONA, the program name for a series of satellites with increasingly more accurate cameras. The exposed film was ejected in a capsule with a parachute and then caught in the air by aircraft. The first successful mission, designated Keyhole 1, took place in August 1960. Some 1,400 photos were taken, covering more of the Soviet Union than all of the prior U-2 overflights combined. The resolution, however, was nowhere close to that obtained from U-2 cameras.,
In August 1962, the AOMC was expanded to become the Army Missile Command and the MIO became the Missile Intelligence Directorate, with Duckett as the Director. Duckett and others from the MID participated in the CORONA photo interpretation. The Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance was formed by the CIA to select areas for imaging; Duckett was a COR member. As the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union intensified, the COR selected Cuba as an imaging target.
The Cuban Missile Crisis began in September 1962, when CORONA imagery indicated likely missile launch sites being surreptitiously built at several sites across the island. On October 14, to obtain clearer images, U-2 reconnaissance aircraft flew over the suspected areas, each flight obtaining about 4,000 pictures. A joint CIA and DoD activity called Photographic Interpretation Center was responsible for interpreting such data. Led by Duckett, a team of image interpreters from the MID assembled at the PGIC and quickly released its top secret report identifying the sites as those for Soviet R-12 Dvina medium-range ballistic missiles, and Soviet R-14 Chusovaya intermediate-range ballistic missiles. President John F. Kennedy imposed a military blockade of Cuba, and the confrontation ended on October 28, 1962, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the offensive missiles and return them to the USSR.