South By Southwest

DATE March 13, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Journalist Philip Taubman discusses the development of
America's spy planes and satellites, and a possible war with Iraq
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

One of the ways that UN inspectors have gathered intelligence about Iraq is
through U-2 reconnaissance planes. These high-flying spy planes were
developed during the Cold War under the Eisenhower administration. My guest,
Philip Taubman, has written a new book about how Eisenhower and the CIA
secretly developed the U-2 and satellite spy technology. The book is called
"Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space
Espionage." Taubman is the deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times.
We'll discuss The Times' editorials about Iraq a little later. He covered
national security and intelligence issue for more than 20 years, was The
Times' Moscow bureau chief in the late '80s, and directed the Washington
bureau's coverage of the Gulf War in the early '90s. I asked Philip Taubman
why he wanted to write about Eisenhower, the CIA and the space technology they
developed.

Mr. PHILIP TAUBMAN (Author, "Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the
Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage"): We were faced with a threat in
the 1950s that is somewhat similar to the threat that we face today in the
sense that there was a new emerging danger in the world in the 1950s. It was
the Soviet Union. Today it's obviously terrorism. And I wanted to go back
and look at the way another administration had tackled a threat at a time when
we were essentially blind to the forces that the Soviet Union had. We knew
that they were a rising power, that they had come out of World War II as our
ally, and then shortly thereafter the Cold War had begun to develop. And as I
covered intelligence over the years for The New York Times, I became aware
that during the Eisenhower administration there'd been a series of
technological breakthroughs in spying that allowed us to overcome that
blindness and allowed us to avoid one of the great concerns that Eisenhower
himself had, which was that the United States, through fear of the unknown,
would become what he called a garrison state, meaning that we would pour so
much of our wealth into defense that we would cripple ourselves economically.

GROSS: What inspired Eisenhower to pursue new spy technology?

Mr. TAUBMAN: Well, you know, he came up through the Army, of course. He was
a graduate of West Point, where he had studied engineering, and then as the
supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, he learned firsthand
about the advantages of technology. There were breakthroughs during the war
that changed the course of the war; the development of radar, for example,
the cracking of the Nazi coding system, and ultimately in the Pacific theater
the development and use of atomic weapons, which ended the war in Japan. So
after the war, Eisenhower had a great appreciation for the potential
advantages of technology. And he'd also learned during the war, particularly
in the last months of the war in Europe, that you could be surprised still by
German military activities because you didn't have adequate intelligence. So
he came into his presidency as someone who was open to new ideas.

GROSS: You describe him as having pursued a unique partnership between
science and industry and the military in order to develop this new spy
technology. What was his approach of creating a kind of open, creative
atmosphere for these people to work in?

Mr. TAUBMAN: You know, it's interesting; when you look back at the course of
American history, I think there are really two presidents who stand out as
having an abiding faith in science. The first one was Thomas Jefferson, who,
of course, was a scientist himself, and the other was Dwight Eisenhower. And
when he moved into the White House after a period in which he'd been president
of Columbia University, he came in already with associations in the scientific
community, and he'd also, in service after the war briefly serving as chief of
staff of the Army, had given the Army in those first months and years after
the war a mandate to go out and do technological research unburdened by
conventional thinking.

So after his inauguration in January of 1953, he began to reach out to
scientists, and before long he brought into the White House on a regular basis
a group of outside advisers, and over the course of his presidency his
reliance on them increased to a point where they were really among the most
valuable advisers he had, and I think it's safe to say that no president since
then, with the possible exception of Kennedy, has made as much and as valuable
use of science advisers as Eisenhower did.

GROSS: One of the most successful technological innovations during the
Eisenhower administration was the U-2 spy plane, a high-flying reconnaissance
plane. What was this plane able to do that hadn't been done before?

Mr. TAUBMAN: Fly deep into the Soviet Union. Up until the time of the
development of the U-2 in 1955-56, we were pretty much restricted to flights
in conventional planes along the frontiers of the Soviet Union. We really
only could get a kind of oblique look at what was going on. And then actually
it sounds harebrained, but we did it for a while. We would send helium-filled
balloons with cameras strapped to them over the Soviet Union, and the idea was
that they would get into the jet stream, fly over the Soviet Union, take
pictures and then when they emerged on the other side over the Pacific Coast,
they would be recovered by American aircraft. Well, not surprisingly, most of
them were either blown down or shot down over the Soviet Union.

And as time went on in the early '50s, Eisenhower became increasingly
desperate to learn about Soviet weaponry, and actually under President Truman
some flights into the interior of the Soviet Union began, and, of course, not
surprisingly, pilots were shot down, planes were destroyed. This was a secret
chapter of the Cold War that only emerged in the 1980s, and when it did, we
discovered that the United States had lost well over 200 airmen in flights
either on the periphery or over the heart of the Soviet Union.

So the U-2 was created essentially in the hope of developing an invulnerable
or at least less vulnerable aircraft that could fly over the heart of the
Soviet Union, look down at military and industrial sites and escape unscathed.

GROSS: How high could it fly, and how did that help it escape unscathed?

Mr. TAUBMAN: It was quite a revolutionary aircraft in its day. If you turn
the clock back and go back to 1954-55, man had never flown for sustained
periods at the altitude of 60, 70, 80,000 feet. There'd been some test
flights at that altitude in rocket planes, but they lasted very briefly. So
when Kelly Johnson, who was this wonderfully gifted aircraft designer at the
Lockheed company out in California, started to design a new spy plane, he had
enormous obstacles to overcome. The airplane itself had to operate for hours
at that altitude. That meant that new fuels had to be created, a new kind of
airplane had to be designed, pilots had to have pressure suits so that if
there was some kind of explosive decompression in the cockpit, they would be
able to survive long enough to bring the aircraft down. There was just a
series of breakthroughs in development of that plane that actually make it
still valuable today. It's still being used 50 years later to monitor
activities in Iraq.

GROSS: The U-2 started being used as a spy plane during the Cold War, so we
were officially in peacetime. What were some of the political issues that we
had to deal with using these spy planes during peace, not during war?

Mr. TAUBMAN: There were huge political issues and, in fact, they were so
important and intimidating that they gave Eisenhower pause over and over again
about using the plane. The formula is really quite simple. If it's
peacetime, if you're not engaged in a war, the sending of a spy plane over the
territory, the sovereign air space of another country, is essentially an act
of war, and Eisenhower told his colleagues at one point during this period
when the U-2 was in use that if the Soviet Union had developed a similar plane
and was penetrating American air space as brazenly as the United States was
flying into Soviet air space, it would prompt him to go immediately to
Congress to seek a declaration of war.

GROSS: But the Soviets didn't do that.

Mr. TAUBMAN: Soviets, fortunately, didn't have the technology, didn't have
that kind of aircraft, and when the U-2 began to fly over the Soviet Union in
July of 1956, they couldn't knock it down. They barely could track it, though
they could track it, and I think to avoid international humiliation, they
never conceded publicly that their air space was being so egregiously violated
over the course of the next four years.

GROSS: My guest is Philip Taubman, deputy editorial page editor of The New
York Times, and author of the new book "Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA,
and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage." We'll talk more after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Philip Taubman. He's the
author of the new book "Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden
Story of America's Space Espionage." He's also deputy editor of The New York
Times editorial page.

Let's look at satellite technology. We've discussed the U-2 spy plane. What
were the hopes for satellite technology when it was in its formative stages
during the Eisenhower years?

Mr. TAUBMAN: The first plan for this, actually, was too far ahead of its
time. The whole concept of putting a satellite or an observation post into
space was a kind of over-the-horizon idea. It was almost science fiction at
the time the Rand Corporation out in Santa Monica began to proselytize for
this. Don't forget, we had not put any kind of object into space at this
time, and, in fact, it was not until 1957 that the Soviet Union first put a
satellite into orbit, and that one, Sputnik 1, was not a spy satellite. So
when you begin to find the thread of this story back in the 1940s, we're
really talking in a kind of fantasy world about what might be done if you
could put cameras in space. So you had to develop the rocketry to do it. You
had to develop the satellite vehicle. You had to develop phenomenally acute
cameras. The kind of cameras that are used on the U-2 is basically child's
play compared to the cameras that would be required to shoot pictures from
100, 200 miles out in space and see anything on the ground that would be
helpful.

The first technology that the Rand people recommended was to take pictures
with a camera in a satellite, then scan them and then take those images and
electronically relay them back down to Earth, where they could then be
assembled and shown to people. That, in fact, is a kind of shorthand for the
very advanced technology that we use today in satellites, digital technology.
But back in the 1950s, this was just beyond the reach of American science, and
it was only when Edwin Land and Jim Killian, Eisenhower's science advisers,
took a look at the satellite program and said, `Wait a minute. You're trying
to do too much. This is too complicated. Let's go to a simpler concept'--it
was only then that we made the breakthrough that allowed us to create a
workable system.

GROSS: Every country has sovereign control of its air space, and if you
violate that it can be considered an act of war. What about the protocol for
space technology where you can't necessarily even see if it's over your
country and taking pictures of your country?

Mr. TAUBMAN: That was an issue much debated at the time. It was almost as
new in legal terms as the technologies that were being developed were in
scientific terms. Since there'd never been objects in space, no one really
knew what the law of space was, and there was great fear in the Eisenhower
administration that the Soviet Union would claim that if the United States has
a satellite that's passing over the Soviet Union, that it's somehow violating
sovereign Soviet air space. So there was a lot of discussion about that. The
issue was essentially eliminated by the Russians themselves, because in that
case they solved the problem for us by putting up the first satellite in
October 1957 and, of course, at that point they were happy to have it circling
over all kinds of countries and had no objection about the fact that there was
such a thing, so that opened the way for us to put up satellites without
incurring the wrath of the Russians.

GROSS: Has any law actually ever been written defining the sovereignty of air
space and the use of satellites?

Mr. TAUBMAN: Yes, the UN eventually adopted a law of space which essentially
guarantees the freedom of space, and that's why space has become such an
important frontier for us militarily, because we basically have the freedom to
put up as many military satellites as we want, and our military has become
incredibly dependant on satellites for everything from communications to
guidance of weapons systems to movement of troops. The gathering of
intelligence is now just one of many facets of American military power that is
basically dependent on satellites.

GROSS: Eisenhower was worried about the growing power of what he described as
the military industrial complex, and he said, `The munition makers are making
tremendous efforts toward getting more contracts and, in fact, seeming to
exert undue influence over the senators.' What were his concerns about the
military industrial complex?

Mr. TAUBMAN: They were quite profound, and they led to his description--the
use of that term, the military industrial complex in his farewell address to
the nation shortly before he left office. And it's particularly interesting
to think back that these words and these concerns came from someone who was
imbued with the military culture, who had grown up in the military and had
been a hero as an Army general.

GROSS: And, in fact, he helped create that military industrial complex.

Mr. TAUBMAN: He did, but he created it with the expectation that it would be
manageable, that it would not, in effect, take on a life of its own where the
sort of politics between the industrial companies and the Congress and the
Pentagon would create a kind of environment where weapons systems were being
built because they were creating jobs, where weapons systems were being built
because they were boosting corporate profits, where this whole thing became
like some kind of nuclear chain reaction where it essentially took on a life
beyond the control of the White House and policymakers in Washington. And
Eisenhower was acutely concerned about a society in which so much money was
spent on weapons that the economy would suffer, that the nature of American
civilization would suffer because we would become, essentially, an armed camp.
And he was worried, as he came to the end of his term in the White House, that
this nexus between the government and industry, that he had actually done so
much to foster, had essentially gotten out of control.

GROSS: Do you think there's also more of a revolving door today between
people in politics and the defense industry--in other words, politicians going
back and forth between politics and the defense industry?

Mr. TAUBMAN: There's certainly much more of that than there was, although
interestingly, I found in my research that there were kind of precursor
examples of things going on which today would be frowned upon and which seemed
to be accepted back in the 1950s. They're small cases but they're interesting
to me because, as I say, they're a preview of things to come where there'd be
someone working at the Pentagon who'd come out of private industry out of a
military contractor, and while that person was working at the Pentagon, he was
promoting projects that would bring money to the firm that he had left before
he came to Washington. It didn't lead to the kind of scandals that we have
today, although there was an Air Force secretary at the time, Harold Talbott,
who got caught in an ethical problem and essentially had to give up his job.
But you could see the beginnings of what you're talking about.

GROSS: Are there people in the administration or in Congress today who've
walked through that particular revolving door?

Mr. TAUBMAN: Well, indeed. You can begin with Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense
secretary, who came out of industry. He's been back and forth over time.
There are just dozens of people, when you look around the governmental
agencies. And it's not to say that it necessarily has to be problematic. I
mean, the expertise that one develops working on satellite programs, for
example, in the private sector may make someone particularly well qualified to
run the satellite programs in the American government. The problem develops
if people lose track of the importance of separating their industrial
interests that they might have had earlier in their career with their
governmental interests, and then once they leave government failing to make
the distinction as they go back to the private sector.

But you can look at a lot of jobs. The director of the National
Reconnaissance Office, Director Teets, for example, was at Lockheed for many
years. So there's a lot of moving back and forth. As I say, it's not, you
know, by definition a bad thing. It just depends on how individuals handle
it.

GROSS: Dick Cheney, who used to be the head of Halliburton--Halliburton
had--one of its subsidiaries, Brown & Root, is a private military corporation
which has gotten huge contracts and even contracts relating to war with Iraq.

Mr. TAUBMAN: Well, I think one of the things the Bush administration has to
be exceedingly careful about is that--whatever comes to pass in Iraq, that we
don't end up looking as though this was done to advance the corporate
interests of entities like Halliburton. I think it would just be a terrible
mistake if we were to end up in a situation where we controlled the Iraqi oil
fields and then all of a sudden, my goodness, Halliburton, Dick Cheney's
former company, has a multibillion-dollar contract to go in and manage the
Iraqi oil fields. I think that would just confirm for many people their worst
suspicions about the Bush administration.

GROSS: Philip Taubman is the author of the new book "Secret Empire:
Eisenhower, The CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage." He's
also deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times. He'll be back in the
second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, we continue our conversation with journalist Philip Taubman
and talk about publishing editorials that take a stand on war with Iraq. He's
the deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times. And Ed Ward looks
back at the early days of Austin's alternative music scene. The South by
Southwest Music Conference is now under way in Austin.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with journalist Phillip
Taubman, author of the new book "Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA and the
Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage." Taubman covered national security
and intelligence issues for more than 20 years, served as The New York Times'
Moscow bureau chief in the late '80s and directed the Washington bureau's
coverage of the Gulf War in the early '90s.

Your position now at The New York Times is you're deputy editor of the
editorial page. What are your responsibilities as deputy editor?

Mr. TAUBMAN: I work very closely with the editorial page editor, Gail
Collins, and with a large and wonderful editorial board to come up with the
opinions of The New York Times seven days a week every day of the year. And
it's a process that involves a lot of discussion and debate, the writing of
editorials, editing of editorials. It's a big responsibility for the paper
that dates back to the beginnings of American journalism and, really, back
through British journalistic history. The notion that a newspaper would have
an editorial voice--we believe it's an important function at The New York
Times, and we devote a lot of resources and energy to trying to produce an
interesting and provocative and principled editorial page.

GROSS: The New York Times' editorials have been opposed to the Bush
administration's push for war now with Iraq, and I'm wondering if you take any
heat from the administration because of that. I guess particularly I'm
wondering if any reporters from The Times find that certain access to the
White House is withheld in punishment or in criticism of the editorial page
stand. 'Cause that's a fear that a lot of people have. Is it actually a
reality?

Mr. TAUBMAN: I don't think it's a reality in Washington. The custom of
having editorials, even ones that are in disagreement, is so well established
in the United States that occasionally, in some administrations that are
particularly paranoid--I'm thinking of the Nixon administration and if you go
back to the Johnson administration during Vietnam, there are efforts at
retaliation through cutting people off or, you know, even worse during the
Nixon years when they created an enemies list and bugged people's telephones.

The Bush administration seems to be fairly enlightened, I would say, in this
respect. They take our opinions and the opinions of others seriously, as far
as I can tell. I don't think they're adjusting their policies based on The
New York Times editorial page, but I don't sense that they're in a bunker
mentality. That's one of the things I've noticed about this administration;
however much one might disagree with its policies, they have not fallen into
that kind of siege mentality that was so damaging to the Nixon White House.

GROSS: What editorial do you think had the biggest impact?

Mr. TAUBMAN: Well, it's interesting. If you think back over the time I've
been at the editorial page, which is now coming up on nine years, I think a
lot of the pieces on foreign countries have a huge impact. It's as if the
megaphone of The New York Times editorial page somehow is amplified when you
move out of Washington and New York and other places, and I think that that's
not surprising considering the number of editorial voices that there are here
in the United States.

But if we write a piece, for example, criticizing a new press law in
Argentina, as we did a number or years ago, the next day the law was reversed.
And I think that that's partly a function of the respect that the paper
carries. It's also a confusion, I think, in foreign capitals that when The
New York Times editorializes it's somehow speaking on behalf of the American
government, which we are most certainly not doing.

GROSS: What editorial about war with Iraq has had the biggest impact?

Mr. TAUBMAN: I think the piece that we ran quite recently. The headline was
Say No To War, and it was our bottom-line articulation that as long as the
Security Council is in opposition to a war, which it has been of late, that
the United States should not go to war with this kind of ad hoc coalition that
it has mustered, including Britain. And Britain being the only country with
real military forces to contribute, that's really what's most important to us
at this point is how the United States manages its power in the world. And,
yes, we understand that Iraq is a threat, but we don't believe that Iraq is a
mortal threat and an immediate threat to American interests. And we think the
paramount issue in the years ahead is how this hyper megapower known as the
United States manages itself in world affairs, and that it not rush off
arrogantly doing things and leaving the rest of the world in resentment.

GROSS: So you say that got the biggest response. What was the response?

Mr. TAUBMAN: Enormous response. I think a lot of positive response from
readers. There's a lot of anti-war sentiment in the country, and I think we
sort of articulated it in a way that was reasonable and commonsensical and was
not ideological. We don't write the page from an ideological position that
we're Democrats or Republicans or we're anti-war. We try to look at every
issue based on the merits, and in this case, I think we laid down an editorial
that basically made a lot of sense to a lot of people.

GROSS: Has there been a lot of disagreement within the editorial page staff
about what your stand should be on possible war with Iraq?

Mr. TAUBMAN: We've had a lot of good discussions about it. We don't, as a
habit, tend to talk in detail about the discussions of the board because it
would probably inhibit us if we did. But what I can say is that we've
discussed it an enormous amount in recent months, and a lot of different views
have been expressed. So I've found it--as someone who's covered these issues
for many years, I found it exceedingly difficult to arrive at my own opinion
about Iraq, because I think it is a complex issue and I think the editorial
board of The Times also struggled over the months to figure out exactly how we
felt about this.

GROSS: Could you describe how you did arrive at your own opinion? You said
it was difficult to do that.

Mr. TAUBMAN: It was difficult because I take the Iraq threat very seriously,
and particularly in the wake of 9/11. To me, the great danger is that Iraq
would develop nuclear weapons. I'm concerned about their chemical and
biological weapons, but I'm particularly concerned that they would develop
nuclear weapons. And even though there's no history of cooperation between
Saddam Hussein and terror groups like al-Qaeda--and I discount to some extent
what the administration has presented as intelligence on that issue; I don't
think it's persuasive--but I don't rule out the possibility that at some time
in the future an alliance might develop, and I think the United States has to
be mindful of that.

But given the potential consequences of a war, everything from the bloodshed
and devastation of the military actions themselves, out through what could be
an incredibly complicated and difficult period of trying to govern and
reconstruct Iraq and to hold it together and to create a democratic society
there, which is what President Bush says he wants to do, all of that would
just be exceedingly difficult under the best of circumstances. And to try to
do it without the support of the Security Council just seems to me to be a bad
policy.

GROSS: My guest is Phillip Taubman, deputy editorial page editor of The New
York Times, and author of the new book "Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA
and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage." We'll talk more after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Let's get back to our interview with Phillip Taubman, author of the
new book "Secret Empire." He's the deputy editorial page editor of The New
York Times. When we left off, we were talking about how he arrived at his
opinion that although Iraq does present a threat, we should not rush to war
without the support of the Security Council.

You said that you didn't find persuasive the intelligence that the United
States government has offered, that Iraq has ties with al-Qaeda. You covered
intelligence for a long time. What is it that you find less than persuasive?

Mr. TAUBMAN: What I find troubling in this case is that we're basically
looking at what in a court of law would be called circumstantial evidence.
There's evidence that an al-Qaeda leader went to Baghdad and received medical
care there. There's apparently evidence that a number of al-Qaeda operatives,
a dozen or so, found their way to Baghdad after 9/11 and may have operated out
of the Iraqi capital for a while. There's the assertion that there's a
al-Qaeda camp in northern Iraq, which, interesting, is a part of Iraq that's
not in Iraqi control. So the accusation that this is a camp that shows that
Iraq is allied with al-Qaeda doesn't quite make the case, because it's in a
part of Iraq where there isn't Iraqi control.

But what's missing is the kind of hard intelligence that Secretary of State
Powell presented to the Security Council about other issues involving Iraq,
where there were intercepts of communications that showed, convincingly I
thought, that the Iraqis were working overtime to try to cover up their
weapons programs. There was photographic intelligence, satellite
intelligence, showing that various sites around Iraq had been cleaned up
before inspectors got there. That's the kind of hard intelligence that leaves
no doubt in my mind that the Iraqis have unconventional weapons programs and
that they're trying to disguise and hide those. But when it comes to the
Iraqi connection with al-Qaeda, it's much more amorphous.

GROSS: If you believe that there is good intelligence telling us that the
Iraqis are working on weapons of mass destruction and that they're being
deceitful to the weapons inspectors, why do you then not support the
president's push to war?

Mr. TAUBMAN: Well, our position on the editorial page was that there was a
middle ground, which is essentially to upgrade the inspection force. I
understand that Saddam Hussein is not in compliance with the United Nations
Security Council. I think the editorial page understands that he has not made
the about-face that would be necessary in which he would fully cooperate and
disarm voluntarily. However, we think that we now have him in a position
where with the present inspection force and the strengthening of it--and I
mean by strengthening putting in hundreds of more inspectors--and by having
unfettered overflights of Iraq with intelligence-gathering systems like the
U-2, that we basically have him so off balance that whatever programs he has
are essentially stalled at the moment, and that he certainly is not in a
position to turn those programs into the kind of offensive firepower that
would threaten his neighbors or other countries.

And that that kind of solution, which I think he would have to accept now,
would give us the kind of security that we need without having to go to war,
and it would also allow us to bring home a good portion of the troops that we
have out there. I don't buy the argument that just because we have 300,000
troops in the region now we have to go to war because to bring them home would
be an admission of failure. I think you could sustain a very intrusive,
smothering kind of inspection regime by maintaining 100,000 troops in the
region or maybe 50 to 100,000 and plenty of air power to back them up if you
needed them. So this notion that we have to go to war now because we'll be
humiliated if we don't is the worst possible argument to go to war.

GROSS: As someone who wrote about intelligence and national security issues
for 20 years, I'm wondering how interested you are in how people perceive
United States spying. For instance, I think it's fair to say that America
internally is pretty divided about America's approach to spying, and some
people think that we spend far too much money on it and America is far too
involved in espionage. And other people think that that's the only reason why
we're a free country is 'cause we've invested so much in that part of our
security. Do you see a lot of kind of extremes? And I wonder if you feel
you've taken a kind of middle path yourself, you know, that you believe in it,
but you also believe that there are certain extremes that we should be wary
of? Because that's the impression I get reading your book, that you're...

Mr. TAUBMAN: Yes. You know, I believe that intelligence is vital. It's
absolutely crucial, as we discovered on 9/11. And a country that does not
have effective means of gathering intelligence is a country that's vulnerable
to attack constantly. So it's absolutely critical that the United States
invest significant amounts of money in its intelligence-gathering agencies and
that it try to constantly be inventing new technologies and recruiting and
training new agents and doing all that it can. It was really crucial to
stabilizing the Cold War, and it can be crucial to defending the United States
from terrorist attacks.

The trouble is that like all these gigantic government agencies, the
intelligence agencies have a tendency to waste money, they have a tendency to
be badly managed and, occasionally, they have a tendency to essentially get
out of control, which is what happened to the CIA in the 1960s when it went
off, mind you, not on its own entirely--it had the authority of the president
to do a lot of these things--but all the assassination plots and famous
boneheaded operations that were revealed in the 1970s. So you have to be
careful of that.

You also have to be careful--and I think this is particularly important
today--that these agencies and their powerful intelligence-gathering systems
are not turned on American citizens. That is the quickest and surest way to
rob Americans of their democratic rights and their civil liberties. These
systems are incredibly powerful. They can pluck off phone, cell phone, fax
communications, you name it, e-mail communications. We just have to be very
careful as we combat terrorism that we control how we use these systems
internally, because it's not much tweaking that would be required to turn them
on the Americans and to move us towards the creation of the kind of police
state that I lived in in the Soviet Union as a correspondent for four years.
And believe me, that is not a place where any American would want to live.

GROSS: Phillip Taubman, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. TAUBMAN: My pleasure.

GROSS: Phillip Taubman is deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times.
His new book is called "Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA and the Hidden
Story of America's Space Espionage."

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, Ed Ward on the early days of the alternative music scene in
Austin, Texas, where the South by Southwest Music Conference is now under way.
This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Profile: Music scene of Austin, Texas, in the late 1970s
TERRY GROSS, host:

Punk's do-it-yourself aesthetic caused an explosion of local music scenes at
the end of the '70s. Austin, which had always been a hotbed of musical
activity, was no exception. And this week in Austin, the largest music
conference in the country, South by Southwest, is under way. Rock historian
Ed Ward is going to revisit the Austin of the late '70s.

(Soundbite of music)

ED WARD reporting:

In the late summer of 1979, I was asked to interview for a job as the rock
critic at Austin, Texas, daily newspaper the American-Statesmen. My friend
Joe Nick Patoski had alerted me to the job, and picked me up at the airport
when I arrived. Before I'd even settled down in the front seat, he slammed a
cassette into his player.

(Soundbite of "Mezcal Road")

Mr. JOE "KING" CARASCO: (Singing) Ah, ha, ha. Ah, ha, ha, ha. Ow! Well, I
just don't know how I feel. The way she treats me is unreal. Going to go
back down to Alistro(ph), going to find that pretty little girl. Hello,
Mezcal Road. My name is Cabron. Hello, Mezcal Road, and my name is Cabron.
Hello, Mezcal Road.

WARD: It seems his girlfriend, Kris, was playing in a band with a vocalist
who called himself Joe "King" Carasco, but who was really Joe Teutsch from
Dumas, Texas. He'd recorded "Mezcal Road" with a band he called El Molino,
but now he had a more stable band of Austinites, with Kris on keyboards. I
told Joe Nick I'd love to hear them, and he assured me I would.

First, though, there was the matter of getting the job, which I did, and then
I had to move to Texas. The paper lost no time putting me to work, and on
Halloween, I went to Palmer Auditorium to review my first show: The Police,
with an awful band called Fashion, and, as per their contract, a local band.

(Soundbite of song)

THE SKUNKS: (Singing) There's something artificial about the style of your
smile; the face of a woman, but the screams of a child. I see you every night
in a different club. There's something very wrong about the way that you rub
me. I'm not the kind of guy who cares about those things. I'm not looking
for an angel with a broken wing. I don't know a guy who would take you home
for keeps, honey. Girls like you there are cheap, cheap, cheap. You're
nothing but a cheap girl. You're nothing but a cheap girl. You're nothing
but a cheap girl. Yeah, nothing but a cheap girl.

The spray on your hair, it makes your head...

WARD: The Skunks were one of Austin's first punk bands, although in
retrospect they were really more of a hard rock band. And I could see they
had a following, since there was a girl dressed up in a skunk suit dancing
while they played. But they were only part of the scene swirling around
Raoul's, a beer bar near the University of Texas campus where, presided over
by the gentle but firm hand of Joseph Gonzalez(ph), weird bands and weird
audiences were gathering despite harassment from frat boys and other creeps.

Raoul's had been going for over a year by the time I got there, and had
already made headlines in Austin when The Huns, another legendary early punk
band, had caused a riot. The police had come in response to a noise complaint
and The Huns' singer, Phil Tolstead, kissed the cop who went on stage to
announce the place closed. A number of people, including the editor of the
campus newspaper, wound up in jail, and punk had officially arrived in Austin.

The Skunks were a trio led by bassist Jesse Sublett with a wonderfully
aggressive guitarist, John Lee Graham, and Billy Blackmon on drums. Because
of their mainstream appeal, though, and the fact that the local rock station
played them, they were deemed uncool by many.

(Soundbite of song)

THE SKUNKS: (Singing) ...(Unintelligible) I don't wanna be a mess. I don't
want to be on your hit list. I don't want to get ...(unintelligible). You
ain't going to find me ...(unintelligible).

Ain't no summer heat gonna drive me out. Ain't no piece ...(unintelligible)
me out. Don't you push, push me far out.

WARD: And then there was Joe "King" Carasco & The Crowns, who appealed to the
old-time Austin crowd that loved Doug Sahm. They were melodic, catchy and
visual. Joe had learned the old blues trick of having a 20-foot cord on his
guitar, and he would run through the audience and sometimes out of the club
while he was playing. After an early single sponsored by Billy Gibbons of ZZ
Top, the band signed to Stiff Records in London and went on one of the
notorious Stiff tours.

(Soundbite of "Buena")

Mr. CARASCO: (Singing) Buena, Buena, Buena all the ti-i-i-ime. Buena, Buena,
Buena on my mind. Buena, Buena, Buena all the ti-i-i-me. Buena, Buena, Buena
on my mind.

(Singing in Spanish)

She looked so good...

WARD: But the most intriguing band is one without any ties to Texas' past, it
seemed. They called themselves Standing Waves.

(Soundbite of song)

STANDING WAVES: (Singing) I'm up, you're down. What it mean when I go down?
What's up? I can't think straight. I'm spinning around. I was driving in
your car. ...(Unintelligible) hit the road. It's like I knew...

WARD: Blessed, or cursed, with three songwriters, they were well-versed in
bands like XTC and Talking Heads, yet came out of it with something that was
their own. They were in the intellectuals favorites, the anti-Skunks, and a
furious war of words went on between the two camps.

But Austin's a funny place, as I would learn. Excellent bands arise there all
the time, but they rarely translate local success to anything more than
regional fame. Austin was visited by the record companies in the New Wave
signing frenzy of the late '70s, but only a mediocrity called D-Day got to
make one long-forgotten album. One by one, the early bands disappeared--The
Huns, Terminal Mind, The Next and then The Survivors did, too. Jesse Sublett
tried another lineup with the The Skunks, and then chose the literary life,
which he still pursues.

Standing Waves also regrouped and moved to New York, but that didn't last
long, and today the ex-members run a folk art gallery, present the news on San
Antonio television and work in a bookstore, among other things. Joe "King"
Carasco became a fraternity and spring break favorite, and has continued with
many changes of band members. Joe Nick and Kris married, and so did Jesse and
Lois, the girl in the skunk suit. And the Austin music scene entered the
'80s.

GROSS: Ed Ward lives in Berlin.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of song)

STANDING WAVES: (Singing) I want to play like children. All I want to do is
play. I want to play like children, but not become just a babe. I want to
play like movies. I want to play like TV. I want to play like movies. I
want you to play with me.

(Soundbite of music)
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