EOP-UAP-D002, Memorandum on Interagency Coordination for the Recovery of Foreign Materiel, May 1963
WAR.gov / Department of War PURSUE Release 07
A one-page memorandum of May 29, 1963, from R. W. Hale to Dr. Welsh – according to the official description, staff member and Executive Secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council in the Executive Office of the President – on a meeting with NASA’s Arnold Frutkin about recovered space “fragments.”
Document Highlights
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Short overview
A one-page memorandum of May 29, 1963, from R. W. Hale to Dr. Welsh – according to the official description, staff member and Executive Secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council in the Executive Office of the President – on a meeting with NASA’s Arnold Frutkin about recovered space “fragments.”
Why this is interesting
Hale met Frutkin and his assistant for more than an hour on May 28 and found him “very negative on the project” discussed at meetings the previous year. The memo lists Frutkin’s position in seven points: no public announcement was needed, an Executive Order or White House statement would scare people needlessly, and the problem lay overseas, where the State Department wanted to point to NASA as the responsible U.S. agency. Most pointedly, Frutkin felt that the Defense Department and the Air Force wanted to use NASA as a “cover” while letting it do little more than return some pieces; he also saw no need to change cooperation between CIA and NASA and expected opposition to sending legislation to Congress because of the debate it would cause. The memo belongs to the interagency correspondence in USG-UAP-D002, where the policy on recovered space material is negotiated in detail.
Selected passages
- “DOD and AF want to use NASA for a "cover" but have no intention of letting NASA do anything but return some pieces;”
- “It was necessary to review the background and course of the meetings held last year because he was away at the time and now is very negative on the project.”
- “An Executive Order or statement from the White House would scare people needlessly;”
Background
This document is an internal National Aeronautics and Space Council (NASC) memorandum from staff member R.W. Hale to Executive Secretary Edward C. Welsh. NASC was a 1958–1973 body within the Executive Office of the President responsible at the time for coordinating U.S. space policy. The memorandum records a May 28, 1963, meeting with Arnold Frutkin, Director of International Programs at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), concerning the development of a coordinated interagency policy for recovering reentering U.S. and Soviet space debris and satellite fragments that might land on foreign soil. This memorandum is associated with a larger body of interagency correspondence included in this collection under the title “USG-UAP-D002.” The memorandum highlights an interagency policy debate over organizational jurisdiction during the early Space Race. It states that the Department of State and Department of War sought to leverage NASA’s standing as a civilian scientific agency to help facilitate discreet recovery of sensitive space hardware while publicly returning non-sensitive components to the country of origin. As described in the memorandum, the proposed arrangement would have served several purposes: enabling access to adversary technologies, protecting U.S. technologies, preserving diplomatic goodwill, and obscuring the intelligence gathering dimension of technology recovery operations. The memorandum also presents Director Frutkin’s reaction to the proposed arrangement as “very negative.”