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Claim of Privilege

A Mysterious Plane Crash, a Landmark Supreme Court Case, and the Rise of State Secrets

Chapter One

Banshee Days

June '46-July '47

The union of Bob and Patricia Reynolds happened in an instant. One day in September 1946, Patricia's mother announced that her friend May had a young man she wanted Patricia to meet. The young man was renting a room in May's Indianapolis boarding-house. He'd just graduated from Purdue with a degree in mechanical engineering and had landed a job at RCA. He'd grown up near Springfield, Massachusetts, and knew no one in Indianapolis.

No way, Patricia told her mother. She was a year out of high school, the only child of older working-class parents, a Protestant growing up in a Catholic neighborhood. Her father, a display-advertising manager at a Indianapolis newspaper, had died of a heart attack when she was fourteen, and that had increased her isolation. She was happy to be alone, watching.

No way, she repeated.

You are going to meet this young man, her mother insisted.

Bob Reynolds came over that night. Patricia acted aloof. She was writing a letter in her room when he arrived, to a Cornell boy she'd met at a USO dance. Her mother finally came in, giving her the evil eye. Patricia put down her pen and walked into the living room.

She felt something the moment she saw him. The expression on his face was just so warm and friendly. He glowed. They went out that night to a movie. They were an attractive pair—he with a ruddy smiling face, she radiant with shoulder-length hair. After the movie, they sat on the Circle in downtown Indianapolis singing "Tell Me Why" in two-part harmony, her voice a sultry contralto. Tell me wh-y the stars do shine, / Tel-l me why the ivy twines, / tel-l me why the sky's so blue, / And I will tell you just why I love you. They sang a lot in those first weeks. She'd been planning to go to art school in New York, but her plans changed. Three months after she met Bob, they married, on November 30, 1946. She was eigh-teen, he twenty-one.

The world beckoned. That they had started life together in perilous times barely registered. If enemies of America seemed to be rising everywhere—if the United States faced mounting threats despite the surrender of Germany and Japan just months earlier—the Reynoldses did not notice.

That February, Korea had split into U.S.-supported South Korea and Soviet-controlled North Korea. Also that February, the State Department's expert in Moscow, George Kennan, had sent his Long Telegram, warning of the Soviet Union's hunger for "capitalistic encirclement" and "total destruction of rival power." In March, in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill spoke for the first time of an implacable threat to freedom that lay behind a Communist "iron curtain." In May, a civil war erupted in China between Chinese Nationalists and the Communist Chinese forces led by Mao Zedong. Later that month, an FBI confidential memo reported the existence of an "enormous" Soviet espionage ring in Washington, D.C. By autumn, there was consensus in the country that the Kremlin represented a treacherous enemy seeking world domination. The Cold War had begun.

Bob and Pat Reynolds felt the impact only indirectly. What touched them was the United States's need for new, sophisticated ways to defend itself. After World War II, control of the seas would no longer be enough; the country had to master the skies. Driven by a sense of urgency, the military began to focus on the development of long-range guided missiles. A fierce rivalry ensued: The Army Ground Forces, the Army Air Forces, and the Naval Forces all wanted to manage this postwar program. The Air Forces, denouncing the other services' forays as a "flagrant violation," decided to seize the lead by staging a public demonstration—by claiming they had already developed a long-range guided missile. The order came from Commanding General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold: "The purpose of the project is to impress upon the public mind the fact that Army Air Forces have, and can use immediately, some form of guided missile."

So began Project Banshee. Whoever selected the name, whatever its provenance, the term carries an eerie resonance: In Irish mythology, a banshee is a "fairy woman"—sometimes young, sometimes matronly, sometimes an old hag—whose mournful wails herald an imminent death.

RCA, awarded a contract by the Air Forces in June 1946, took on a central role in this project. In early 1947, RCA assigned Bob Reynolds to Banshee. For the Reynoldses, this meant moving to Florida, where tests were about to begin. They flew there in an Air Force B-17, Pat smuggled aboard, posing as an Army nurse. The plane had no seats or air pressure; they used oxygen masks. When they were about to land, the pilot asked Pat if she wanted a thrill. She crawled into the Plexiglas nose cone. It was her first plane ride.

In Florida, they lived by the water in Delray Beach, a sleepy coastal town between Palm Beach and Fort. Lauderdale, not for from an Air Force installation in Boca Raton. Home was a garage apartment that did regular battle with mildew. They didn't talk much about Banshee. Pat knew it involved drone planes controlled remotely by mother ships. She knew also that a man named Al Palya was the project supervisor, but she never said more than a hello to him; he was the big shot. Life with Bob—not his work—claimed her attention. She'd traveled outside Indiana only once before and found Florida exotic. She and Bob would rise early and go out walking, watching the sand crabs. When she looked back on those Florida days, not one single other person came to mind.

Al Palya certainly was the big shot. An engineer, he supervised a team assigned to develop the computerized radar system that would guide drone "missile" aircraft to precision targets thousands of miles away. He'd joined RCA in 1946, after three years at Minneapolis-Honeywell designing an automatic pilot system. At Honeywell, he'd impressed everyone with his ability to solve problems, to build compact analog computers, to put a lot of wires into small boxes. His closest colleagues there, Walt Frick and Bill Ergen, thought Al Palya extraordinary—no one had his type of imagination or drive.

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Excerpted from Claim of Privilege by Barry Siegel Copyright © 2008 by Barry Siegel. Excerpted by permission.
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