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Bissell had a problem, though. The CIA was not in charge of the satellite mission; the air force was—but the project was languishing on the shelf. Bissell was alarmed that it was not even at the blueprint stage. Worse, it apparently had received such a low security classification that articles were appearing on it in the aviation press—a death knell to any covert program. Compared to the secrecy that surrounded the U-2, it seemed to Bissell as if the air force was advertising its lack of interest in spy satellites, and in the process blowing the cover of what could potentially prove to be the intelligence community’s premier surveillance tool.

The same lackadaisical attitude plagued the navy’s quasi-civilian entry into the International Geophysical Year’s scientific satellite competition. Vanguard, as the project was known, had been chosen by Quarles over von Braun’s army proposal, sparking a furious rearguard campaign by Medaris to have the decision reversed. The navy’s effort was mired in technical difficulties, hopelessly underfunded, and badly behind schedule. The four-stage Jupiter C test rocket, on the other hand, was already reaching near-orbital velocity in its trials and could easily escape gravity if it were allowed to use a live fourth stage, instead of the dummy weighted with sand that the Pentagon ordered.

Alas, after the Nickerson scandal, ABMA had few friends in the administration. Not only were Medaris’s pleas gruffly rebuffed, but Engine Charlie spitefully ordered the general to personally inspect every Jupiter C launch to make sure the uppermost stage was a dud so that von Braun did not launch a satellite “by accident.”

With the army sidelined, the navy bogged down with crippling delays, and the air force generally uninterested, Bissell was in despair. “I knew our national effort to put any kind of a satellite into orbit was lagging badly,” he recalled. “Given my keen personal desire to implement a successor to the U-2 program, I approached Allen Dulles and urged him to take action. He gave me permission to meet with Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles to inform him that the CIA was interested in accelerating the development of a satellite. Perhaps threatened by my approach, the Pentagon added a modest sum of money to the Navy’s budget to speed up its work, on the grounds that its satellite was the most promising of the candidates for an early flight. Unfortunately, the additional funds accomplished little.”

There was another reason why Bissell began pushing Quarles, who had just been promoted from assistant secretary to deputy secretary of defense, to start taking the IGY satellite effort more seriously. A legal question was nagging CIA attorneys, one that threatened to scuttle the future of any orbiting surveillance system: Who had the territorial rights to outer space? Did sovereign airspace extend beyond the stratosphere? There was no legal precedent for a satellite circumnavigating the globe, snapping photographs of foreign countries. Would it violate international law, like the U-2?

The sooner a satellite was sent into orbit, the quicker a precedent would be set that would govern the legality of all future launches. In that regard, a purely scientific satellite, such as the Naval Research Center’s entry into the civilian IGY competition, was the perfect foil for establishing the open, international nature of outer space that would make extraterrestrial spying lawful.

Legal issues aside, there was also the question of national prestige. One of the CIA’s principal tasks was to engage the Soviet Union in psychological warfare, and Bissell worried that if the Communists were first in space, they would score a significant victory over the capitalist democracies of the West in the battle for the hearts and minds of the developing, postcolonial Third World.

Bissell was not the only one concerned about the propaganda value of a Soviet space milestone. The nuclear physicist I. I. Rabi, a future Nobel laureate, wrote to Eisenhower