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assortment. They struck me as being very grandmotherly old biddies but, in fact, were the sharpest creatures you would ever meet,” the technical tutor recalled. “They gave this very matronly appearance. They seemed thirty-five or forty years older than me. I was twenty-seven at the time and had an idea that they were somehow frail, elderly ladies. But once a man came to the office whom they knew intended to do bodily harm. He was one of St. Elizabeth’s [the nearby Washington Psychiatric Hospital] ‘walk aways.’ I watched them disarm the fellow, who had a pistol. They talked to him very calmly, very politely, and all of a sudden a big hulking security guy was behind him; then it was over quickly.” Inside the inner office, the tech found Dulles sitting behind an imposing desk. Bespectacled, gray-haired, and dressed in rough Scottish tweeds, he looked very much like the headmaster of a very good boarding school or a Wall Street lawyer at a prestigious firm (a job he had, in fact, once held). “I went in and introduced myself,” the TSS staffer recalled. “I asked him what he wanted to know, exactly, and he said, ‘I don’t have the slightest idea, just start broad.’ So, we talked about physics, and we talked about chemistry.”

Over the next nine months, the tech and the DCI engaged in nearly two dozen sessions. Dulles, ever the spymaster, was effectively debriefing the junior engineer. What started out with principles of pure science soon narrowed to specific questions or requested tutorials regarding particular technologies, such as Doppler radar or sonar. “In hindsight, I know this was at a time when he and the Air Force were arguing about the U-2. I don’t doubt that his deputy, General Cabell, was pushing the Air Force view, rather than Edwin Land’s view, which was more aggressive as to what could be done,” said the engineer. “Perhaps Dulles was beginning to feel that he was being cut out.”

Land, founder of Polaroid, was heading an intelligence subpanel of distinguished scientists on long-range missile development. He, along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology president James Killian, proposed a technologically ambitious overhead reconnaissance role for the CIA while the Air Force was advocating a more conservative approach. In the end, President Eisenhower approved plans for the more advanced plane championed by Land and Killian, eventually code-named U-2. The project was put under CIA control and the aircraft designed by the legendary Clarence “Kelly” Johnson at the Lockheed “Skunk Works” outside Los Angeles, California.

Dulles began his scientific push by forming the CIA Research Board in 1953. Comprised of prominent scientists and business leaders, members of the Research Board included Land and Rear Admiral C. M. Bolster (ret.) of General Tire and Rubber Company, with Navy Rear Admiral Luis de Florez serving as chairman. “They’d come in for a day or so, and Dulles would entertain them at the Alibi Club,” said the Advisory Board’s secretary at the time. “Many of the sessions were very informal. He—Dulles—liked the informality. Once we had oysters, and I mean they brought in bushels, put them on the table and everyone pitched in, with a trash can next to the table and plenty of beer.”

It is not difficult to imagine Dulles’s likely methodology. As the case officer, Dulles was debriefing and building networks—essentially conducting an intelligence collection operation on the giants of industry and the “technologists” driving the aerospace and electronics revolutions.

If Dulles’s pursuit of technical briefings seemed prescient, he was not alone. Other prominent national security experts saw substantial opportunities to use technology for intelligence objectives. In 1955, Air Force general and World War II hero James H. Doolittle, working at the request of President Eisenhower, led a small team in preparing a confidential report on the state of America’s intelligence capabilities.16

The sixty-nine-page report took just eight weeks to complete, and its conclusions sounded an alarm:

The usable