The Press: The Bird Watchers

Bird watchers around Florida’s Cape Canaveral boast each year of spotting more boat-tailed grackles, brown-headed nuthatches, yellow-shafted flickers and other species than any other group taking part in the National Audubon Society’s Christmas bird count. Last week they were joined by an eager band of sky gazers bent on observing some of the most awesome birds of passage the world has seen. Lured to the Cape by advance tips that some of the promising missiles in the U.S. arsenal would be test-fired, 14 reporters and photographers stood a weeklong telescope watch over the launching sites at the Air Force Missile Test Center.

From the palmetto-dotted public beach that adjoins the launching sites, newsmen glimpsed test-firings of the 5,000-mile Navaho and the less complex Snark which superseded it, covered the first successful firing of the Air Force’s Thor (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). At week’s end the newsmen were standing by for the biggest bird of all, the second attempt to launch the 5,000-mile ICBM Atlas.

Espionage with a Conscience. Cape Canaveral has become one of the world’s most important news sources. It is also one of the most frustrating. To pierce a “total security” curtain that is even more tightly drawn than the cloak around the Atomic Energy Commission, missile-beat reporters from California to Canaveral are forced to cultivate what one of that band calls an “espionage system with a conscience.” Some reporters estimate that a good 10% of the missile information that is leaked to them would materially aid Soviet missilemen if printed. But the Pentagon’s security regulations are designed to keep even the most innocuous news from the missile-beat reporters.

Last week, for example, there was no advance notice of the launchings from the Pentagon or the test center’s headquarters at Patrick Air Force Base. Beyond the standard communiqué, “A missile has been fired,” newsmen got not a shred of official information on the tests. As late as last week, not even last June’s abortive Atlas launching had been confirmed, though newsmen have long known many hush-hush details of its performance.

Beneath the Skin. Visiting newsmen at the Cape last week got their basic information on the missile-beat regulars—the half-dozen Florida missile buffs who call themselves bird watchers and profit from their pastime as year-round string correspondents for wire services, magazines, a few dailies and the TV networks. Though Defense Secretary Wilson has long promised to take newsmen on a chaperoned tour of the test center, about the only outsiders who have been allowed inside the gate have been local politicians. However, the Air Force has not yet restricted picture taking from the nearby public beaches; nor do news pictures imperil security, since the most vital secrets of a missile are locked in its guidance box, deep in the bird’s skin.

Frustrated reporters thus are forced to get their stories from partisan sources, such as the Air Force officer who is anxious to build up an Air Force bird and blow down its Army rival. Says Edwin Rees, TIME’sarmed forces correspondent in Washington: “Covering the missile beat is like covering a baseball team without being allowed to watch the game, talk to the players or the coach. Occasionally the front office slips you the score in an isolated inning or the details of a rare rally. From these crumbs, plus whatever information you can get from loose-mouths or disgruntled players whose options have been dropped, you are supposed to find out the standing of the teams and the winning pitchers and the leading batters.” Missile coverage as a result is generally inadequate, sometimes inaccurate, often inane. Pentagon officers, however anxious to put press relations on a realistic basis, point helplessly to the White House. Behind present security policy, they explain, is President Eisenhower’s deep reluctance to brandish the space weapon. Newsmen hoped nevertheless that the scare headlines over Khrushchev’s boasts of Russia’s intercontinental missile last fortnight might spur Ike to lower the security curtain—at least enough for the press to cover accurately the most crucial technological race in the free world’s history.