Unknown to NASA itself, the Center for an Informed America (CIA) had installed wiretaps in the offices of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, right around the time of the Watergate affair. There was a tiny microphone tucked away and held in place in the ceiling of the office of Administrator Richard Truly. They used Velcro.
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Date: July 20, 1994, 9:00 AM
Meeting participants: Richard Truly, NASA Administrator, James Jesus Engle, Deputy Administrator, Carl Severinsen (Doc), Press Secretary, William Gates III, Deputy Assistant
Truly: Gentlemen, before we start, and I offer refreshments? Coffee? Would anyone care for some Tang? OK, then. I called this meeting today because of some troubling news from our deputy, Mr. Gates. Bill, do you want to bring us up to speed?
Gates: Well, I don’t think it will ever amount to much, or at least I’ve stayed away from the meetings, but my staffers are telling me that things are bubbling, so to speak, and a thing called Innertube is beginning to take hold of the communications system. Again, I’m pretty sure it’s a non starter, but I did brief Dick Truly this morning, and he saw cause for concern.
Engle: Innertubes? Don’t you mean Internet, Bill?
Gates: Right, Internet. Anyway, this Internet is a way of communicating by sending pictures over electric wires. And the funny thing is, anything can be a picture, even printed words. So I could sit down at my desk right now and type a message, and send it to all of you, and you’d get it and I’d never be able to get it back. I can send it to anyone who is hooked up.
Truly: As I told Bill, I don’t see a problem with that. Hell, I send out memos every day and people sign off on them. But this Internet thing is different.
Gates: Well, that’s why I brought my assistant today, Jim Engle. He’s a little bit more up to speed.
Engle: Right, gentlemen. We’ve been looking at this system, this Internet, and we think it might be something hard to control. For instance, I could send to all of you a photo of Hillary Clinton, naked as a jay bird, and she could not stop it from going out, and even President Clinton himself could not prevent it from spreading around. And, once it goes out, you can never get it back!
Severinsen: That’s a little disturbing, Jim. But you see, gentlemen, we might have a problem, you know, with this Moon business. Just in this room, no one says a word, like always, but we want to get ahead of this thing.
Truly: How do we do that?
Severinsen: Photos, Dick. Photos of our guys on the Moon.
Truly: We don’t have any.
Severinsen: I know, Dick. That’s the problem. But we still have that mockup out there in the desert, that big frickin’ warehouse where we shot the landing. We could dust it off, get some guys in space suits, and take some photos now. You know, spruce them up. Say we’ve had them all along, but access was limited to historians and journalists.
Engle: That’s a problem, Doc. We have the space suits and all of that stuff, The lander is still there, hell, we even have a buggy just sitting there. But the astronauts, they’ve all aged twenty-five years. They’ve gained weight, their faces are different. They look twenty-five years older!
Gates: How about this – we do this sometimes with perfume when we sell it. We put gold leaf film over the bottle to make it seem expensive, and so you can’t see the inside. It’s just some amber colored spray. We could spray the visors on the space suits so no one can see inside. We’ll say it’s Armstrong and Buzz. Who’s gonna know?
Truly: Sounds good, Billy, but I see another problem here, guys. Stars. It’s just a big warehouse. There’s no stars visible. We can’t paint them on the ceiling or hang them from the rafters like a high school homecoming. And, people are gonna want to see how the Earth looks from the Moon. How are we going to fake that?
Engle: Worse yet, you’ve got all those goddamned amateur astronomers, and real ones too, and those shitheads will look at them and tells us they are in the wrong place! We’re NASA, fer chrissakes! We’re supposed to know where the stars are located.
Severinsen: How about this: We say that the cameras the guys used, the Hasslebocks …
Truly: Hasselblads, Doc. Hasselblads.
Severinsen: Whatever. We’ll say they had to be adjusted because of glaring sunlight, and the exposures could only pick up surface features. No stars.
Gates: Do you think people will buy that?
Severinsen: We’re NASA. We can sell it. I’ll get the guys down in the press room start writing up the official story of the landing and return, and have them fill in details like that. I have some good writers down there. Also, they’ve got this writing system they use in Star Trek, you know the TV shows, where the writers do the dialogue and the plot, but when it comes time to talk about space ships and space travel and equipment and science, they have a couple of other writers they send it to, and they leave it blank and have other writers fill in what they call “techspeak”. It’s gobbledygook like warp drive, flux capacitors, tractor beams, that sort of thing. They turn out a nice product. So can we.
Truly: OK. Get them on it, Doc. Time is a factor here. Can we get a photo crew up in the next couple of months to do shoot in Arizona? Get all the NDAs lined up? And then, I’ll make some phone calls, but maybe we can run them by our friends in Hollywood to spruce them up.
Gates: OK, here’s a problem too. Supposedly we sent seven missions out there, you know, the one flubbed. To do that sort of thing requires records, you know, magnetic tape of the TV footage and the dialogue and all of that. Hell, we had 50 display computer monitors with guys in white shirts and ties supposedly tracking everything. We don’t have anything like that!
Severinsen: I got this covered. We’re NASA. We can sell it. Make up a number, any number, preferably a big one.
Engle: 6,000.
Severinsen: Think big, Jim, bigger!
Engle: 33,000.
Severinsen: Don’t get cute, Jim.
Gates: 14,304.
Severinsen: I like this guy! Now you’re getting it! But that’s too specific. Let’s use 14,000.
Engle: 14,000 what?
Severinsen: Think, guys, Think! We’re NASA. What do we do? Moon landings. We keep records of everything! Magnetic tapes, gentlemen, Magnetic tapes. Every detail of the Moon landings is on those tapes.
Truly: We don’t have 14,000 tapes. We don’t have any!
Severinsen: That’s because we lost them, Dick! We lost them!
Gates: What the … who’s gonna believe that?
Severinsen: We’re NASA. Everyone will believe us!
Gates: It’s hard to lose that many tapes.
Severinsen: Think, gentlemen, think! NASA does not lose tapes. We are in the business of saving taxpayer dollars. We reused the tapes! We wrote over the old data. We didn’t think we’d need it again. We’ll say we put it all down on paper anyway.
Gates: What if someone wants to see the paperwork?
Severinsen: We’ll stonewall them. Humidity problems, too dry here in Texas, stored in Minnesota in humidity-controlled vaults. Shit like that. We can hold off most of them, and then let a couple of our guys in on the business see them. Maybe Rather, maybe even Cronkite. They’re good soldiers.
Truly: Fucking brilliant! That I can sell.
Severinsen: Also, Hollywood is interested in the Moon stuff, and I think thirteen might be a good show. Maybe we can get Redford or Newman to act it out. That’s another topic, but movies sell more than popcorn. They sell ideas too.
Truly: OK, we’re going to power up the warehouse out in New Mexico, hire the camera crew and the actors, get the NDA’s, and shoot some lunar photos. We’re going to announce that all of the data saved on tapes was lost. We are going to be ready when the Innertubes, I mean, when the Internet is up and running. We’ll get our people lined up. Doc, are you on it?
Severinsen: On it!
Truly: Good. Gentlemen, we’ll meet every Thursday at noon right here. We’ll bring new hands as we need them in to sell this thing on the fine points, Van Allen, radiation, all that shit. We can sell it. We’re NASA.
Gates: OK, I’m aboard. But I still don’t think this Internet thing is going anywhere. I think it’s a dud.*
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*”As late as about 1994, people like say, Bill Gates, had no interest in the Internet. He wouldn’t even go to conferences about it, because he didn’t see a way to make a profit from it.” (Noam Chomsky, interview with Corpwatch, May, 1998)
Piece of Mindful 