Check Your Facts: Cox Report Bombs

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 9, 1999 | by Sam Cohen

The U.S. ICBM program has not been my area of expertise. However, from its very inception in the early 1950s I was aware of the program and contributed to the decision to get it under way. What I am getting to is the Cox report's account of Qian Xuesan in chapter 4. Qian Xuesen was a rocket scientist, born in China in 1911, who left in 1935 during the Japanese occupation to come to America, where he received a Ph.D. from Cal Tech and where he became one of the foremost experts on rocket propulsion. During the early 1950s, he came under suspicion that he was a PRC spy, the report says. His security clearances were removed, and in 1955 he returned to China, where he joined its long-range ballistic-missile program. So great were his contributions that, according to Cox, he was known as the "father of the PRC's ballistic-missile force." Indeed, the report goes on, "based on his rocket work at California Institute of Technology, Qian was recruited to join the U.S. Army Air Force in developing its long-range missile programs. Commissioned a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Force, he eventually began working on the Titan intercontinental ballistic missile."

There are a few problems with this story. First -- and this may seem like nit-picking -- there was no U.S. Army Air Force at that time. During World War II, there was a U.S. Army Air Corps, in which I, as a humble private, not a colonel, received my basic training. Toward the end of the war, the Corps was renamed the U.S. Army Air Force. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Air Force, rising on the great prominence and esteem attached to military air power, was renamed the U.S. Air Force and became a third branch of America's military forces. It was the Air Force, as a separate branch, that developed our ICBMs. The distortion of detail may seem like an innocent mistake, but it is highly indicative of the just plain sloppiness behind the composing and writing of the Cox report. Was this report ever seriously reviewed by knowledgeable national-security agencies?

As for "Colonel" Qian, no such person ever was a member of the U.S. Air Force, much less a colonel, nor did said person ever work on the Titan program. I verified this fact by checking with an old friend, the first director of the Titan project. The Titan was a highly classified project which was initiated in 1954, about the time Qian's security clearances had been withdrawn; indeed, his departure to China then was imminent.

The account given by the Cox report is worse than sloppy. It is inexcusable from a congressional select committee.