Executive Office of the PresidentPDFTier 2 · Documented firsthand report
Memorandum on Interagency Coordination for the Recovery of Foreign Materiel, May 1963
EOP-UAP-D002 · Release 07 (10/23)
Agency
Executive Office of the President
Document type
PDF
Location
Washington, D.C. (United States)
Incident date
5/29/63
Release
Release 07 (10/23)
Evidence tier
Tier 2 · Documented firsthand report
What the document says
This document is an internal National Aeronautics and Space Council (NASC) memorandum from staff member R.W. Hale to Executive Secretary Edward C. Welsh. NASC was a 1958–1973 body within the Executive Office of the President responsible at the time for coordinating U.S. space policy. The memorandum records a May 28, 1963, meeting with Arnold Frutkin, Director of International Programs at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), concerning the development of a coordinated interagency policy for recovering reentering U.S. and Soviet space debris and satellite fragments that might land on foreign soil. This memorandum is associated with a larger body of interagency correspondence included in this collection under the title “USG-UAP-D002.”
The memorandum highlights an interagency policy debate over organizational jurisdiction during the early Space Race. It states that the Department of State and Department of War sought to leverage NASA’s standing as a civilian scientific agency to help facilitate discreet recovery of sensitive space hardware while publicly returning non-sensitive components to the country of origin. As described in the memorandum, the proposed arrangement would have served several purposes: enabling access to adversary technologies, protecting U.S. technologies, preserving diplomatic goodwill, and obscuring the intelligence gathering dimension of technology recovery operations. The memorandum also presents Director Frutkin’s reaction to the proposed arrangement as “very negative.”
Auto-extracted from the original PDF · may contain extraction artifacts. The source document above is authoritative.
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Authority:
NND 968063
May 29, 1963
MEMORANDUM FOR DR. WELSH
Subject:
Conference with Frutkin - - Fragments
I saw Frutkin (and his assistant Marvin Robinson) for more than
an hour in his office on May 28. It was necessary to review the
background and course of the meetings held last year because he
was away at the time and now is very negative on the project.
Frutkin seems to feel that:
1. No public announcement is now needed;
2. An Executive Order or statement from the White House
would scare people needlessly;
3. The problem is overseas and State woul d like to be able
to point to NASA as the U. S . responsible agency (without a scary
public announcement);
4. DOD and AF want to use NASA for a "cover" but have no
intention of letting NASA do anything but return some pieces;
5. CIA and NASA get along fine and can do so in the future
on this matter;
6. NASA should wait to see what the USIB settles on (and
would like to have us pass Frutkin' s comments on the DOD
paper to AEC (at staff levels for information); and
7. Although NASA was drafting legislation, they (legal?)
would oppose sending anything up to Congress in the foreseeable
future because of the harmful debate it would touch off.
~~
R. W. Hal e
Context
This is one of 2 Executive Office of the President records in the declassified archive, reported in the United States region. It was published in Release 07 (10/23).
Evidence tiers describe the type of record (sensor capture vs. written report vs.
administrative file) · not a claim about its conclusions. UFO Papers reports only what the documents state.