Cloak & Geiger Man

The most vital piece of intelligence since World War II was the report laid on President Truman's desk on Sept. 23, 1949, stating that the Russians had exploded their first atomic bomb. The report was the handiwork of no secret agent but a highly secret, highly effective U.S. detection system sensitive enough to pick up traces of important Soviet land or air bursts. For the first time the name of the hero of the system slipped into public print last week, when President Eisenhower presented a Distinguished Federal Civilian Service Award to Atomic Detective Doyle L. (for Langdon) Northrup.*

Short (5 ft. 5 in.), spectacled Scientist Northrup is an avid detective-story reader but hardly a storybook detective himself. A onetime Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher, he joined the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in 1940, was in Honolulu Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese began dropping bombs on Pearl Harbor. Dodging flak showers, Civilian Northrup dashed to the burning Navy Yard, helped put out submarine-detection devices from a patrol boat in pitching seas. In 1948, when Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss persuaded the Administration to establish an atomic-detection unit, selfless Scientist Northrup was borrowed by the Air Force, named technical director of something called AFOAT-1, a special project of the Air Force Office of Atomic Energy so secret that his bosses refused to say they knew him.

As chief of AFOAT-1, Northrup built a detective force that correlated data from delicate seismographs and from patrol weather planes scooping up radioactive dust over the Pacific (prevailing winds carried Russian bomb particles eastward) for rapid analysis and report. Last week, at award time, Doyle Northrup (who holds a highly select, open-salary PL 313 civil service rating) was in Geneva as a delegate to the three-power conferences on nuclear detection. In his stead, wife Sybil went to the White House, came home with a clearer understanding of why, since 1948, Cloak and Geiger Man Northrup has occasionally been routed out of bed at 3 a.m. to sort the clues of a high-stakes international mystery.

* Other award winners: Missile Expert Wernher von Braun (TIME Cover, Feb. 17), Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert D. Murphy (TIME Cover, Aug. 25), Bureau of Prisons Director James V. Bennett, and Hazel K. Stiebeling, the Agriculture Department's Home Economics Institute director.

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