Titan Turnkey

A case of bizarre bargaining?

As deputy commander of a four-man Titan II missile-firing crew, 2nd Lieut. Christopher Cooke had little to do but wait for a day the world hopes will never come: when he and his superior would each turn two keys, one to open a box containing codes that would tell them whether higher orders to fire the doomsday weapon were valid, the other to trigger the missile's flight. Standing 24-hr, watches about twice a week in a silo 65 ft. below the Kansas crop lands, the officer led a life of unrelieved tedium. One day he thought of something else to do.

According to the FBI, Cooke walked into the Soviet embassy three times in broad daylight -- twice last December and once in May. An FBI camera caught him on one of the December visits, but agents were unable to identify him until March. The FBI then alerted the Air Force security branch, which arrested Cooke after his May contact with the Soviets. His Air Force superiors evidently reasoned that it was less important to punish him than to find out what, if any, secrets he had divulged. So they offered him immunity from prosecution in return for his full story.

Cooke said that he had given Soviet officials some information about the codes used to order the firing of the Titans, according to FBI investigators. The Air Force promptly changed the codes and charged Cooke with failing to report his meetings with Communist officials, a violation of military regulations. But Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, angry at both the Air Force and the Justice Department over that lenient treatment, telephoned Attorney General William French Smith to ask that criminal prosecution of Cooke be studied.

Smith agreed. Said a Pentagon aide: "Weinberger found it simply inconceivable that an Air Force officer could betray strategic weapons secrets and get away with just a slap on the wrist."

Still, that hasty immunity grant will make it difficult to convict Cooke of any federal crime. So far, both military and FBI investigators seem convinced that Cooke, who had written his master's thesis at the College of William and Mary on nuclear weapons, and had twice been rejected for a job with the CIA, was merely trying to trade information with the Soviets in hopes of enhancing his self-image as a strategic weapons wizard. The case, said one investigator, is "bizarre."

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