John Clauson - Missileman: The Secret Life of Cold War Engineer Wallace Clauson

IF AMERICAN NOVELIST ALAN FURST had set his historical tales of intrigue at the dawn of the Cold War instead of World War II, one of the characters hurtling toward an unexpected destiny could have been my father, Wallace Clauson. By mundane chance (or was it divinely guided?) an eighth-grade math test propelled him from an Iowa farm to a world of high-tech military secrecy. For nearly fifty years, he kept it all hidden from his family and concealed his double life behind a fog of vague excuses, bland diary entries, hammer-and-nail work projects that he attacked with an obsessive fury, and a refusal to form social friendships.

We moved often, much to the displeasure of my mother, Marilyn, and he seemed to always be traveling for work sometimes months at a time with no contact or details of his whereabouts because of his sales job with IBM, selling computers. At least thats what he told my mother, my siblings, and me. Yes, his paychecks came with an IBM logo on the upper-right-hand corner. Yes, he was in IBM company photos and he received IBM employee Christmas gifts.

But his real job was with IBMs clandestine Federal Systems Group, which meant that he was really taking orders from the Department of Defense. As such, he was one of the genius mathematicians behind the most important developments in twentieth-century military technology. From radar systems to nuclear warheads, he was there to provide mathematical brainpower, and to make sure American nuclear missiles hit their targets if they were ever fired.

I learned this just two years before he died. Several years into retirement, my father called me to say he was coming across the country from Seattle to help me build a fence, one of his typical home-improvement projects, for the new three-acre home I had purchased for my family near Princeton, New Jersey. I soon found out his visit over those four days was less about the fence and more about finally telling the truth about his career.

At first glance, when he got off the plane in Philadelphia wearing his Mister Rogers cardigan, he was the same father Id always known. But during the drive home from the airport, as we drove through Philadelphia and Titusville, New Jersey, where I lived with my family in a fenceless house, he saw things interstate signs and old houses that triggered memories, and he believed some explanations were in order. He began to open up, pointing out places he remembered, their importance to national security, his role in the matter, and the other people involved. Dad and national security? What is he talking about? My dad had been a salesman his entire career or so I thought.

While I loved my father dearly, we had never been that close, mostly due to his frequent travels and his closed-off personality. So his unsolicited and rather surprising revelation rendered me speechless. In fact, I barely slept that night, replaying his voice over and over and wondering, Could it be true?

The next morning, we began to dig the holes for the fence posts. Once the tap opened, his story gushed forth, and he began downloading decades of details, spurred on by hours of manual labor. As the last of four children, and the second son, I wondered if hed told my older brother or anyone else in the family, for that matter. Did my mother know any of this? What about my sisters? On the other hand, I felt a sense of pride that he was entrusting me with his secrets if they were, in fact, secrets. Hed been diagnosed with cancer a few years before, and I couldnt help but wonder if it had returned, destructive cells somehow concocting a highly detailed fantasy world in Dads mind.

What my dad told me that weekend was shocking on many levels. Not only did I discover that he was one of the key men responsible for the development and installation of nuclear weapons, and that hed been living a lie for fifty years; it also put a new perspective on my childhood and teenage years. It made me realize that the reason we moved so often was because we were accompanying him around the United States and Europe on secret missions, not because he was switching sales territories. I now knew why he and my mother had few friends, and how necessary it was for him to find solace at church as he did every Sunday. And it accounted for the fact that he always seemed to know so much about my day-to-day activities even though he wasnt present because at times there was a government detail following me everywhere I went.

Moreover, the stories my father told me revealed the secret operations of the U.S. government, and gave me an inside view on the politics, alliances, and personalities of the Cold War period. I marveled at his associations, legends such as Einstein and Fermi and von Neumann and Atanasoff.

I was now privy to the fact that in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis was much more serious than the American public was originally led to believe. And in the mid-1980s, the United States had come extremely close to nuclear war with the Soviet Union and that we were saved from that fate by a random but timely stroke of very good luck.

I now understood why he had paced through our home on countless sleepless nights under unbelievable stress; he knew that one missed calculation could lead to total disaster for the human race.

It explained why he was often reluctant to become involved in my life, whether that meant holding back on coaching Little League teams or avoiding school performances because no stranger could ever be trusted.