Falcon (20 page)

Held aloft for the Air Force photographer, and swaddled and bound to prevent injury en route, they look as bemused as their uniformed couriers. Since 1956 falcons have been flown at Academy football games in half-time demonstrations of air- power dominance. The usafa website explains how falcons characterize the combat role of the us Air Force: they are fast and ‘manoeuvre with ease, grace and evident enjoyment’. Courageous, fearless and aggressive, they ‘fiercely defend their nest and young against intruders. They have been known to unhesitatingly attack and kill prey more than twice their size.’ And of course, along with their keen eyesight, they are marked by their ‘alertness, regal carriage and noble tradition’.
¹⁹
With a nod to Tom Wolfe, us military falcons are The Right Stuff.

Behind the scenes, Air Force Academy personnel stare intrigued into a box containing

a new mascot falcon.

Left to right: Chief of Staff of the
us
Air Force Academy Col. R. R. Gideon, Academy Super- intendent Lieut. Gen. H. R.

Harmon (holding ‘Mach
I
’) and Harold Webster, falconer.

hungry and mr galileo

With almost inevitable logic, usaf falcons have made it to the moon. In July 1971, standing by Apollo 15’s Falcon landing module, Commander David Scott grasped a feather from a usafa mascot prairie falcon called ‘Hungry’ in one gloved hand and a geological hammer in the other. Unrecorded by stills camera, this episode exists only as blurred video footage, a strange, charged mix of science and popular entertainment. Scott’s voice breaks enthusiastically through the white noise of the lunar transmission:

One of the reasons we got here today was because of a gentleman named Galileo a long time ago, who made a rather significant discovery about falling objects in gravity fields . . . The feather happens to be appropriately a falcon feather, for our
Falcon
, and I’ll drop the two here, and hopefully they’ll hit the ground at the same time . . .
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They fall in tandem to the surface of the moon. Pause. ‘This proves that Mr Galileo was correct in his findings’, Scott announces. Wondrous symbolism: rather than a hammer and sickle, here is a hammer and an American falcon feather, bathed in stark sunshine through an auratic haze of lunar dust. Scott’s recapitulation of a crucial experiment is broad- cast as the summation of science’s triumph in the conquest of space – America claiming the right to prove the laws of nature. And training a hawk can prove one’s patriotism, too. ‘In the final analysis’, cadet falconer Cadet Peterson explains earnestly, the us Air Force Academy’s falcons ‘don’t have to impress us, we’ve got to prove to them that we are worthy of their trust.’
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1

Fittingly for a bird so meshed with national and martial iconographies, twentieth-century falcon stories are rich with espionage. Sometimes it’s merely literary: in
The Hooded Hawk Mystery
, the Hardy Boys’ peregrine foils a gem-smuggling ring by slaying ruby-carrying racing pigeons. And Hasbro Toys’ 2000
Falcon Attak
[
sic
] Action Man comes with a natty fringed leather arm-brace and a surveilling cyber-falcon you can launch across the room. Sometimes it’s real, and just as peculiar. Back in 1940 a
New York Times
headline ran: ‘Hints At Goering Aim In Visiting Greenland: Ex-Air Corps Pilot Suspects A Purpose Beyond Falconry.’ Below it, Captain Meredith suggested that ‘now Germany has taken Denmark, considerable significance might be attached to the “falcon expedition” sent by Field Marshal Hermann Goering to Greenland in 1938’. ‘To be sure’, he remarked drily,

Lying on the moon, a prairie falcon’s curved flight feather and a geological hammer offer an all-American riposte to the Soviet hammer and sickle.

Field Marshal Goering is, like myself, an amateur falconer, but at a time when Germany was undergoing such eco- nomic and political changes one wonders why he would go to all the trouble and expense just to get six Gyrfalcons. five members of the expedition spent almost six months in Greenland, and during that time they could not have escaped a lot of general, and perhaps specific, observations.
²²

Strange symmetries existed: Goering and Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, commanders-in-chief of Luftwaffe and raf respectively, were keen falconers both. So was the most infam- ous American spy of the 1970s, Christopher Boyce. Boyce worked at us spy satellite manufacturer trw, where his extra- curricular activities included flying falcons in the California hills, making daiquiris in the top-secret-document shredder, and selling secret spy-satellite information to the Soviet Union under his
nom de plume
‘The Falcon’. Boyce was played by Timothy Hutton in John Schlesinger’s 1985 film
The Falcon and the Snowman.
Schlesinger leans heavily on the familiar falcon symbolism, bringing the camera in to linger on the dark eyes of the peregrine as fbi agents close in to arrest Boyce: grand motifs of freedom, infinite vision and mastery of the sky.

falcon 2020

But surely, one might ask, what about eagles? Wasn’t it an eagle that Roman centurions carried on their battle standards, the eagle on the seal of the United States, or the German and Austro-Hungarian flags? Agreed: but these eagles map to nation-states, not to modern war. Eagles are large, impressive, powerful. They connote old-fashioned styles of warfare: huge

armies, large-scale infantry movements and massive and delib- erate strength. Falcons, however, are small. They possess immense speed, mobility and range. Falcons, not eagles, are the iconic animals of post-modern, network-centric war, built on the concepts of global vision, surveillance, rapid deployment and lightning strike. They allow a naturalization of what cul- tural commentator Paul Virilio describes as ‘pure’ weapons, weapons whose destructive capability is a function not of their massive power, but ‘the rapidity and extreme precision of [their] delivery – and this as much in the sighting or surveil- lance of enemy movements as in the selectiveness and stealth of the strike’.
²³

In blue-sky documents such as
Joint Vision 2020
the us military dreams of future battlefields.
²⁴
A digitized world, a seamless integration of biological units – soldiers, pilots and so on – with high technology. Military superiority is built on know- ing where
everything
is, coupled with the ability to intervene in

near real-time. Drenched in the terminology of complexity and air-power theory, it is a dream somewhat sullied by recent events in Iraq; winning a battle is different from strategic victory. Built on speed and omniscience, c4isr is the preferred acronym for this metaphysical mix: Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. Such is the fearsome hunger of this dream of digitized war that these military networks extend beyond the merely human and beyond the exigencies of landscape to incorporate animals too.

The idea of incorporating wild animals into military surveil- lance networks for conservation ends was first mooted in America in 1966 at a nasa-sponsored wildlife conference. Speakers Frank and John Craighead were no longer excited teenage falconer-photographers: they were now eminent wildlife biologists and ex-field-intelligence operatives who’d written the

us Navy’s Second World War survival guide. Satellites could be used to track wildlife movements, they suggested. Perhaps one could integrate wildlife-tracking data with Landsat imagery or spy-photographs from the usaf/cia u-2 surveillance programme. Their paper was prescient.

One champion of the peregrine during the ddt years was

F. Prescott Ward, a falconer and chemical and biological warfare expert who worked as an ecologist at the us Army’s chemical weapons testing ground in Maryland. He helped the Peregrine Fund organize a spectacularly successful release of young peregrines from an old chemical-shell testing gantry. Swords to ploughshares. But Ward had bigger plans: a large-scale study of the migratory habits of the tundra peregrine. These beautiful, pale, diminutive peregrines congregated on east coast beaches on their way southwards in the fall. So tame you could practically walk up and touch them, they’d been trapped by falconers for years. Falconer trappers like Alva Nye and Jim Rice knew these falcons bred in the far north, and wintered in the south. But no one knew exactly where, or the routes they took. What had been a wistful conundrum in the 1930s and ’40s became an important question in the post- ddt era. For while ddt had been banned in the continental United States, it was still used further south. These migratory populations were still threatened.

And so Ward and his co-workers on the project trapped and banded migrating peregrines on the east coast; other falcon- minded researchers, like arctic specialist William Mattox, who was central in instigating the Greenland Peregrine Falcon Survey in 1972, banded falcons far further north. Others went south, hoping to spot wintering peregrines. Overall the project was as politically fascinating as it was biologically; it involved international agreements signed by the us/ussr Working Group on Wildlife, and White House staff joined the research team.