THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 4, 1995 TAG: 9503040457
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JACK DORSEY AND DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITERS
LENGTH: Medium: 54 lines
A senior military official on Friday defended his decision to block media coverage of Navy tests of a new ballistic missile defense system.
``We are going to try it again this weekend, and I've blacked it out,'' said Army Lt. Gen. Malcolm R. O'Neill, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. ``Because I don't want people to be there in the muck and the rain at 3 in the morning and have absolutely nothing happen.''
In an interview with reporters and editors of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, O'Neill made plain his ire with Navy officials who last month invited coverage of their ``star wars'' development efforts.
``I don't want to get people's expectations up before they should be gotten up,'' he said. ``What I told the people I would do is I would invite everybody to the third successful test . . .
``This program has put up with a lot of accusations about our integrity and everything else, and I am not going to subject my people to the kinds of things that happened early in the program because some young officer or some young civil servant said it will happen - it will work.
``Then when it doesn't work, some Boston Globe or New York Times or whoever jumps in and says: `lack of integrity, they lied to us, they told us it would work, phony tests,' et cetera, et cetera.''
A Navy spokesman, Cmdr. Steve Pietropaoli, said the service allowed reporters to witness the test because ``the press knew it was taking place and we felt it would build greater confidence in the integrity of the program if they were permitted to see what was happening as it happened.''
The Navy spokesman also took exception to O'Neill's complaint that the initial decision to permit coverage ``was not coordinated'' and was handled by ``some guys on my staff working with some guys in Navy public affairs who thought it was an F-18 flyby.''
``There was never any confusion on the part of the Navy officials involved in this effort about what this experiment was,'' Pietropaoli said. And the decision to permit coverage ``was fully coordinated'' with O'Neill's organization and the Defense Department, he said.
For the test, the Navy has modified a Terrier rocket by adding a third stage and a special projectile developed to track and destroy an attacking missile. Two at-sea test attempts last month were scrubbed because of tracking problems.
The Navy plans to try the system today by firing a ``target'' rocket from NASA's Wallops Island on the Eastern Shore and then launching the interceptor from the cruiser Richmond K. Turner off Carolina. If the test works, the LEAP interceptor (for Light Exoatmospheric Projectile) will smash the attacker about 80 miles above the Atlantic, disintegrating both vehicles. by CNB