His father was a construction laborer at the Beacon Blanket Manufacturing Company, the epicenter of the Swannanoa community, and he wanted his son to start a career at the mill.
[2] With a good speaking voice, some musical talent, and a very persuasive nature, Duckett eventually found beginner employment at WMVA, a small station being established in Martinsville, Virginia.
[3] He also gained an elementary knowledge of radio electronics, and, to prepare for a better job, attended part-time for six months a course in this field at the nearby Danville Technical Institute.
In 1944, he was a member of a team sent to England to advise on the use of Westinghouse SCR-584 radar equipment for V-1 ‘buzz bomb’ defense, and stayed as a field engineer during the Normandy invasion.
As a radar specialist, he rapidly advanced from Private to Master Sergeant, with assignments that included the Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab) at MIT, the Pacific Theater of Operations, and the White Sands Proving Grounds (WSPG) in New Mexico.
He also received a First-Class Commercial Radiotelephone License from the Federal Communications Commission, making him eligible for higher positions in this field, and joined in establishing radio station WBOB in Galax, Virginia.
[4] Highly aggressive in these activities, he was one of the founders of a Virginia-wide association of news broadcasters (1949)[5] and represented Virginia radio stations in a meeting with President Harry S. Truman (1950).
The team of German scientists and engineers under Wernher von Braun, initially brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip, had worked at Fort Bliss, Texas, and tested their missiles at nearby WSPG.
In July 1956, Duckett accepted a civil service position with the ABMA, joining the Guidance and Control Laboratory as a telemetry specialist and serving as a Scientific Advisor to the Commanding Officer, Major General John B.
[8] In the mid-1950s, the National Security Agency (NSA) set up a listening station near the coastal town of Sinop, Turkey, directly across the Black Sea from the Kapustin Yar range, where the Soviets were testing medium-range missiles.
In early 1957, it became known that the Soviet Union was testing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at their Tyuratam range and soon a listening station was opened by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at Behshahr in northeast Iran, some 1,000 miles (1,600 km) across the Caspian Sea.
The U.S. Air Force and the CIA assembled a highly secret Telemetry and Beacon Analysis Committee (TABAC) to analyze the signals recorded from the launch at Tyuratam and those heard all over the world from Sputnik.
President John F. Kennedy imposed a military blockade of Cuba, and the confrontation ended on October 28, 1962, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the offensive missiles and return them to the USSR.
Some of the Agency’s strategic consultants strongly suggested that more capability was needed in advancing the basic science and technology used both in collecting information and in predicting future actions of adversaries.
While Wheelon held a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and had earlier been a senior scientist at TRW, Duckett had no formal higher education and his only non-government experience was in small-town radio broadcasting.
Nevertheless, he was accepted as a leader by scientists and engineers; he was an excellent briefer, "turning technical data into laymanese," and was considered by many to be the Agency’s best "marketeer" in selling CIA programs to Congress.
With greater "sprint" speed (Mach 3.1), reduced radar cross-section, and capable of higher altitude (about 84,000 feet), the A-12 become operational in May 1967; at that time reconnaissance flights over North Vietnam were conducted out of Okinawa Island.
Duckett tasked Leslie C. Dirks, one of his most capable researchers, with assessing the present and projected technologies, and, with Edwin H. Land (inventor of the Polaroid Instant Camera and senior advisor to the CIA), preparing a plan for the replacement of CORONA.
The resulting plan was strongly opposed by the Air Force, but, after personally hearing arguments from both sides in 1971, President Richard Nixon approved Duckett’s approach.
The CIA also funded ELINT operations in Norway, both at a ground station in the far northeast near Kirkenes and on a converted whaling boat in the Barents Sea; these monitored Soviet radio communications and telemetry originating in northwest USSR.
Shortly after he became the Director of the DS&T, Wheelon had proposed using a geosynchronous satellite to relay very-high and ultra-high frequency (VHF and UHF) telemetry signals from Soviet test sites to CIA control stations.
In March 1969, newly elected President Richard Nixon announced to the public that he was authorizing the implementation of an anti-ballistic missile system, called Safeguard, to counter a potentially devastating Soviet threat.
At that time, there was a balance between the United States and the Soviet Union based on Mutual Assured Destruction; this assumed that a first strike could not eliminate the capability for retaliation.
The data, however, were not sufficient for the FMSAC to firmly determine if these were MIRVs or simply three warheads reentering in a row; this difference would have a major impact on their threat to the U.S. defense.
[25] In March 1968, a Soviet Golf class submarine imploded – generally believed to be while on the surface recharging its batteries – and sank in about 17,000 feet (5,200 m) of ocean some 1,700 miles (2,700 km) northwest of Hawaii.
There was great interest in attempting a recovery of items such as cipher machines, code manuals, communications equipment, and possibly a torpedo or even a nuclear warhead.
In October 1972, the TSD initiated the Biofield Measurements Program, to be conducted jointly with SRI, to determine whether participants (the viewers or percipients) could reliably identify and accurately describe salient features of remote locations or targets.
Duckett asked that this center on a description made by remote viewing of a target area in the Soviet Union that had been recently imaged by a satellite and suspected to be a nuclear test site.
He had retained top levels of security clearance and, through Intec, provided a number of aerospace industries with consulting services and analytical studies in technical intelligence and electronic warfare.
He continued working for Intec until early 1992, but died of lung cancer in a medical center at Newport News, Virginia, on April 1, 1992, and was buried in the Gwynn’s Island Cemetery near his farm.