Aerospace Exec’s Book a ‘Scintillating’ Tell-All

Albert Wheelon, former Los Angeles aerospace executive and onetime CIA technology chief, has written a tell-all book, but not the sort likely to create much controversy.

In a research effort that spanned more than a decade, Wheelon has published the first of at least two technical volumes on electromagnetic scintillation, the phenomenon that causes stars to twinkle.

Not exactly light summertime reading, Wheelon’s 455-page book is filled with mathematical equations and charts. It is among the most definitive examinations of how Earth’s atmosphere distorts waves of light, vital to developing more accurate telescopes, radars, lasers and even satellite-based global positioning systems.

Wheelon, who holds a doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is credited with building the former Hughes Aircraft Co. into the global leader in commercial satellites. The satellite operations, headquartered in El Segundo, are now owned by Boeing Co. He earlier was technical director of the CIA, where he helped pioneer the agency’s development of advanced spy satellites.

After Wheelon’s retirement in 1988, he elected to eschew golf and travel in favor of renewing his research into radio physics and space technology.

“I found a number of loose ends and apparent conflicts,” Wheelon said.

The book, “Electromagnetic Scintillation, Geometrical Optics” (Cambridge University Press, 2001), is intended as a handbook for researchers. The book’s preface gives credit to Valerian Tatarskii, a former Russian scientist who once worked in the field behind the Iron Curtain.

Of course, it’s not unusual for former chief executives to write books, but they are typically ego-boosting autobiographies or primers on how to run a company. Rarely do former executives spend so much time on what could be described only as an egghead’s dream.

Wheelon, who now lives in Santa Barbara, is working on a second volume, and the publisher has been asking him to write a third.

Because of his wife’s illness, Wheelon said he probably won’t work on a third volume, although he said the writing has “been one of the more joyous parts of my life.”