Retired Air Force General Lew Allen Jr, who led the mammoth National Security Agency (NSA) through a period when congressional scrutiny brought its domestic eavesdropping activities out of the shadows and who later became director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), has died. He was 84.
Allen died on Monday in Potomac Falls, Virginia, according to a NASA statement.
A cause of death was not given.
Allen was the first JPL director hired from the outside after a long career in the military and as a spy chief.
In 1973, then-US president Nixon appointed Allen director of the NSA, at the time a little-known agency responsible for electronic intelligence gathering.
Two years later, testifying before a Senate committee, Allen acknowledged that, at the request of other agencies, the NSA had intercepted the phone calls of Americans. As a result of the hearings, Congress in 1978 passed an act that established a secret court responsible for issuing warrants for domestic wiretapping.
Allen later became Air Force chief of staff in 1978, retiring from the service in 1982 as a four-star general.
During his tenure at JPL from 1982 to 1990, he saw the budget for planetary science rebound from an all-time low. He presided over important robotic space missions including the launches of the Magellan spacecraft to Venus and the Galileo mission to Jupiter. He also oversaw the Voyager 2 flybys of Uranus and Neptune and the completion of a sky survey by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite.
A champion of technology, Allen invested money into research and development projects that eventually allowed scientists to study planets around other stars, current JPL director Charles Elachi said.
“He was one of the most visionary people I have ever met, always thinking 10 to 15 years downstream,” Elachi said.
Born in Miami in 1925, Allen attended West Point and joined the Air Force in 1946, flying bombers out of Carswell Air Force Base in Texas. While an Air Force officer, Allen earned a PhD in nuclear physics from the University of Illinois in 1954.
Funeral arrangements were incomplete. Burial will be at Arlington National Cemetery.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS