The Big Assawoman Bay NASA launch is John Kiriakou’s account of a CIA-organized outing early in his career. As a junior analyst, he and roughly eight colleagues were driven by van — a roughly 3.5-hour trip — to watch a NASA rocket launch at a site near the village of “Big Assawoman,” on a bay of the same name on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.[1]
Kiriakou recalls being unsettled to find officials from the Russian, French, British, Ukrainian and Australian space agencies present at the site with no apparent supervision, worrying the group would have to report the contact with a Russian government official to security back at headquarters. A NASA scientist told him to relax: “Literally everything we do is unclassified” — the rationale being that space research, shared openly among nations, yields medical and engineering breakthroughs for everyone.[2]