As a communications denial analyst, Regan also had a role to play in jamming communications between Iraqi commanders and their military units, leaving Iraqi fighters with no link to their decision-making nerve centers. By analyzing radar signals and other communications, Regan and analysts with expertise similar to his mapped out the locations of Iraqi air defense systems, including where the Iraqis were positioning their mobile surface-to-air missiles.
For five weeks, a coalition led by the U.S. military carried out a relentless campaign of air strikes over Iraq, bombing military installations and other targets. Saddam Hussein’s forces were so weakened by the assault that when U.S. soldiers began a ground offensive on February 24, 1991, it took less than a week to expel the Iraqi army from Kuwait and make an incursion well into Iraq. Only forty-four days after Operation Desert Storm had begun, coalition forces achieved a decisive triumph. There was no doubt that the United States’ sophisticated signals intelligence capability, which enabled the coalition to conduct an effective air campaign, had been a key contributor to the relatively easy and resounding victory.
All these years, Regan had helped produce intelligence that fed into strategic decision making and war readiness. Now, for the first time, he had been able to experience the adrenaline rush of contributing to a real-time campaign in which the lives of U.S. soldiers and airmen were at stake. He hadn’t been in the heat of battle, but he had played a role in keeping his fellow servicemen and servicewomen safe.
That sense of fulfillment deepened for Regan in the two years that followed, during which time he worked with the Air Force Intelligence Support Agency at the Pentagon. His analysis was now aimed at helping to enforce the two no-fly zones that the U.S.-led coalition had imposed over northern and southern Iraq following Desert Storm, to prevent Iraqi aircraft from bombing the Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south. Regan’s job was to use signals analysis to monitor the mobilization of Iraqi air defense systems, which could threaten coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones and permit the Iraqi air force to make incursions into that space.
Regan’s star was on the ascendant. In 1993, he was promoted to master sergeant, and the Air Force awarded him a medal for outstanding leadership. In mid-1994, he was sent to the Joint Military Intelligence College to train for his next job, in an agency that for decades had kept itself completely hidden from the public: the National Reconnaissance Office.
CHAPTER 4
A DESPERATE PLAN
The last thing Francis Gary Powers saw, just before the face shield of his helmet frosted over in the icy atmosphere above the clouds, was the rearview mirror of the U-2 snapping off and flying away. Moments earlier, the thirty-year-old American pilot of the CIA reconnaissance airplane had felt the craft jerk forward as the orange glow of an explosion lit up the cockpit. A missile fired at the U-2 had detonated behind the airplane. Within seconds, Powers knew he had lost control of the craft. Spinning, it plummeted down over the town of Sverdlovsk Oblast near the Ural mountain range in the southwestern Soviet Union.
The day was May 1, 1960. For four years, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had been flying reconnaissance missions over the USSR, taking photographs of airfields and missile sites from an altitude of seventy thousand feet—tens of thousands of feet higher than any other type of aircraft could fly. The United States had begun this program of high-altitude spying after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev rejected President Dwight Eisenhower’s proposal for an “open skies” treaty, under which the United States and the USSR would have given each other permission to conduct aerial surveillance of each other’s military installations to verify that the two countries were complying with arms control agreements. Although the Soviet Union knew about the overflight program, the CIA was positive that Soviet radar couldn’t track the movement of the U-2s. In what constituted further assurance for the United States, the highest-known altitude that the best Soviet interceptor, the MiG-17 fighter aircraft, could reach was forty-five thousand feet.
The May 1 overflight, named Operation Grand Slam, was the most ambitious reconnaissance mission to have been planned since the U-2 program began. Unlike the twenty-three missions that had been flown before, all of which had entered and exited Soviet airspace from the same direction, this one was to traverse the length of the country from its southern border to the northwest. Powers took off from an Air Force base in Peshawar, Pakistan, and flew northwest, crossing Afghanistan to enter the USSR, flying on toward Tyuratam, just east of the Aral Sea, and then onward to the Ural Mountains. From there, he was to take a sharp left turn toward Kirov and then head north again, flying over Severodvinsk and Murmansk before landing in Bodø, Norway.
But now, four and a half hours into the flight, Powers was in rapid descent, having ejected himself from the U-2 after its dismemberment by the missile strike. Contrary to what the Americans had believed, Soviet radar had, in fact, been able to track the airplane successfully. When Powers had come down to below an altitude of fifteen thousand feet, his parachute unfurled above him, yanking his body up as it halted his fall. Drifting down, he pulled out a map from his pocket, tore it up into tiny pieces, and scattered it like confetti—destroying any evidence that might reveal that he was on an intelligence-gathering mission.
Powers gazed down at the picturesque Russian countryside below, its hills and forests and roads and buildings growing sharper in definition with his descent. He pulled out a silver dollar that the CIA had given to him and all U-2 pilots to carry on missions. It wasn’t really a dollar but a carrying case for a pin laced with curare—a suicide device to be used in dire circumstances. Worried that a shiny dollar would be a tempting souvenir for his Russian captors, Powers unscrewed the metal loop at the end of it, took out the pin—which was covered in a sheath—and slipped it into his pocket before throwing the dollar away.
He considered whether to use the poison pin as a way of ending the uncertainty that lay before him. But hopeful that he might escape, he dismissed the idea.
What awaited Powers was a two-year ordeal that he would later recount in Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident. After landing in a plowed field, he was handed over to the authorities and thrown in jail. The U.S. government, assuming that Powers had died in a crash, issued a cover story about one of its weather planes having gone off course. But the pieces of the U-2, along with much of the reconnaissance equipment it was carrying, had been recovered by the Soviets, and Khrushchev took delight in disproving the United States’ claim to the world days later.
On August 17, 1960, a Soviet court convicted Powers on charges of espionage and handed down a ten-year sentence. Luckily for Powers, his jail term was cut short by a prisoner exchange in 1962 between the two superpowers. Powers and another American imprisoned in the USSR were released in exchange for a Soviet spy who had been sentenced in the United States.
The downing of the U-2 and the capture of Powers forced the CIA to stop overflights of the Soviet Union. Yet America’s need for continued aerial surveillance over the vast territory of its Cold War rival was even greater on account of the Soviet Union’s successful 1957 launch of Sputnik 1. Not only had the launch demonstrated the Soviets’ technological edge over the United States; it had also raised fears that the USSR might be able to aim nuclear warheads at the continental United States, using the same rocket that had catapulted Sputnik 1 into orbit. Consequently, it was vital for the United States to find an alternate way of gathering intelligence about the USSR’s military capabilities and preparedness.
The Eisenhower administration had been quietly working on a solution that some officials saw as overly ambitious and perhaps impractical: the ability to conduct surveillance from space. The capture of Francis Gary Powers gave an added impetus to the effort. By the time Powers returned home in February 1962, the United States had become adept at deploying spy satellites in orbit for the purposes of reconnaissance. The capability would give the United States
an unprecedented strategic and military advantage over its adversaries in the years to come.
• • •
When the U.S. government conceived of its program of satellite photoreconnaissance—code-named Corona—in the late fifties, the concept seemed outlandish. A satellite carrying a camera would be blasted into orbit about a hundred miles above Earth. After it took pictures, the satellite would release a capsule carrying the exposed film. The capsule, or film bucket, would fall back toward Earth, protected by a heat shield to guard against the high temperatures it would be subjected to upon reentry into the atmosphere. At about eleven miles from Earth, the heat shield would be cast off and a parachute would deploy, allowing the capsule to be snagged in midair by an airplane.
The challenge of accomplishing this feat was driven home by a string of failures starting in 1959. There were twelve attempts that proved unsuccessful, either because the rocket misfired on the launchpad, or the satellite couldn’t be placed into orbit, or the camera failed to operate, or the reentry capsule was ejected prematurely and couldn’t be retrieved.
The thirteenth try, made on August 10, 1960, worked like a charm. The satellite went into orbit as planned, the capsule was released at the right time, and the parachute deployed as it was supposed to. The capsule was recovered from the Pacific Ocean. This was, however, a test launch, with no film involved. Just eight days later, the next satellite was fired into space bearing a capsule containing three thousand feet of film. After ejection and reentry into the atmosphere, when it was on its way down toward the Pacific, an airplane flying out of Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii plucked it out of the air on its third attempt. On August 25, scientists and engineers gathered in the Oval Office to show Eisenhower the results of the country’s first successful satellite photoreconnaissance mission. The film had captured 1.65 million square miles of Soviet territory—more than the area covered by all the U-2 missions over the USSR combined.
A new agency was created within the Department of Defense to manage space-based intelligence collection: the National Reconnaissance Office. The American public knew about the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but the existence of the NRO—entrusted with running what was in effect a secret space program—would remain hidden for decades.
Over the next twelve years, another 144 satellites were launched under Corona. Even though the imagery acquired by the camera systems they were equipped with steadily improved in resolution, going from between fifty to thirty-five feet to under ten feet, the U.S. intelligence community realized that it needed a sharper imaging capability to get detailed information about specific military sites. That led to the development of a new camera capable of photographing defined targets such as a single missile base. The first such camera was launched into orbit in 1963 aboard a satellite code-named Gambit. Another thirty-seven Gambit launches followed over the next four years. While Corona’s mission was to bring back panoramic views that could be searched for military installations, the Gambit satellites were deployed to take follow-up pictures of sites identified with the help of imagery acquired through Corona.
Behind these satellites and cameras were not just billions of dollars in government investment but also the best that American ingenuity and innovation had to offer. Aside from developing a film capsule that could survive reentry and devising the precise controls necessary to have the capsule land where desired, researchers spent years refining the camera systems so that they could function flawlessly in the vacuum conditions of space. For the missions, Eastman Kodak made a special film with three times the resolution of the best aerial photography ever done before. When the acetate-based film showed a tendency to break in space, the company switched to a polyester-based film, which also decreased the film’s thickness significantly and enabled later missions to fly with twice as much film as the early ones.
There was an especially intense effort to improve the sharpness of photographs taken by the Gambit satellites, for any detailed analysis of the Soviet arsenal depended on them. To test the upgrades made to the cameras, the NRO had retirees from the military drive out to farms across the United States and lay down canvas sheets in the middle of open fields, upon which bars were placed at varying distances from one another. The satellite photos of these targets, showing how far apart the bars had to be to be distinguishable, were a way to measure improvements. Through incremental advances and occasional leaps, these “close-look” satellites were eventually able to return photographs with a resolution of less than six inches—good enough for analysts to study even small changes in the design of Soviet tanks.
Unbeknownst to ordinary Americans, the photoreconnaissance from Corona and Gambit quickly became indispensable to U.S. intelligence gathering. The film buckets retrieved from the satellites over the Pacific Ocean were flown by a high-speed jet to a classified facility on the East Coast where the film was processed. In the early days, copies of the photographs were physically sent to intelligence agencies throughout the government, from the Defense Intelligence Agency to the CIA to intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. In later years, the film began to be scanned and transmitted electronically.
Gathering photographic intelligence wasn’t the only endeavor of the national reconnaissance program. In parallel with the imaging satellites, the United States also sent up satellites to collect signals intelligence, starting with one launched in 1960 under the cover “Galactic Radiation and Background.” True to its name, GRAB had a publicly acknowledged scientific purpose—that of measuring radiation in space—but it was also equipped with antennas and other instruments to eavesdrop on electromagnetic transmissions from Soviet air defense systems. GRAB-1 and its successor satellites recorded these signals on tape; the information was then downloaded remotely at radio receiving units on the ground. By analyzing the signals, the U.S. military was able to locate and characterize Soviet radar installations and develop plans for air strikes in the event of a war.
Preparing for conflict may have been a key objective of the United States’ reconnaissance program, but its biggest contribution during the Cold War was to help prevent the escalation of hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union. Imagery obtained by Corona satellites in the early sixties showed that the Soviet Union had a far smaller arsenal of long-range missiles than the U.S. government had previously thought. Through the following two decades, satellite intelligence allowed U.S. policy makers and strategic planners to accurately estimate the number of missiles, bombers, and submarines the Soviet Union held. The Soviets had their own reconnaissance satellites, which similarly helped allay their fears about the United States’ capabilities and intent. When the USSR and the United States signed a strategic arms control treaty in 1971, accepting limits on the number of missiles they could maintain, they relied on their spy satellites to monitor the agreements.
The role of reconnaissance in helping ease tensions on either side during this era was perhaps best articulated by a Russian intelligence official named Georgiy Polischuk years later, in 1996, when he came to Washington for discussions between U.S. and Russian officials on using satellite imagery for environmental monitoring. Both the American and the Russian delegations at the meeting had representatives who had worked in the field of space-based reconnaissance on behalf of their respective governments. Prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union, Polischuk had headed the Soviet counterpart to the NRO. “I am proud of my service and of yours,” he said at the meeting, speaking to an audience that included an ex-director of the NRO, Marty Faga. “We both labored during the Cold War to keep our leaders informed. Every time our leaders feared the worst, our hard evidence showed that the intentions of the other side were not so dire. I know that we both helped prevent the Cold War from becoming a hot one.”
• • •
Through all those years, however, the United States never acknowledged the existence of the NRO, even though President Jimmy Carter hi
nted at it in a 1978 speech on U.S. accomplishments in space, remarking that “photoreconnaissance satellites have become an important stabilizing factor in world affairs in the monitoring of arms control agreements.” Despite that pronouncement, which was the first statement to Americans that satellites were being used to collect intelligence, the NRO remained an entirely “black” organization operating out of a hallway of offices in the Pentagon that lay behind a set of double doors marked 4C-956.
This official veil of secrecy—maintained primarily out of concern that other countries might object to being surveilled from space—didn’t protect the NRO from losing its secrets, however. In the mid-seventies, a young defense contractor named Christopher Boyce, working with his boyhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee, passed on to Soviet officials documents containing classified information about the development of U.S. spy satellites. In 1977, shortly after the two were convicted, a low-ranking CIA clerk named William Kampiles stole the manual of the KH-11 spy satellite and sold it to officials at the Soviet embassy in Athens for a mere $3,000. He was sentenced to forty years in prison but released after serving nineteen years.
Unlike its predecessor satellites, the KH-11 was capable of transmitting imagery in the form of signals to ground stations rather than dropping film canisters out of space. As the technology for relaying photographic data to Earth advanced through the eighties, U.S. intelligence officials were able to get images of targets in close to real time. The advantage this offered went beyond strategic decision making—the military could now use satellite intelligence tactically, in the conduct of operations on the battlefield.
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