by Dwayne Day
In many ways the shape of the program was determined by the environment of the time and the interests of the organizations involved. The CORONA photoreconnaissance satellite series was developed to satisfy an urgent Cold War need for imagery of the Soviet Union and other denied areas. The CIA was more interested in hard intelligence about Soviet capabilities and intentions than the Air Force, which was more interested in locating targets to attack. These requirements were not simply arbitrary ones, but represented the distinctly different missions of the CIA and the Air Force.
Despite a difficult and discouraging beginning, CORONA was ultimately a tremendous success and proved the value of space-based reconnaissance for enhancing knowledge of a dangerous enemy. CORONA and the people who built and operated it deserve much of the credit for winning the Cold War.
R. CARGILL HALL
4
POSTWAR STRATEGIC RECONNAISSANCE AND THE GENESIS OF CORONA
The concept of strategic reconnaissance that emerged in the first few years after World War II differed sharply from accepted wartime convention. The Army Air Forces’ (AAF) doctrine associated strategic reconnaissance with the well-established intelligence functions of identifying and pinpointing vital targets for aerial bombardment, with identifying any antiair threats that might impede the striking force, and with bomb damage assessment. With the advent of atomic weapons, however, a few young officers and civilian scientists and engineers, especially those associated with the AAF’s Aeronautical Photographic Laboratory at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, began to think of strategic reconnaissance in quite different terms, as an intelligence tool that could be used to provide advance warning of a surprise attack. At first termed “pre-D-day photography,” then “pre-hostilities reconnaissance,” a redefined strategic reconnaissance mission called for acquiring reliable intelligence about the economic and military activities and resources of a potential foreign adversary through periodic, high-altitude overflight in peacetime.1
In the remarkably short span of 15 years (1945–60), as the Cold War increasingly shaped national perceptions and actions, this concept was embraced by American political leaders and made into national policy. Secretly, at the direction of two presidents, resources would be allocated and technology developed to put this policy into practice. First, military aircraft would be used for peacetime overflight of potential foreign adversaries. Next, specially designed, unarmored, high-flying reconnaissance balloons and aircraft would be so employed. Finally, by 1960, automated satellites would gather intelligence concerning activities on Earth while operating silently in outer space. The clandestine reconnaissance plans, national policy, and machines created in this period would provide far more diverse and reliable kinds of intelligence than that providing advance indications and warning of surprise attack. Collectively, they also made possible the sizing of the U.S. military establishment to meet actual threats rather than imagined ones, enabled arms control treaties with verification, and helped maintain a delicate peace between the Cold War’s international protagonists.
A CONCEPT FORMED
The first person to articulate the concept of overhead strategic reconnaissance was Lieutenant Colonel Richard S. Leghorn, wartime commander of the 30th Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron in the European Theater. He had graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1939 with a bachelor’s degree in physics and a reserve commission in the Army Ordnance Corps. While still a college student, Leghorn served as an officer in the Sigma Chi fraternity, where he became well acquainted with its faculty “den mother” and MIT graduate, the 32-year-old editor of MIT’s Technology Review, James R. Killian Jr. With a degree in English and without scientific credentials, Killian nonetheless possessed an extraordinary knack for facilitating collaborative efforts among scientists and nonscientists, and among students and faculty alike. Killian and Leghorn’s paths would cross again many times in the years to come.
Richard S. Leghorn, whom many call the father of American strategic reconnaissance, 1955. (Photo courtesy R. Cargill Hall)
Working at Eastman Kodak in December 1939, Leghorn met Major George W. Goddard, commander of the Army Air Corps’ small Aeronautical Photographic Laboratory at Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio. Determined that his active military service would be in aerial photography, Leghorn offered to work for Goddard at Wright Field if the major could arrange to transfer his commission to the Air Corps. In early 1940, Goddard did just that. Shortly after Germany invaded Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France in the spring of 1940, Leghorn learned he now held a commission in the Army Air Corps. At year’s end he obtained an active duty assignment at the Aeronautical Photographic Laboratory.2
Second Lieutenant Richard Leghorn arrived at Wright Field in March 1941; there he worked on improving methods of assessing and exploiting data from aerial photographs. At Goddard’s laboratory, Leghorn became acquainted with two individuals whose interests and careers also would become intertwined with his in the years afterward: Amrom H. Katz, a recently hired civilian physicist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who tested and compared the performance of camera shutter systems; and Lieutenant Walter J. Levison, a physicist from City College of New York, who tested and characterized light-sensitive materials and development processes in the laboratory’s sensitometry unit.
Major Goddard also recruited for wartime services astronomer James G. Baker at Harvard University. German-made lenses were no longer available; Baker visited Goddard in December 1940 to discuss the situation. With the permission of his superiors at Harvard College Observatory, after January 1941 Baker designed and perfected lenses for a number of Air Corps reconnaissance cameras. During World War II, the Harvard Optical Laboratory, which Baker formed for this purpose, became a major component of the National Defense Research Committee’s (NDRC) Division 16, which operated under the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development.3 The K-22 aerial camera was one of the most significant of Baker’s contributions to aerial photography. This camera featured a 40-inch focal length f/5.0 distortionless telephoto lens that adjusted automatically to the pressure and temperature variations inherent in high-altitude aerial photography. By war’s end, James Baker was widely recognized as America’s preeminent lens designer for aerial reconnaissance cameras, a reputation he maintained with even more remarkable contributions for much of the rest of the century.4
Many of the men from Goddard’s Aeronautical Photographic Laboratory, together with Duncan E. Macdonald, a physicist from Boston University, worked together in 1946 for the AAF, filming the two atomic tests of Project CROSSROADS at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. Traveling between Roswell, New Mexico, where the photographic unit was formed, and Kwajalein Atoll, where it was stationed for the tests, Leghorn read a summary report of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (Europe), issued on September 30, 1945. This document assessed the effectiveness of and lessons learned from the strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany and the reconnaissance that supported it. A few key points impressed Leghorn. “In the field of strategic [target] intelligence,” the report stated, the United States needed “more accurate information, especially before and during the early phases of the war.” The report urged improving coordination among intelligence services in the collection and evaluation of information, and suggested involving civilian scientists in peacetime as well as in wartime. Underscoring these and other points, the report concluded: “The combination of the atomic bomb with remote-control projectiles of ocean-spanning range stands as a possibility which is awesome and frightful to contemplate.”5
In addition to the frightening possibility of a future sneak atomic attack on the United States, what struck Leghorn most forcibly was the identified need for pre-hostilities targeting reconnaissance, separate and distinct from tactical reconnaissance during wartime. That distinction matched his own experiences in pre-D-day photographic missions flown from Great Britain and in subsequent combat reconnaissance conducted on the Continent. But in a world where more
than one state possessed atomic weapons, securing strategic targeting data was insufficient to ensure survival. Leghorn also realized that the United States had to have reliable indications and warning of force levels and enemy capabilities for a surprise attack in advance, if it was to avoid an atomic disaster. This information, Leghorn was sure, could only be acquired through periodic, extremely high altitude aerial reconnaissance overflight of potential adversaries using new aircraft especially designed for this task.
James G. Baker, director of the Harvard Observatory Army Air Forces Optical Project, adjusting a 40-inch focal length aerial camera developed for the service, ca. 1944. Baker was one of the pioneers of American reconnaissance cameras. (Photo courtesy of James G. Baker)
During the long hours between sorties on Kwajalein, he explained and elaborated upon this proposition to anyone who would listen, and especially to Duncan Macdonald, who was among the first converts to his cause. The CROSSROADS atomic tests that the AAF photographic unit filmed in July 1946, in particular the underwater test on July 25 that tossed the Japanese heavy cruiser Nagato 400 yards like a bathtub toy, also seared themselves in his memory and committed him to selling “pre-D-day photography,” as he then termed it, to the AAF, to America’s political leaders, and to the public.6
Leghorn’s first opportunity to do so came a few months later in December 1946 when Macdonald invited him to speak at the dedication of Boston University’s Optical Research Laboratory. Back in 1943, Colonel George Goddard had secured funding to build a proper optical workshop for James Baker and relocate his AAF lens design efforts from the basement confines of the Harvard College Observatory. The new brick structure, built on the grounds of Harvard University with reinforced footings that eliminated any vibrations from traffic on nearby roads, was completed in late 1944 and, as an element of the wartime NDRC, was dedicated as the Harvard Optical Laboratory. In this well-equipped facility, Baker and his assistant Duncan Macdonald had finished designing the 60-inch f/5.0 lens and began work on an ultra-high-precision (K-30) 100-inch f/10 system using a 9 × 18-inch film format. The Perkin-Elmer Company in Glenbrook, Connecticut, fabricated all of Baker’s lenses for the AAF. By war’s end, the laboratory employed thirty-six optics scientists and fifty technicians. In September 1945, however, when Colonel Goddard visited Cambridge, Harlow Shapley, chief of astronomy at Harvard, advised him that the university would return to peacetime operations immediately. That meant severing all ties with military research. James Baker would return to the university full-time and the Harvard Optical Laboratory staff would be disbanded.7
The American “Baker” atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll on July 25, 1946. This test was a seminal event for American strategic reconnaissance. Not only did it bring together many of the top photographic and reconnaissance experts at the time, but it also impressed upon them the incredible destructiveness of nuclear weapons.
Desperate to save his team of optical designers and technicians for national security research, a shaken Goddard appealed to Daniel L. Marsh, president of nearby Boston University (BU), to house the optical laboratory staff in three temporary wartime structures built by the federal government on the BU campus. The AAF would continue to fund the laboratory’s operation. If Marsh and Chester M. Alter, dean of the BU graduate school, agreed, Duncan Macdonald, BU physics professor and Baker’s wartime assistant, would serve as director of the new Boston University Optical Research Laboratory (BUORL).8 In February 1946, Marsh and Alter did agree. After moving out those in residence in the buildings, re-equipping them, and transferring the Harvard staff, BUORL was formally dedicated on December 13, 1946, with Duncan Macdonald as director. The luminaries that attended the dedication signified the importance accorded the optics laboratory both locally and nationally. They represented the colleges and universities along the Charles River, virtually every major photographic and optical firm in the country,9 and the military services. AAF leaders in attendance included Major General Curtis E. LeMay, Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development; Brigadier General Alden R. Crawford, Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Materiel; and Major General Laurence C. Craigie, Chief, Engineering Division, Air Technical Services Command.10
At the BUORL dedication Leghorn outlined the requirements for and impediments to achieving strategic overflight reconnaissance. A world in which more than one country possessed atomic weapons, Leghorn asserted, was a world that would “demand … aerial reconnaissance prior to the outbreak of hostilities.” In that world, he continued,
military intelligence becomes the most important guardian of our national security. The nature of atomic warfare is such that once attacks are launched against us, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recover from them and counterattack successfully. Therefore, it obviously becomes essential that we have prior knowledge of the possibility of an attack, for defensive action against it must be taken before it is launched. Military intelligence is the agency for providing this information, and our national security rests upon its effectiveness, next to a sound international political structure.
Overhead reconnaissance conducted with cameras in daylight and, if they could be developed, radars at night and in overcast conditions would produce the core of this intelligence, particularly “in the case of potential enemies of a totalitarian, police-state nature where the acquisition of information by the older methods of military intelligence is more successfully blocked.” Nonetheless, Leghorn had to concede, unauthorized overflight of a foreign state in peacetime was denied by treaty law and
would be considered an act of military aggression. It is unfortunate that … peacetime spying is considered a normal function [while] … aerial reconnaissance—which is simply another method of spying—is given more weight as an act of military aggression. Unless thinking on this subject is changed, reconnaissance flights will not be … performed in peacetime without permission of the nation state over which the flight is to be made.
Leghorn thought it highly unlikely that such overflight permission would ever be granted. Consequently, he concluded, to ensure national security the United States would have to devise means for overflight reconnaissance that could not be detected:
The accomplishment of this objective is not as technically difficult as it might at first appear. Extremely long-range aircraft capable of flying at very high altitudes are currently on the drawing boards, and in some cases prototypes have been constructed. Effective means of camouflaging them at high altitudes against visual observations are well known. It is not inconceivable to think that means of preventing telltale reflections of other electromagnetic wave lengths, particularly of radar frequency, can be developed. With such a tool at hand, information can be secured of a potential enemy’s mining of radioactive materials and his plants—necessarily large—for the production of fissionable products, as well as a variety of other essential data.11
The kind of world that Leghorn described for members of the audience, however, did not yet exist in 1946. The United States alone possessed atomic weapons. The Army Air Forces preferred to modify multiengined combat aircraft for reconnaissance and to avoid spending scarce funds on single-purpose aircraft tailored to that mission alone. Finally and most discouraging, even “with such a tool at hand,” international law proscribed unauthorized flight in the airspace of another state. Unless political and legal strictures against reconnaissance overflights were changed, any American leader ordering them could trigger a serious international incident, and might provoke another war.
A LEGAL OBSTACLE AND A POLITICAL WATERSHED
International air navigation treaties negotiated in the wake of World War I featured one cardinal principle: each state claimed for itself exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory and territorial waters. Just as no land vehicle might enter another state without clearance at the border, no foreign aircraft might enter the airspace of another state in peacetime without prior permission. States’ representatives agreed that the welfare and s
afety of each nation was no greater than its command of the air overhead. Article 1 in the first convention of 1919 made the point explicitly:
The High Contracting Powers recognize that every Power has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the air space above its territory.
For the purpose of the present convention the territory of a State shall be understood as including the national territory, both that of the mother country and of the colonies, and the territorial waters adjacent therein.12
Subsequent treaties on air commerce that U.S. presidents signed and the Senate ratified contained similar introductory articles. In terms of application, moreover, all international treaties to which the United States was a contracting party, under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution (Article VI, Section 2), became the law of the land. Whether or not he had read these international instruments, it was this elemental aspect of air law to which Richard Leghorn referred in his 1946 BUORL address. Among the military members who heard him, no general officer could deny the primacy of civilian leadership or the rule of law. Only a president of the United States, as a head of state, might counter the strictures of international law—either by withdrawing his country from a treaty under the terms provided for it, or, for some overriding reasons of state, by expressly violating its canon and the law of nations.
In the months after the December 1946 dedication, the Cold War began in earnest. In an attempt to detect Soviet military preparations, the AAF in late 1946 began flying RB-29 reconnaissance aircraft along the USSR’s northern borders nearest the United States. Equipped with cameras of limited focal length (36-inch or less), these aircraft flew within a few miles of the Soviet coastline to obtain oblique photography of Soviet territory. The two regions of greatest concern were the Chukotskiy Peninsula directly across the Bering Strait from Alaska and the Kola Peninsula north of Leningrad on the Barents Sea, which contained the port of Murmansk.13 The Soviet Union, however, claimed sovereignty over territorial waters and the airspace above it within twelve miles of its coast, not the three miles recognized by the United States. To avoid any incidents, the Department of State instructed the AAF to observe the twelve-mile limit.14