by Dwayne Day
Overall, CORONA provided Presidents Eisenhower through Nixon with vital strategic intelligence. Each administration learned to rely on and value the information the program furnished. CORONA supplied the Cold War presidents with the type of information that they needed in order to assess and defuse a variety of dangerous situations during a very volatile period in world history.
9
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF THE CORONA SYSTEM
In this chapter, five CORONA pioneers recount the various roles they played in the development of America’s first reconnaissance satellite system. Each one shares his own unique perspective about the origin and evolution of the CORONA system by detailing the work he did as a government, military, or industrial representative. Their comments range from the original conceptualization of CORONA to the various technical aspects of designing its cameras and lenses.
Although each pioneer concentrates on a different aspect of CORONA’s development, one common theme that emerges from all of their discussions is the idea of “teamwork.” Collectively, they agree that CORONA would not have been possible without the extraordinary cooperation that occurred between the government, the military, and industry. As the pioneers explain, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when tensions between the Soviet Union and United States were extremely high, all concerned sectors recognized the pressing need for satellite intelligence and worked together to make sure CORONA came to fruition.
One of the pioneers, John N. McMahon, who worked with the CIA/Air Force team that developed and oversaw the U-2, A-12, and CORONA programs, begins the discussion with an appreciation for just how daring the people were who worked on CORONA during the project’s nascent years.1 McMahon stresses that the program’s pioneers must have possessed an incredible amount of courage and determination in order to continue pressing for CORONA’s development despite its numerous early failures. He also recounts why politicians and the Intelligence Community believed that CORONA was so vital to American security. McMahon asks us to
try to think of what space was all about 37 years ago [1958]. At that point in time we had no experience in space and to think of orbiting the earth was beyond the comprehension of the average person. Think of the courage that a handful of government officials—military and civilian—had to possess to seek approval to carry out our first venture into space. Think about the bold and courageous efforts by contractors to do what no man or woman had done before, and the anxiety of the government officials who had the vision to persevere in spite of the many setbacks and failures. Only the stoutest hearts could have prevailed. Could we orbit a satellite? Could it take meaningful pictures from space? And could we really bring it back in a film-recovery capsule? All of these were very profound questions that required actions and results—the first of their kind in the annals of the United States.
Why did so much effort and risk go into the first satellite effort? Just stop and think of the times. Remember that our lack of knowledge of the Soviet Union prompted President Eisenhower to proceed with the extraordinary program of the U-2 overflights, even though he recognized that it would only be a year or two before the Soviets would counter those flights. So he pressed for alternatives, and they took the form of the A-12, now known as the SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, and a satellite system under a projected Air Force program known as the WS-117L.
The crying need to understand what was happening in the Soviet Union drove this program and gave tolerance to the risk. There was a general concern in this country that there was a missile gap and that we were falling behind the Soviets in our military posture. Our national security was indeed at stake. Also, bear in mind that President Eisenhower advocated “Open Skies” in 1955, and when Khrushchev turned him down, he could only conclude that the Soviets wanted to conduct their actions in a closed society and in secret from the world. What also added stimulus to the CORONA effort was a proclamation by the Soviets that they had fired an ICBM in August 1957—and, of course, the Sputnik satellite also orbited in October that same year.
And so the CORONA program moved forward. It proceeded with great haste. In April 1958, with presidential approval, CORONA came to fruition. In the span of a little over a decade, it produced 145 launches at a cost of $850 million and returned 300 million nautical miles of cloud-free photography revealing all of the Soviet missile complexes—medium, intermediate, and long-range; each class of their submarines; a complete inventory of their bombers and fighters; the Soviets’ ABM effort; and their weapons storage. It also gave us maps for strategic targeting. More important, it gave our policymakers the confidence to enter disarmament talks and fashion the SALT I Treaty. It was a remarkable program.
General Lew Allen Jr., another CORONA pioneer, was one of the key Air Force personnel involved in the early satellite reconnaissance program. Allen saw the CORONA project develop out of the Air Force’s WS-117L program and the RAND Corporation’s early space studies. He also served as Director of Air Force Special Projects during the last several years that CORONA was in operation.2 In his discussion, he recounts how the project evolved from WS-117L and the RAND studies, and how a handful of key Air Force officers worked to convince the Air Force high command of the benefits of a satellite system. In order to understand the origin of the CORONA system fully, Allen believes that
Technicians at work on the Agena vehicle for Discoverer XIII. After a string of disappointing failures, the program managers decided to launch Discoverers XII and XIII as instrumented test vehicles, without cameras. Discoverer XIII’s payload was an American flag stored inside the reentry vehicle, the first object to be successfully retrieved from space. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Air Force)
we need to go back a little bit and remember that [Theodore] von Kármán in 1945 wrote a report called “Toward New Horizons,” which was very influential in setting the tone of the Air Force research and development program for the next fifty years. In that document, he observed that if you had the propulsion for a long-range ballistic missile, you were very close to having the propulsion to place something in orbit. But there were no speculations in that report as to why one would want to do that.
RAND got started as a result of a very prescient early document which observed that there were uses for satellites and that reconnaissance was certainly a key one of those uses. As RAND formed, and those studies continued, that whole concept was expanded and fleshed out to where, by 1953, there was a substantial body of studies by RAND that observed that there were a variety of things that could be done in space. And this volume of studies, because of the sensitivity of reconnaissance missions, was classified Top Secret. It was hard to take the studies seriously when there was no rocket boosting capability. But as boost capability began to be apparent in the early 1950s, and we discovered one could and should build an ICBM, then I think interest in RAND’s ideas picked up.
Around 1954 or 1955, there was a project office established at Wright Field under Bill King that went around the country and presented the RAND report and suggested that the Air Force should begin moving toward implementing some of the things that RAND had observed were possible. But Bill did not always receive a warm reception. Many people were very skeptical of these space concepts. Bill says that he used to carry a dishpan with him in which he’d place a ball bearing and swing it around to try to show how forces could keep an object in orbit. But SAC [the Strategic Air Command] was still very uninterested and [General Curtis] LeMay basically kicked him out. You know, LeMay was a very pragmatic person. But because nothing had flown in space, he was skeptical. He wasn’t very interested in it at the time. This was pre-Sputnik.
By 1956, these studies led to the establishment of WS-117L, but without any significant amount of money attached to it. The system was based on the West Coast largely because as the project was established, [General Bernard] “Benny” Schriever and Simon Ramo observed that it would probably interfere with the ICBM/IRBM programs that they were conducting on the West Coast, unless they also had control
of WS-117L. So they wanted it moved out there and integrated in some fashion with the missile development programs. Obviously, that turned out to be a good decision.
In 1957, after Sputnik flew and people began to take space seriously, the dollars began to flow and WS-117L actually began to get funded. The Air Force’s interest grew greatly. I can recall that shortly before Sputnik, we were all encouraged not to use the word “space” in any documents, but immediately after Sputnik we were encouraged to use the word “space” in all documents. SAC began to believe that it was really possible to have objects in orbit, and it began to recognize that space reconnaissance was extraordinarily important for target planning. So they really began to give it support. But, by the end of 1957, it was clear to most people, I presume even to the 117L people on the West Coast, that the schedules were unrealistic. 117L was trying to address a broad menu of requirements including both the Atlas and Thor programs. It lacked a focus.
In the latter part of 1957 and the early part of 1958, the decisionmaking process moved to Washington. The president, his advisors, and the Director of Central Intelligence all said that we had to significantly change our approach in order to adequately meet the demands of the nation. So, when those decisions were made, we decided to pursue CORONA as a covert program. The Air Force people recognized that overflights were politically sensitive, and they consequently acknowledged that a covert program was the only way to really be successful.
As James W. Plummer, the former manager of the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation’s CORONA development team, remembers, CORONA’s covert nature heavily affected everyone involved with the project.3 Plummer recalls that it required a tremendous amount of diligence to keep CORONA secret. He himself sometimes even had to lie to friends and superiors in order to conceal the system. For example, Plummer notes:
The side and front views of an early spin-stabilized film-return reconnaissance satellite proposed by RAND. The design was simple, but did not offer much room for growth. It was pursued for a short time at the beginning of the CORONA program before it was abandoned in favor of a new camera design proposed by Itek.
The existence of the CORONA program was highly classified and had to be denied. We could not admit the existence of the program to anyone, including superiors in our own places of work. It was a truly covert program. There were many, many steps taken by the CIA and the Air Force which allowed us to stay totally submerged—such as having a separate accounting system. Our monies were all hidden in the system. And of course, the word “CORONA,” or even the letter “C,” which scared us all to death, was never used either. We were very, very conscious of that in everything we did. You would not talk to someone unless you really knew that person was part of it. It was a totally covert system based on a strictly “need-to-know” basis.
Because of the secrecy, Colonel Lee Battle, who was the System Project Officer, and I had difficulties facing some people in the outside world. For example, when we were launching the mice as a cover story during the early days, we would hold press conferenees—with the Air Force’s permission, of course—and these smart reporters would come into the room and start asking questions which we couldn’t answer. It was hard to stonewall them because they wanted to bore in, especially since they suspected we were doing more than we said we were.
Colonel Lee Battle was the Air Force officer initially in charge of CORONA operations in Los Angeles. Battle was instrumental in getting CORONA operational. (Photo courtesy of James Plummer)
Another situation that was difficult was when smart engineers would come and knock on your door and say, “I want to talk to you about an idea I have.” And what they would do is reveal their own private design for something that might be able to be done in orbit. But then you had to turn them off by saying, “Well, it’s a pretty good idea, but we haven’t got time for that,” or you’d have to find some other way to get them out of your office.
One final security matter that was difficult was when we went to the Pentagon to report to [Undersecretary of the Air Force and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office] Dr. [Joseph] Charyk and to the people at the CIA. We generally would go around and see people in the Pentagon who knew we were doing something and they were generally pretty high-ranking officers. This was very difficult because it was hard to be evasive to a high-ranking officer. General LeMay was a good example. He was very, very difficult to tell a story to and not tell the whole story. There were also others who knew that something was going on and that thought the explanations they had gotten out of this colonel or that Lockheed engineer were very bad answers to their questions. This led to great problems.
In addition to CORONA’s secrecy, another element of the program that impresses General Allen was the enormous amount of cooperation that developed between the CIA and the Air Force during the early years of CORONA. Allen remembers:
There was an enthusiasm on the part of the people involved to really make this thing work. The Air Force/CIA team pulled together extremely well. Although ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency] was nominally in charge, it was largely just a pass-through organization. The activities were done in key measure by the program officer—Richard Bissell at CIA, and his deputy on the West Coast, [General Osmond] “Ozzie” Ritland. The project seemed to work well because there was a very clear mission and a clear understanding of that mission. There was no ambiguity throughout the life of CORONA. It was aimed at national intelligence, intelligence that national strategic planners and the Air Force needed.
The initial cooperation between all parties was remarkable, even though the delineation of responsibilities between the Air Force and the CIA was not always clear. It was very fuzzy, apparently even to Bissell and Ritland, and was worked out primarily by the people on the West Coast: Lee Battle, who was the program director, and Charlie Murphy, who worked at the helicopter facility at Palo Alto. They did an extraordinary job pulling it all together without squabbling. There were some squabbles, of course; it is hard for porcupines to mate without there being a few sticky points, but those squabbles were handled over the life of the program in a quite satisfactory manner.
Richard L. Garwin, who was a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee and the Defense Science Board during the CORONA era, recounts CORONA’s origin and evolution from his unique perspective as a member of the Land Panel—a group chaired by the renowned inventor and scientist Edward “Din” Land, which was responsible for recommending what kind of technology to develop in order to guard against a Russian nuclear attack on the United States.4 Although Garwin did not join the Land Panel until after it had recommended the development of CORONA to President Eisenhower, his story still provides some unique insights into the panel’s operations and culture and its influence on the continuous evolution of the CORONA program. Garwin recalls:
Edwin H. Land, inventor of polarizing film and the Polaroid instant film process and camera, and president of the Polaroid Company, was both a genius and a showman, and an extremely productive and forceful person. Land became chairman of the Technological Capabilities Panel’s (TCP) Project III, an activity organized in July of 1954 by James Killian in response to Eisenhower’s challenge to use new technologies to counter the Soviet potential of nuclear attack on the United States by intercontinental bombers.5 Projects I and II dealt with continental defense and striking power.
By November 1954, President Eisenhower had approved the TCP’s Project III proposal to build the U-2. The responsibility for its development and operation were assigned to CIA. It was to be covert and subject to special security procedures. Its high-resolution, small-format camera constituted a new optimization of aerial photography by allowing the capture of an enormous amount of imagery.
In early 1955, Richard Bissell, CIA director of the U-2 CIA/Air Force project, asked Din Land and the TCP to advise him on systems for the technical collection of intelligence, which included the U-2 and the A-12 (which would later be known as the two-seat SR-71 and produce th
e Mach 3 reconnaissance aircraft). Bissell later received word from Land that he was to develop the CORONA system. Din Land’s intelligence panel continued its activities and constituted an important part of the nation’s strategic reconnaissance program. It was involved in the continuous improvement of CORONA as well as successor satellite systems.
I was pleased to be able to join the Land Panel in 1962, or maybe somewhat earlier; I don’t recall the exact date. Most of the recommendations of the Land Panel involved the National Reconnaissance Office—the NRO—for which the CIA and the Air Force were the two chief implementing elements. However, there were also non-NRO recommendations dealing with R&D [research and development] that were not specific to a particular satellite system but were of general use in improving the capability of any system. For instance, improved image storage, photographic interpretation techniques, dissemination of imagery, and other intelligence data were all nonsystem-related.