Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites

by Dwayne Day

  3. Dino Brugioni—the manager of the National Photographic Interpretation Center during the CORONA program (see chapter 11)—has noted that despite Eisenhower and Kennedy’s political differences, “a close bond developed between General Eisenhower and President Kennedy” after the 1960 presidential election thanks, in part, to CORONA. For instance, Brugioni stated at the CORONA conference: “After President Kennedy was elected, General Eisenhower sat in on several briefings at which Arthur Lundahl and Richard Bissell briefly taught Kennedy the finer points of intelligence and the value of satellite imagery in the decisionmaking process. Many times during his administration, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was in touch with General Eisenhower, and so was President Johnson, for that matter.”

  4. Comments made by David Doyle—an imagery analyst and manager at NPIC during the CORONA era (see chapter 11)—reveal how differently certain presidents and advisors interpreted photos related to Vietnam. Doyle suggested at the CORONA symposium, “I don’t think that Eisenhower, after looking at the imagery that we provided in 1958 and 1959, would have ever gotten involved in Vietnam. After he saw CORONA photos of how the Vietnamese were beginning to penetrate Laos, he told us about the difficulties of fighting a war under such circumstances. He compared it to the way Tito outfoxed the Germans during World War II.”

  5. Richard Helms began his intelligence career in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1943. During his service, he worked in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin, among other places. After the war, he continued in intelligence work, first by joining the OSS’s successor organization, and then the CIA. After holding various positions in the clandestine service, Helms ultimately became U.S. ambassador to Iran in 1973. Four years later, he retired from government service and became president of the Safeer Company in Washington D.C., an international business consulting firm.

  CHAPTER 9. THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF THE CORONA SYSTEM

  1. McMahon first joined the CIA in 1951. After completing an overseas assignment and basic training in the U.S. Army, he returned to his regular assignment at the agency, joined its reconnaissance program, and eventually rose to the position of Deputy Director of the Satellite Office. From 1972 through 1982, he served as the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations, Deputy Director of Intelligence, and Executive Director of CIA (a position which made him responsible for the day-to-day management of the agency). McMahon also acted as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from 1982 until his retirement in March 1986. In September 1986, McMahon joined the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company and served as its executive vice-president and corporate vice-president until August 1988. At that point, he was elected president of the Lockheed Missiles and Space Group and Company. He remained in those positions until his retirement from Lockheed in December 1994.

  2. Allen also served as director of the National Security Agency, Commander of Air Force Systems Command, and Chief of Staff of the Air Force. He was the individual who came up with the concept for the CORONA movie, “A Point in Time,” and the person who proposed that the Smithsonian Institution preserve some of CORONA’s hardware. After his retirement from the Air Force, Allen became director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. From 1995–96, he served as a member of the Aspin Commission (later renamed the Brown Commission), which examined the role and capabilites of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Allen is currently chairman of the board of Draper Laboratories and a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

  3. Plummer served as the Secretary of the Air Force during the Nixon administration. That assignment included responsibilities as the director of the National Reconnaissance Office. After retiring from government service, Plummer returned to Lockheed as its executive vice-president. He then served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Aerospace Corporation until he retired in 1992.

  4. Garwin had a distinguished career with the IBM Corporation. At IBM, he made contributions to the design of nuclear weapons, instruments and electronics for research in nuclear and low-temperature physics, computer systems, and military technology. He is currently an IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, an Adjunct Research Fellow in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and an Adjunct Professor of Physics at Columbia University. In March 1996, Garwin received the R. V. Jones Intelligence Award of the National Foreign Intelligence Community.

  5. Some of the other Land Panel members included Harvard physicist Edward Purcell and James G. Baker, designer of high-performance optics.

  6. Levison retired from Itek in 1974 as the senior vice-president for operations. He continued to act as a consultant for Itek during his retirement, in addition to serving a number of other clients including Lockheed Missiles and Space Company and Mark Systems.

  Incidentally, Levison at the CORONA symposium said that he “never got to see one of those [CORONA] launches because Jim Plummer would never let me go down there for security reasons. Plummer was afraid someone would recognize me.”

  7. Levison noted at the symposium that “from the very beginning, we knew that panoramic cameras, although rich in intelligence, had distortions that made it hard to use for precise measurements. In fact, my good friend Amrom Katz used to say that photogrammetrics had to do with the character of the terrain, but intelligence had to do with the characters on the terrain.”

  CHAPTER 10. CORONA AND THE REVOLUTION IN MAPMAKING

  1. Gifford has held several senior management positions at the CIA, including posts in the Office of Development and Engineering. She has also served as NPIC’s director of the National Exploitation Laboratory and as deputy director of the Office of Communications. In 1994, she became associate deputy director for administration.

  2. Mahoney was instrumental in developing and applying advanced triangulation techniques utilizing satellite imagery. When the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) was formed in 1972, he assumed the position of the DMA Director of Science and Technology. Mahoney also served as the scientific advisor to the DMA Director of Special Program Office for Exploitation and Modernization. He retired in 1986.

  After reviewing an edited version of the transcript of the May 1995 CORONA conference, Dr. Mahoney supplemented his comments with a paper that further details many of the points he touched on during the meeting. Consequently, his material in this chapter is a combination of both his submitted essay and his original comments.

  3. The geoid is the imaginary surface within or around the earth that is everywhere normal to the direction of gravity and coincides with the mean sea levels in the oceans. It is the fundamental surface reference for surveying and mapping.

  4. Mahoney at the CORONA symposium noted: “The KH-5 ARGON camera was being developed at the same time that improvements were taking place on the KH-4 configuration. It was a 3-inch dedicated mapping camera flown for a short time. One of the things that the KH-5 demonstrated during its short lifetime was that a 3-inch focal length frame camera could achieve an image pointing accuracy of 30 meters in the horizontal and 50 meters in the vertical. With that information, along with orbit determination, MC&G reduced past target location inaccuracies from a maximum error of two or three miles, down to within about a 1000 foot Circular Error—90 percent (CE), and a vertical error of 300 feet (linear error—90 percent) on the WGS. It was a fantastic improvement and had an immediate impact on our ability to target enemy strategic weapons. However, the eventual MC&G workhorses ended up being the KH-4A and KH-4B systems that flew with 1.5- and 3-inch focal lengths, and reseau calibrated frame cameras. They flew until the end of the CORONA program. We accomplished all of this without compromising the intelligence function.” He also noted that “we primarily used the stellar/index camera to determine attitude. If we caught a good star field on film, we could pin the attitude down to within three to five arc seconds. On the ground, this was equivalent to eight to fifteen feet in ground positioning. One could take this error into account during the calculation process and estimate
the final effect it would have on the ground point positioning error.”

  5. Mahoney stated at the symposium: “Their efforts allowed geodetic targeting capability to improve to CE 90 percent = 450 feet, and LE 90 percent = 300 feet. By 1970, the MC&G community could achieve the following accuracy anywhere in the Soviet bloc to meet SAC (Strategic Air Command) SHOELACE ICBM targeting objectives with respect to WGS: CE 90 percent = 1000 feet (launch to target) and CEP = 600 feet (impact error).”

  6. To accomplish this task, the DoD screened hundreds of its employees and sent the most qualified to universities throughout the country so that they could receive training in geodesy, orbital sciences, computer science, photographic science, photogrammetry, and other specialities. The training lasted from one to two years.

  7. An aggressive MC&G R&D program spawned the development of software, analytical plotters and comparators, carto compilation equipment, high-resolution optical rectifiers, photo processors, technical management enlargement software, panoramic imagery and associated geodetic/gravity data, and other developments.

  8. Daugherty was one of the key individuals involved in establishing geodetic and geophysical support for ballistic missile operations. He has held several high-level positions at the DMA including deputy director, which is the DMA’s senior civilian position. Daugherty retired in March 1995.

  9. Elaine Gifford also stated at the symposium: “I had to chuckle when I heard Ken say he went to look up what a geodesist was when he first joined the team because I flashed back to when I was bent over a dictionary trying to figure out what a ‘photogrammetrist’ was; I wasn’t at all sure what photogrammetry encompassed. But I think these two stories show that we were paving new ground during those days. Although we didn’t have specific job titles, we did have the sense of a great mission and what we could do with CORONA. The CORONA pioneers and innovators were creative and came up with some wonderful ideas to get the most out of the system.”

  10. William Mahoney at the symposium noted, “By 1972, we had built up a cadre of almost 100 to 200 people who had received advanced college training in photogrammetry, computer science, and other mapping related disciplines, and we used them in any position we needed them in.”

  11. Lowell Starr, a fellow mapping expert, noted at the CORONA symposium: “It’s interesting that you bring up how the Soviets obtained maps of the United States because we used to have a map information office over at 19th and E Street here in [Washington] D.C.—when the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] was in the old GSA [Government Services Administration] building—and there was this little lady from the Russian embassy who would come in every month and get all of the new publications. It was so routine that after a while the people working at the desk would anticipate her arrival and would stack up all of the new publications for her. Then, she’d just walk in, count them, pay for them, and leave. This went on forever.”

  12. The Global Positioning System is a network of DoD-operated earth-orbiting satellites that provides navigational positioning data to military and civilian users.

  13. From 1986 until 1991, Starr served as chief of the National Mapping Program. As chief, he was responsible for the production of multipurpose maps, the development of a digital database of geographic and cartographic information, and the investigation of the cartographic application of remote sensing data. After his retirement from government service, Starr took a position as the technical advisor for the International Federal Systems of the Intergraph Corporation.

  14. However, at the symposium, Starr suggested that overall “there was a tremendous amount of cooperation and synergism between the various Intelligence Community organizations, including the DIA, the ACIC, the Army Map group, and the DMA.”

  CHAPTER 11. EXPLOITING CORONA IMAGERY

  1. Huffstutler served with the CIA for 35 years. During the first 25, he held senior management posts in the Office of Weapons Analysis, the Office of Strategic Research, and the Office of Soviet Analysis. In the mid-1980s, he became the director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), and from 1988 to 1991, he acted as the CIA’s deputy director for administration. Huffstutler completed his career with the CIA in 1994, after two years of service as the agency’s executive director. He currently works for the Aegis Research Corporation.

  2. David Doyle, another former imagery analyst and manager at NPIC during the CORONA era, added at the CORONA symposium: “The questions we were being asked in the early days were very basic. ‘Where are the airfields?’ Not ‘What kind of airplanes are on them,’ as much as just ‘Where are the installations and where are the missile sites?’ ”

  3. Kerr joined the CIA in 1960 shortly after the CORONA program began. He originally worked with the team of analysts who were responsible for writing CORONA mission summaries. Kerr later became the executive officer for the Intelligence Community Staff and vice chairman of the Committee on Imagery Requirements and Exploitation (COMIREX). From 1976 to 1982, he served as the director or deputy director of several offices responsible for worldwide political analysis and current intelligence. He became associate deputy director for intelligence in 1982. Four years later, he received an appointment as the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence, and then in 1989 became the deputy DCI. Kerr retired from the CIA in 1992.

  4. Brugioni is considered “one of the founding fathers of NPIC.” During the CORONA era, he was responsible for writing the summaries that NPIC’s director Arthur Lundahl used to brief presidents, Congress, the cabinet officers, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Brugioni has written extensively on the application of imagery to intelligence and is the author of a detailed analysis of aerial photographs of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. After his retirement from the CIA, he wrote Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He continues to write and lecture on subjects related to overhead imagery.

  5. David Doyle, at the CORONA symposium, added: “The Chinese, however, were not quite as helpful to us. They did not build fences around their installations. Their missile sites were very difficult to detect.”

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Dwayne A. Day is a military space policy analyst and historian in Virginia. He was the 1996–97 Guggenheim Fellow at the National Air and Space Museum and a NASA Space Grant Fellow at the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He is the author of numerous articles on American military and civilian space programs, an assistant editor of Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, vols. 1 and 2, and editor of several issues of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society on military space history. He is currently working on two books about science and the Air Force and the race to the moon.

  Peter A. Gorin is a specialist in political science and a longtime researcher of aerospace history. He graduated from the Moscow University and worked as a political analyst. He continued his research in association with the National Air and Space Museum as a Guggenheim Fellow. Mr. Gorin is a contributor to Air & Space and Quest magazines, as well as to the public TV (WGBH) presentation “Spy in the Sky” (1996).

  Gerald Haines is the historian for the director of Central Intelligence. During 1996 and 1997, he was the historian for the National Reconnaissance Office. He was previously deputy chief historian, director of Central Intelligence History Staff, and chief of the History Branch at the National Security Agency. He is the author of Unlocking the Files of the FBI: A Guide to Its Records and Classification System as well as numerous articles on diplomatic history.

  R. Cargill Hall is the historian at the National Reconnaissance Office. He has served as the historian at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and as chief of the Research Division at the Air Force Historical Research Agency. Hall is the author of Lunar Impact: A History of Project Ranger, and editor and contributor to Lightning Over Bougainville.

  Brian Latell is the former director of the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence a
nd the former editor of the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence. He is currently a professor at Georgetown University and specializes in the history of Central America.

  John M. Logsdon is the director of the Space Policy Institute and the Center for International Science and Technology Policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University where he is professor of political science and international affairs.

  Ernest R. May is director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. He has also been dean of Harvard College, associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, director of the Institute on Politics, and chairman of the Department of History. He has written extensively on American foreign policy and the uses of history in decisionmaking.

  Jonathan McDowell is a writer and researcher on the technical history of the space program, and has published papers on the topic in Quest magazine and the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, as well as writing a monthly column in Sky and Telescope magazine. Since 1989 he has distributed a weekly electronic newsletter with details on current space activities, Jonathan’s Space Report (http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/jsr/jsr.html), which is widely distributed in the aerospace community. Dr. McDowell is also an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., and has published numerous scientific papers on quasars, black holes, and cosmology.