This New Ocean, page 36
The Corona Program’s managers were doubly irked because one of von Braun’s Jupiters had carried two monkeys, Able and Baker, on a well-publicized 300-mile flight only six days earlier and both had survived. The Army did not come away unscathed, however. The very day the CIA’s mice perished in the service of their country, Able died during minor surgery to remove an electrode that had been implanted under his skin, causing the ever-vigilant British Society Against Cruel Sports to lodge a formal protest with the U.S. ambassador in London.
During that period—1957 to 1959—the Air Force waged a public relations campaign designed to link itself to observation satellites. Besides leaking material to trade journals, for example, the Air Force released a nine-page pamphlet that described Discoverer in some detail. While the handout gave away no secrets, calling the operation an “open-end” research program, it did tease alert readers by identifying Midas and calling Samos a “photographic satellite.” The releases and the pamphlet reflected an early Air Force ambivalence about space reconnaissance. Mostly, spying from space was taken to be a wasteful extravagance by a service that desperately wanted long-range bombers and ballistic missiles. It was not that the air staff did not want up-to-date strategic intelligence from space, particularly on targets that would justify all the bombers and missiles it wanted to buy; it just did not want to pay for it.* At the same time, with NASA taking over manned and other space operations, there was a clear feeling on the part of some generals that their service should keep as much of a hold on space as possible.
The Devil in the Details
Like Samos, Discoverer was designed to be stabilized on all three of its axes. There would be no pictures if the satellite vibrated, rocked, rolled, or tumbled. One of the hundreds of fundamental engineering challenges was therefore to fit it with a horizon sensor and tiny steering thrusters that would squirt gas to keep it in the right position. It would also fly a polar orbit so that an entire slice of the planet passed under its camera on each ninety-minute round-the-world flight. The camera itself, which would be improved over the years, was made by the Itek Corporation in Lexington, Massachusetts, and was a work of art in its own right. It had a twenty-four-inch focal length and used very high quality German glass that was taken through U.S. Customs without paying duty by faking contracts. That kept the CIA out of it.
Since the Corona flights were going to be near polar, they had to be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Santa Barbara, California. The site was ideal for two reasons. First, jutting out into the ocean as it did, it provided a straight shot due south over the Pacific, which not only reduced the number of people who would witness the firings but ensured that a satellite that did not make it to orbit would fall into the sea, not into the center of some town. The thought of one of the spy satellites crashing into a community and not only causing death and destruction, but drawing curious reporters in the process, was nightmarish to the spy satellites’ obsessively secretive managers. Second, with one notable exception, the desolate location offered excellent security. The one persistent security problem was to be caused by the Southern Pacific railroad, whose heavily traveled tracks passed through Vandenberg’s launch complex.25 Corona launches would therefore have to be planned with an eye to the Southern Pacific timetable. For years, mission planners would be vexed by having to schedule the launches of one of their country’s most secret and valuable intelligence collectors in the early afternoon and often with only minutes to spare between trainloads of tourists and commuters.
The idea was to launch the spacecraft almost due south so they would fly over or near the poles. Precise calculations told planners when the particular spot in the Soviet Union, China, or elsewhere would pass beneath the orbiting satellite, allowing its timer to be set so that it turned on the camera at precisely the right moment. Its mission accomplished, the Agena and its camera system would begin a series of maneuvers that were remarkable for their sophistication, particularly at the time.
As the Agena arced more than a hundred miles over the North Pole heading south toward Hawaii, it would turn 180 degrees, until its nose faced backward and it pointed down 60 degrees toward Earth. Then it would fire its satellite recovery vehicle: the re-entry capsule that was its nose, and that contained a spool of exposed film. The capsule’s own tiny rockets would then fire to spin-stabilize it and a retro-rocket, now pointed toward Earth, would fire to slow its descent. All of this was particularly tricky because the capsule, like other spacecraft returning to Earth, had to hit the atmosphere at exactly the right angle: too high or low and it would stay in space, incinerate, or land in the wrong place. After it re-entered the atmosphere, the retro-rocket thrust cone, the ablative heat shield covering the nose, and a parachute cover would all separate.* A drogue chute would open, followed by a much larger orange-and-white-striped main chute, which lowered the recovery capsule through the air.
Meanwhile, six Air Force C-119s and one C-130 transport (eventually, all C-130s) would have arrived at a 200-by-60-mile rectangle called the “ballpark” a couple of hundred miles south of Honolulu. Three other transports would patrol an outer area called, appropriately, the “outfield.” With the eighty-four-pound capsule sending a continuous signal as it floated down, the aircraft would close in on it. Then one of them would snare the parachute with a flying trapeze that looked like a giant version of the one at the circus. The capsule would be winched into the aircraft and flown to Hawaii. If the plane missed, according to the plan, the capsule would float on the sea and send out a signal until a salt plug dissolved, but long enough for it to be retrieved by naval vessels that had also been sent to the area ahead of time.
Corona had a troubled beginning, both technologically and politically. A baker’s dozen launches, or attempted launches, were anything but promising, though they echoed what was happening east at Canaveral and, far beyond it, at Kapustin Yar and Tyuratam. An hour before the first attempted launch on January 21, 1959, tests were started on the Agena’s hydraulic system. Suddenly, the explosive bolts that held it to its Thor booster, and which were supposed to detonate high in the sky to separate them, ignited. Sensing that separation had occurred, tiny rockets went off that were supposed to push the Agena fast enough so its propellant was pulled downward into its engine. The resulting explosion left the Agena and Thor smoldering on the pad. Like the Soviet censors who were infamous for airbrushing out-of-favor people from official photographs, Corona’s dismayed managers named the twisted, smoking mess Discoverer O and simply refused to count it among the failures that followed.
Throughout 1959 and well into 1960, the CIA, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company (no longer just a division), General Electric (which made the capsule), Fairchild, Itek, and others labored to perfect and integrate Corona’s complex systems. Meanwhile, the demise of Discoverer O was followed by a dozen more frustrating, and budget-busting, mishaps that caused the CIA and the Air Force to dig ever deeper into their black—ultrasecret—pocket. The string of disasters stretched from that January to August 1960. Three of the Agenas never made it into orbit, and two others went into very erratic orbits; one capsule was dropped too soon; two cameras worked briefly and then failed, and a third failed altogether; one Agena’s retro-rocket malfunctioned; and one of the spacecraft ran so low a temperature that it ruined its health by freezing components, including its batteries. Of five capsules that were actually shot out of the Agenas, two failed to transmit the signals that helped the planes find them, one overshot the recovery area by several hundred miles and was lost, and two overshot it by a somewhat wider margin: one was thought to have disappeared near the South Pole and the other was believed to have crashed somewhere in Scandinavia and was never found.
“It was a most heartbreaking business,” Bissell would later recall. “If an airplane goes on a test flight and something malfunctions, and it gets back, the pilot can tell you about the malfunction and you can look it over and find out. But in the case of a recce satellite, you fire the damned thing off and you’ve got some telemetry, and you never get it back. There is no pilot, of course, and you’ve got no hardware. You never see it again. So you have to infer from telemetry what went wrong. Then you make a fix and if it fails again you know you’ve inferred wrong. In the case of Corona, it went on and on.” That it did go on, that the Air Force and the CIA pressed grimly on, fixing first the booster, then the satellite and camera systems, and finally the re-entry capsule, was a measure of how desperately the United States needed the intelligence. All they had as of the spring of 1960 was film shot on the occasional, and increasingly risky, U-2 flights. And even that dried up on May 1, when Powers was blown out of the sky by an SA-2 anti-aircraft missile.
The break came on August 11, 1960, when the capsule from Discoverer 13 fell into the Pacific 330 miles northwest of the planned recovery area and was hoisted out of the ocean by a Navy helicopter.* Since the capsule hit the water instead of a trapeze, it was only a partial success. But that was trivial compared to the fact that the extraordinarily complex requirement of getting the Thor, the Agena, and the capsule to work together had finally been accomplished. And the wonder of it was that it was accomplished within thirty months of the first American satellite having taken to space. The re-entry problem was fixed, and Bissell and his Air Force colleagues were absolutely ebullient.
The feat also provided propaganda-starved Americans with a first of their own, however minor: Discoverer 13 was the first man-made object to be recovered from space, and Ike was duly photographed inspecting the Stars and Stripes, which were said to have been the capsule’s only passenger. The Soviet Union had tried to do the same thing with Sputnik 4’s recovery capsule three months earlier but had failed because, like Discoverer 5, it had gone up instead of down. The intensity of the competition between the two spacefaring nations was accelerating as surely as some of their rockets.
The very next Corona flight was letter-perfect. Discoverer 14 went up on August 18 and became the first man-made object to be recovered in midair the following afternoon when an Air Force C-119 Flying Boxcar called Pelican 9 snatched it on the third pass as it drifted 8,500 feet over the Pacific. Unaware of the true nature of what they had snared, the elated crewmen flew the capsule back to Hickam Air Force Base where the pilot was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and his crew received Air Medals on the spot. Their cargo, complete with a twenty-pound roll of processed negatives, was rushed to Washington. The first space reconnaissance picture showed two fuzzy white scars: the runway at Mys-Schmidta air base in the Soviet Far East and an adjacent apron. That picture, with a resolution on the order of twenty-five feet, revealed almost nothing. But it promised everything. The pictures that followed proved beyond doubt that the technique worked splendidly.
At 8:15 on the morning of the twenty-fourth, just before a National Security Council meeting, Killian, Land, National Security Adviser Gordon Gray, and George Kistiakowsky took a reel of the developed Discoverer 14 film into the Oval Office and, with Allen Dulles looking on, unrolled it across the carpet toward Eisenhower, who was standing beside his desk. The president was stunned by what he saw: “good” to “very good” photographs that covered 1.5 million square miles of Soviet and Eastern European territory and that turned up sixty-four airfields, twenty-six new surface-to-air missile sites, and a third major rocket-launch facility at Plesetsk. Discoverer 14’s “take” was nothing short of phenomenal. It had collected more intelligence in seven orbits at an altitude of 115 miles than had been collected in four years of U-2 operations at fifteen. “For the analysts and estimators,” Wheelon would later remark, “it was as if an enormous floodlight had been turned on in a darkened warehouse.”32
Eisenhower declared on the spot that no strategic reconnaissance pictures should be released to the public. It was a particularly statesmanlike decision, since doing so would have all but ended Democratic charges that the Soviet Union led the United States in ballistic missiles.
The science charade notwithstanding, the Discoverers were mostly taken to be what they were. Pied Piper had been described as “an earth reconnaissance satellite program by Aviation Week as early as mid-June 1958. The trade magazine matter-of-factly published a number of articles describing how the “advanced reconnaissance systems” were to be flown and made frequent references to the fact that WS-117L was a military reconnaissance system.34 It and all other “Weapons System” designations for satellites were therefore ordered dropped on October 20, 1958, in order to lessen the aggressive nature of the operation. WS-117L became Sentry and finally reverted to just plain Samos. No one was deceived. Following the first fully successful Discoverer operation in August 1960, for example, Aviation Week informed its readers, some of whom worked in the Soviet Embassy, that the event occurred “as a close examination of the satellite reconnaissance concept and its technical feasibility was in progress.”35 The New York Times followed, reporting that “the technological feat marks an important step toward the development of reconnaissance satellites that will be able to spy from space.”
Nor were the Soviets fooled. An article in the Soviet journal International Affairs correctly named all three American observation spacecraft—Midas, Samos, and Discoverer—and declared (as predicted) that “espionage satellites” were illegal. It went on to say that the Soviet Union had “everything necessary to paralyze United States military espionage both in the air and in outer space.” Harry Truman would have called that “hooey,” too, and he would have been right.
On August 18, 1960, the day Discoverer 14 began its epic flight, a Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance that functioned under the auspices of the CIA and that was chaired by the agency’s James Q. Reber, issued a top-secret “List of Highest Priority Targets” in the Soviet Union. The thirty-two highest-priority targets for U.S. spy satellites’ cameras reflected the continuing preoccupation with surprise attack:
As in previous lists, the priority interest centers on: (a) The ICBM, IRBM, sub-launched missiles; (b) The heavy bomber; and (c) Nuclear energy. However, the principal emphasis is the ICBM and the questions of its deployment. At the moment, this objective transcends all others. In the main, it is expressed in this target list in terms of the search of sections of rail lines which are judged to be, among the total of USSR rails, the most likely related in some way to ICBM deployment and which are short enough in length to be considered as a terminal objective within operational capabilities.
The CIA’s analysts correctly figured that R-7s and their successors would be moved by rail and that ballistic missile launch sites would therefore be at or near the end of rail spurs, so that following train tracks (which U-2 pilots had done for four years) would turn up the heavy weapons. Included in the ten-page memorandum were the huge Sary Shagan nuclear weapons test site in Kazakhstan and the surface-to-air missile sites that would threaten SAC’s bombers. Plenty of SAMs turned up, but they were not protecting many ICBMs. Not yet, anyway.
Within a couple of years, the entire U.S.S.R., its Eastern European proxies, Communist China, and most of the rest of the world would pass under the eyes of the orbiting spies. The Russians, who would begin retrieving their own space imagery from Cosmos 4 and 7 in April and July 1962, knew that they were under continuous surveillance. What they did not know was that the Discoverers and the spacecraft that succeeded them with ever-better cameras were calibrating those cameras—checking them out for photographic detail—not only on targets in the United States whose precise dimensions were known but in the parking lot behind the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, where parking spots were carefully marked off with paint lines of varying sizes and widths. It had the same effect as a television test pattern. The satellites also practiced photographing an automobile that was parked in front of the embassy on Novinsky Boulevard. Comparing the size of the car with the sizes of actual intelligence targets helped the photointerpreters calculate the exact dimensions of Soviet aircraft, armor, missiles, naval vessels, antennas, and even power cables that carried electricity to uranium enrichment facilities.
At the same time, U.S. intelligence feared that its space “assets” would be attacked. A Special National Intelligence Estimate issued on August 9, 1960, warned that the Soviets would theoretically be able to destroy American reconnaissance satellites, or at least “neutralize” communication with them, by 1963. In the meantime, the NIE predicted that the Kremlin would try to mobilize world support to put pressure on the United States to stop its snooping, but would not bring the issue to a political climax until its anti-satellite weapon was ready.
And besides all the other reasons for keeping the program top secret—largely to keep the Soviet Union from knowing what was being uncovered, the American public from knowing what it cost to do so, and the respective bureaucracies from knowing what the others were doing—the report repeated the old fear that publicizing space reconnaissance would only hurt the Russians’ prestige and make them even more determined to end the threat to their secrecy: “[I]f the US Government refrained from officially avowing and attempting to justify a reconnaissance program, and perhaps explained the launching of new satellites on other ground such as scientific research, we believe that the chances are better than even that the Soviets would not press the issue until they were able either to destroy a vehicle, or to establish its mission by authoritative US acknowledgment or other convincing proof.” In other words, fooling the Soviets was at that point totally out of the question, but embarrassing and goading them would be counterproductive.
Still, intelligence planners believed that no matter what the United States did by way of officially disguising Corona, the day would come when the Soviet Union “will probably seek to destroy US reconnaissance satellite vehicles.” Wrong. Both sides’ reconnaissance satellites would soon become vital to national security for intelligence collection, targeting, and arms control. The United States and the U.S.S.R. would also come to rely on them as “confidence builders” that reduced nasty surprises and verified agreed limits on strategic weapons. An attack on a spacecraft would be an act of war as surely as would an attack on a naval vessel. Both would invite immediate reprisal.
