Atomic Express

Finally!  To its credit, the National Reconiassance Office declassified several of its Cold War programmes this fall. The arcane and extremely secretive world of satellites was in the past limited to flawless people with bizarre security compartments with names like RUFF and ZARF. I have a close friend who was ‘read in’ to several compartments way back in the 1980s. When I demonstrated what you could do with Google Earth (I showed him a cluster of abandoned Soviet submarines carelesly piled up in a cove near Murmansk) he blanched and his security training kicked in, not wanting to believe that what he had been taught was a highly-classified capability was now so openly available. It was interesting to see the paradigm shift without a clutch. Essentially, what we look at today on Google Earth was only a dream in the 1950s, became film droped from cannisters to the earth in the 1960s and 1970s. Eventually near real time imagery like this was only deployed in the 1980s.

The general parameters of the early programmes were known, though their designations were not. The early KH satellites (‘Key Hole’: the name of the security compartment) code-named CORONA (KH-1 through -4) KH-5 ARGON and KH-6 LANYARD all dropped film buckets retarded by parachutes once the sat did its run over the Soviet Union fiming swaths of the country. A special USAF squadron flying C-119 transports scooped the ‘buckets’ out of the air. This wasn’t really secret: a documentary called “Catch a Falling Star” came out in the ‘60s and showed the planes recoverying the catch over the Pacific. What is interesting is how CORONA was hidden in plain sight, nested within civilian scientific satellite programme.

CORONA showed up in popular fiction very early on. Alastair Maclean’s novel “Ice Station Zebra” (1963) had a ColdWar race for the film bucket up in the high Arctic. Maclean actually based this on a real event where the Soviets recovered an American film bucket up in Spitzbergan. When the “Ice Station Zebra” movie was made in 1968, an NRO employee served as technical advisor to the film.

In the fall of 2011, NRO declassified a number of other sat programmes: GAMBIT and HEXAGON. HEXAGON was called ‘Big Bird’ because of its size (60 feet-as long as a school bus). ‘Big Bird’ showed up in the 1979 Frederick Forsyth novel “The Devil’s Alternative’ where analysts detect a crop failure in the Ukraine which leads to a destabilized superpower situation….

 

What is truly staggering, though, is the sheer number of (declassified) NRO satellite launches:

CORONA/ARGON/LANYARD (all types) 136 from 1959-72

GAMBIT-1 (KH-7) 38 from 1963-67

GAMBIT-3  (KH-8) 54 from 1966-84

HEXAGON  (KH-9) 20 from 1971-86

 

That averages out to ten launches a year or nearly one per month for 15-20 year period (check my math: I’m a historian not a engineer). Indeed, if you take the tour at Cape Canaveral and see the derelict launch facilities, you see that what occurs there today is a mere shadow of what it once was.

How does this compare with Soviet recce sat programmes and launches?

There were an estimated 500 Zenit launches from 1961 to the early 1990s.

(check out the Zarya website for its extensive coverage)

 

 

 

 

 

It looks like something belonging to the Empire in ‘Star Wars’.

See also http://www.russianspaceweb.com/ for moar (I’d avoid the ads for Russian wives, tho’)

 

 

NRO is so unlike other intelligence agencies. They have an ‘NRO Jr’ section for kids who think NASA is for pussies. I mean, can you see the KGB having a ‘kids’ portion on their…website?   I digress.

 

Good job, NRO. Now tell us about the SIGINT birds beyond GRAB and POPPY…..like the ones piggybacking on KH-4 A and B.

 

[Corrective: I am reliably informed that CIA also has a kids section on their website…]

The NRO hasn’t yet declassified its’ later programmes. When they eventually do you will see how the navigation systems we take for granted in our vehicles today (GPS and mapping) are the direct result of Cold War programmes designed to assist B-1 and B-2 bombers and ALCM, GLCM, and Tommahawk cruise missiles hit their targets. Most people haven’t heard of TERCOMM systems in the missiles, let alone know about which satellites fed the data to them.  Just like the use of microwave communications  technology to heat food, commonplace capabilities today are Cold War technologies.