The Wizards of Langley (30 page)

But OD&E was doing more than living off its past accomplishments. It was working on a follow-on to RHYOLITE, code-named ARGUS, which became the subject of an internal intelligence community battle and ultimately was killed by Congress.
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Most important, OD&E was proceeding with the KENNAN program, which promised to provide imagery in “near real-time”—as the satellite passed over its target—via a television-like electro-optical system. That program represented another victory for the directorate and Program B over their rivals in the Air Force Office of Special Projects (Program A)—but one obtained only through the intercession of some prominent scientists. KENNAN was also part of Bud
Wheelon’s legacy and a personal triumph for Dirks, whose work on developing a real-time capability went back to the earliest days of the directorate.

In 1963, Dirks and several colleagues began pondering whether the United States could launch a truly secret reconnaissance satellite, one that could be kept secret not only from the American public but from the Soviet Union as well. An April 1963 memo from OSA deputy director James Cunningham to John Parangosky, his deputy for technology, argued that if, in the future, the United States relied solely on the heavy reconnaissance satellites under development, “an intense Soviet effort will seriously reduce our coverage and may deprive us of coverage completely.”
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Cunningham believed that specter justified development of “a backup covert system which would rely, above all, on concealment” and “be kept on the shelf until needed.” Requirements of a covert system would include a clandestine and preferably mobile launch system, silent launch and operations, and radar cross-sections that did not show up on Soviet radar screens. Although the resolution of the photographs would be inferior to that of the more conventional systems, it was believed that “useful coverage can be obtained.”
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But Dirks and his colleagues quickly concluded that a secret satellite in low-earth orbit was not feasible. The Soviet space detection and tracking network would easily pick up the launch and orbit of the satellite. An alternative was to place the spacecraft in a much higher parking orbit, bringing it down only when needed. Possibly the Soviets would miss or be confused by this unusual maneuver. But this strategy also had a fatal flaw. As the film sat in space, unused, it would begin to degrade. By the time the secret satellite received NRO’s call, the entire film supply might be worthless.
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The alternative to film brought Dirks and his colleagues full circle to the concept of a television-type imagery return system, which had been suggested in the 1950s by Merton Davies and Amrom Katz of the RAND Corporation.
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The desirability of such a system had not been forgotten, despite the success of CORONA and the failure of SAMOS. Whether or not such a satellite could be kept secret from Soviet space watchers, it could send back timely data. The Cuban missile crisis was one dramatic example of the potential value of “real-time”—an example appreciated by both Bud Wheelon and a young Leslie Dirks. One day they visited AT&T’s Bell Labs in New Jersey to take a peek at something the company was working on, a special dispensation
from Bell Labs president and PFIAB member William Baker, whose organization didn’t ordinarily allow outsiders to see work in progress. The two CIA officials saw work being done on charge-coupled devices (CCDs), which AT&T hoped would serve as key technology in videophones.
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Such technology was not mature in 1963, but Dirks realized that it might be in 1973. Over the rest of the decade and into the next, he and other OSP staffers, including Robert Kohler and Julian Caballero, kept the project alive, looking for advances in technology that would permit such a system and seeking support for research into areas relevant to its development.
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By the end of the 1960s, several crises had demonstrated the limitations of film-recovery systems for warning of imminent attacks and the monitoring of the wars that followed. There was an appreciation that existing satellite imagery sensors were “rigid and unresponsive on timely basis.”
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On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a series of devastating air strikes on Egyptian air bases. The attacks followed the mid-May withdrawal of U.N. troops from the Sinai and Gaza, the closure of the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping, the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, and the U.S. government’s assessment that a serious international effort to open the canal was unlikely.
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Over the next six days, Israeli forces racked up devastating victories against Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air and ground forces on three fronts. By noon on June 5, Egypt had lost 309 of its 340 serviceable aircraft, including all thirty of its TU-16 bombers that could be used against cities. Three Israeli Defense Force armored corps broke into Egyptian territory, took the Gaza Strip, and penetrated to the heart of the Sinai.
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In response to the Jordanian strafing of a small Israeli airfield, the Israeli air force struck back, catching thirty Jordanian planes on the ground. Israeli ground forces rolled through to the West Bank in a matter of days. Syria had also struck against Israel on the opening day of the war, bombing an oil refinery, Israeli positions at the Sea of Galilee, and an air base. An Israeli air strike followed, all but eliminating the Syrian air force. On June 9, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan instructed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to seize the Golan Heights, from which Syria had been conducting artillery attacks in peacetime. By noon the next day, the Syrian town of Kuneitra had fallen into IDF hands, and the road to Damascus was open.
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From the beginning of the war, the United States was monitoring events as closely as possible. But neither CORONA nor KH-7/GAMBIT satellites made a contribution. A KH-7 had been launched the day before the war. In addition, a CORONA mission that began May 9 continued for sixty-four days, including the entire period of the war. In an attempt to get better coverage, technicians altered the orbit of one of the satellites, but the returned film was apparently of poor quality. Not surprisingly, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later did not recall that satellite reconnaissance played any role in U.S. intelligence gathering during the war.
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Former JCS chairman Maxwell Taylor, then a member of the PFIAB, was among those whose interest in the possible value of real-time photography was stimulated by the war. After a July briefing by Helms, he sent the CIA a series of questions concerning intelligence collection capabilities in the context of the Six-Day War, leading Dirks, then head of OSP’s Design and Analysis Division, to explain CORONA capabilities during crisis situations. In a memo, Dirks noted that “I particularly emphasized the problems associated with using recovery film type systems in a crisis situation.”
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During a joint CIA-NSA-DIA briefing on August 31, Taylor indicated his continuing interest in the question of satellite reconnaissance in crisis situations. In particular, he inquired about the relationship between technological developments and the prospect of obtaining imagery in near real-time to support decisionmakers during a crisis.
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Less than a year after that briefing, on August 20, 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact forces stormed into Czechoslovakia to put an end to Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face.” In the months leading up to the invasion, attention in the West had turned to the question of whether the Soviets would use brute force, as they did in Hungary in 1956. A memorandum by the CIA’s Office of Strategic Research on August 2 noted, “It appears the Soviet high command has in about two weeks time completed military preparations sufficient for intervening in Czechoslovakia if that is deemed necessary by the political leadership.”
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Although a minority of analysts in each of the major analytical agencies (CIA, DIA, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research) believed that the Soviets would invade, a majority in each of those agencies expected the Soviets to exercise restraint.
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In an attempt to accumulate hard data on Soviet plans, the intelligence community relied on monitoring the Soviet press, diplomatic reporting, clandestine agents, and signals intelligence. KEYHOLE satellites also
could provide important data. Signs of impending invasion that might show up in satellite photography included increased activities at airfields, troop departures, extensive logistics activities, and, most dramatic, the massing of troops near the Czech border.

A KH-8/GAMBIT launched on August 6 performed poorly and was deorbited after nine days. As a result, the CIA was forced to rely solely on the KH-4B launched on August 7. A film package returned prior to August 21 proved reassuring. It showed no indications of Soviet preparations for an invasion.
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But on August 20, Warsaw Pact troops, led by those from the Soviet Union, entered Czechoslovakia and brought an end to the Prague Spring.

When, subsequent to the invasion, the second and last of the CORONA film buckets was recovered and analyzed, the imagery showed “unmistakable Soviet preparations for invasion,” according to Roland Inlow, former chairman of the Committee on Imagery Requirements and Exploitation. Photointerpreters could see that the Soviets had placed crosses on their mobile equipment to distinguish it from similar equipment they had given to the Czech army. The film also showed the presence of large numbers of transport aircraft “lined up wing-tip to wing-tip at an airfield near the western border.” The transports had moved to the airfield under radio silence and would be used to transport the airborne forces that secured Prague.
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The experience was not forgotten by many of those involved in the photo reconnaissance program. One former CIA official recalled that people were “still talking about it years later.” Furthermore, “a lot of good work was done in retrospect”—the photo intelligence did prove valuable in developing warning indicators.
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The Sino-Soviet border hostilities of 1969 marked the fourth significant conflict between the countries since 1962. Notable about 1969 was not only that recent events seemed to highlight the limitations of film recovery systems and the potential value of a real-time system, but that technologies that might permit development of such a system had matured. Thus, in 1969, Leslie Dirks traveled up the Washington-Baltimore Parkway to visit Westinghouse, which was producing light-sensing diodes. Dirks felt that until CCDs were available, those diodes could be used in a real-time electro-optical system, recording the light levels of small segments of a scene; this information could be converted into electronic signals, transmitted to a relay satellite, and then converted on the ground to a photograph of the scene viewed by the satellite seconds earlier.
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Dirks’s investigation of technological developments that could make real-time imagery possible was complemented by two 1969 studies concerning its utility and impact. A June 1969 study, “The Implications of Near-Real Time Imagery on Intelligence Production and Processes,” examined the impact on the CIA of the acquisition of a real-time capability, including the disruption to staffing and schedules. A slightly later study, focused on fifty different crises (including Suez, Cuba, the Six-Day War, and Czechoslovakia) and categorized the crises by their rise, duration, location, and decline; the warning available; and the demands for information. It also addressed what information could have been obtained in each situation, how it might have changed perceptions of the crisis, and the potential utility of such information. It attempted to determine how different degrees of timeliness could have aided decisionmakers.
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The study’s conclusions were sufficiently positive to encourage the DS&T to begin a full-scale effort to develop a real-time system along the lines envisioned by Dirks. Not surprisingly, the CIA and Air Force were soon in competition. As had been the case for many years, the Air Force sought incremental improvements to currently operating systems rather than quantum leaps. Thus, Program A proposed development of FROG—Film-Readout GAMBIT. As its name indicated, FROG would take the film-return KH-8/GAMBIT satellite and add a film-scanning capability, in the manner of SAMOS.
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FROG had been under development since at least the mid-1960s. In an August 1966 memo, Bruce C. Clarke, then the special assistant for special projects to the Deputy Director of Intelligence, noted the system’s projected capabilities. It would have a thirty-to-ninety-day lifetime, the ability to transmit imagery three to four times a day, several ground stations in the United States, and a resolution of three to five feet. For targets at certain latitudes, there might be no more than a twenty-minute gap between photographs being taken and the image being received on the ground. For other targets, there might be a five-day gap resulting from the locations of the target and closest ground station along with the movement of the earth and the satellite. FROG was, according to Bud Wheelon, “a really dumb idea,” whose only purpose was to block the CIA program.
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Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird apparently disagreed, selecting FROG as the next-generation KEYHOLE system. FROG had the advantage of being a modification of an existing system and thus could be brought into operation more quickly than a more revolutionary approach.
But Laird’s decision, if not reversed, would probably mean that it would be a long time before any revolutionary change was made. That prospect did not sit well with Carl Duckett and some of the eminent scientists who served as advisers to the CIA and NRO.
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