Eyes In The Skies

Whether one is fighting a war or maintaining a III peace, knowing what the other side is up to can be more valuable than any amount of personnel or weaponry. Few techniques are more effective for this than observation from above. What we now call aerial reconnaissance dates from the beginning of the Civil War, when three professional balloonists—John Wise, John LaMountain, and Thaddeus Lowe—offered their services to the Union.

In June 1861, the same month that Lowe made his first aerial observations of the war, LaMountain was sent to the Union’s Fort Monroe, near Hampton Roads, Virginia, where he would ascend repeatedly and make detailed reports on the Rebels’ positions. Wise and Lowe stayed in Washington for the Battle of Bull Run. After the Confederates won that fight, Lowe’s aerial observations revealed that the Southern forces were too disorganized to follow up on their victory. His work helped convince officials that balloons could be useful in war, and he went on to set up an aeronautical corps that grew to include five observation balloons.

A Boston photographer, James Wallace Black, had already invented aerial photography, taking pictures of that city in October 1860 from a balloon piloted by the aeronaut Samuel Archer King. But the cameras of the day were too cumbersome for military use. Instead LaMountain made drawings of enemy positions, as did draftsmen sent aloft by Lowe. In 1862, during the Union advance on Richmond, Lowe’s observations at Fair Oaks enabled Gen. Georee McClellan to shift his forces in time to hold off a major counterattack.

However, balloons offered no easy way to pierce the fog of war. At Fredericksburg, in December 1862, this fog existed literally in the form of a heavy morning mist that prevented much reconnaissance. At Chancellorsville, in May 1863, Gen. Joseph Hooker misinterpreted Lowe’s reports (along with other intelligence) and concluded that Gen. Robert E. Lee was preparing to withdraw when in fact he was launching a withering flank attack. The Union lost both these battles, and after Chancellorsville, Lowe’s balloon corps was dissolved.

Half a century later, in World War I, aerial reconnaissance—this time conducted with heavier-than-air craft in addition to balloons—showed its value from the outset. Less than three weeks after Britain entered the war, three airmen spotted a movement of the German 3d Army near Dinant, Belgium, that threatened the British right flank, and they reported the information in time to allow the British force to retreat.

Two weeks later aerial observation played a critical role in the French decision to fight the Battle of the Marne. The Germans were pouring into France, headed for Paris. Then Gen. Alexander von Kluck suddenly turned his army to the east, hoping to encircle the Allies. French and British commanders learned of this maneuver from several sources, but the airborne ones were particularly important. The intelligence showed that the Germans would be vulnerable to an immediate counterattack, which the Allies executed.

French forces also made good use of aerial photoreconnaissance at Verdun in 1916. That ghastly battle amounted to a vast eight-month artillery duel, and throughout the struggle French field commanders relied on aerial photography for locating targets and assessing the effects of bombardments. Film-developing stations turned out as many as 5,000 prints per day, which corps commanders received within an hour of exposure. During 1917 and 1918 the British took more than half a million reconnaissance photos. Technicians pieced together hundreds of them to form a detailed photographic map of the entire Western Front.

Photoreconnaissance expanded anew at the start of the Second World War to support strategic bombing. In the earlier war, which had begun barely a decade after Kitty Hawk, not even the best planes had had range enough to venture far behind the enemy’s front lines, and bombing techniques had been rudimentary. But by World War II bombers could fly from England to Berlin and hit specific targets with considerable accuracy. Knowing what lay inside enemy territory became much more important.

An early success came in March 1940, when a British pilot managed to photograph most of the heavily industrialized Ruhr Valley. The resulting photomosaic was still in use four years later. The Allied Central Interpretation Unit, based in an eighteenth-century abbey overlooking the Thames, issued data used in the careful planning of bombing raids, and every bomber carried its own camera to record whether it had struck its target. By war’s end the unit was 1,750 strong, and officers and staff were supplementing its photos with large, detailed three-dimensional models of targets. Thirteen specially trained photography squadrons—five British, five American, and three Canadian—provided raw material for the work.

Such international cooperation continued during the Cold War. In 1952 Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of America’s Strategic Air Command, sent a group of B-45 jet bombers to England; the Royal Air Force flew them over the Soviet Union and shared their findings with the Yanks. When B-47s, which had longer range, became available, LeMay began launching flights directly from the United States. But President Dwight Eisenhower eventually called a halt, preferring to leave intelligence gathering to the Central Intelligence Agency.

The first of the CIA’s aerial reconnaissance sources was the specially designed U-2 spy plane, which entered service in 1956. On a typical flight a U-2 would cross the entire Soviet Union at 494 miles per hour and an altitude of 70,000 feet, to keep from being shot down. Despite the great height, U-2s quickly showed up on Soviet radar screens, prompting diplomatic protests. Ike responded by sharply curtailing the flights (while telling the Soviets he was stopping them completely). The first 5 missions took place in July 1956; during the next four years there were only 15 more.

Nevertheless, the U-2 proved useful. It photographed known military air bases and showed that the Soviets were building their bomber forces far more slowly than had been feared. One mission spotted the huge Tyuratam rocket center known as Baikonur Cosmodrome, whose existence the CIA had never suspected. And of course U-2s were among the aircraft that revealed that the Soviets were secretly installing long-range nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Reconnaissance overflights legally counted as acts of war, and in 1960 the Soviets succeeded in shooting down a U-2, triggering an international incident that forever ended U-2 forays over Russia. By then, however, the CIA had a replacement, a system of orbiting satellites knowji as CORONA . The CORONA program’s spacecraft, initially called Discoverer, would take a set of photographs from 100 miles above the earth, roll the exposed film into a capsule, and drop it. After the specially insulated capsule re-entered the atmosphere, a parachute opened up, and an Air Force transport plane would snag it.

What did theDiscoverers discover? At the start of the program, in 1960, Americans brooded about the missile gap” brought by Moscow’s early lead in rockets. Photos from space set this concern to rest. The main Soviet ICBM, analysts declared in September 1961, was too unwieldy to be deployed as a strategic weapon.

CORONA spacecraft photographed all the USSR’s aerospace launch complexes, including a major and previously unknown center in the far north, at Plesetsk. It specialized in military spacecraft, capturing at its height more than half the world’s space launches. It also followed the progress of antiballistic missile installations and located antiaircraft batteries, allowing the Strategic Air Command to find routes for its bombers to avoid them. Photographs of military bases and industrial sites kept analysts up to date on fighters, bombers, tanks, submarines, and the rapidly growing Soviet surface navy. Finally, CORONA satellites provided a wealth of general cartographic information.

The spacecraft of CORONA continued to fly until 1972, when they gave way to the more capable Big Bird. Like its predecessor, Big Bird was a “bucket dropper,” requiring physical recovery of its exposed film. This did not permit real-time reconnaissance, which would be invaluable during fast-moving events. A complete roll of film took up to a week to expose, and a month might be required for images to make their way from satellite to photo interpreter’s desk. This was fine for following the slow deployment of missiles or submarines but useless in war.

The Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel overran its enemies, showed that a major conflict could begin and in which Israel overran its enemies, showed that a major conflict could begin and end while film from a spacecraft was on its way to Washington. A year later, when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, CORONA clearly showed their preparations, including the massing of troops. But by the time CIA analysts saw the photos, the invasion had already occurred. (Another problem with satellite photography was much more mundane but equally intractable: When the satellites ran out of film, there was no way to resupply them.)

Video was one possible solution, but it couldn’t capture fine enough detail. Then, in the late sixties, two physicists at Bell Labs, William S. Boyle and George E. Smith, invented the charge-coupled device. It captured light with high efficiency on a microchip instead of on photographic film, something like today’s digital cameras. Since it was electronic, it could transmit its images digitally, too. This allowed for both real-time processing and computer manipulation to bring out fine detail. Furthermore, a satellite with such end uihile film from a spacecraft was on its may to Washington a system could stay up almost indefinitely since it had no film to run out of.

The resulting reconnaissance satellite, KH-Il, was nicknamed Kennan after the great Cold War statesman. Its optics included a mirror 90 to 95 inches in diameter. The first Kennan went up in December 1976 and remained active for two years; later ones operated for as long as a decade. The Kennan showed details down to six inches. Leaked photos of a Black Sea shipyard suggested what this meant: In a picture taken by a spacecraft 500 miles away, the cables on the cranes at dockside were clearly visible.

Such fine resolution is even more remarkable when you consider that the plane or satellite is moving at hundreds or thousands of miles an hour above a spinning earth. The camera lens must physically move in the proper direction during exposure with absolute precision. To take pictures at night or through clouds, radar systems are often used, employing techniques similar to those of optical holography.

In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson explained how aerial reconnaissance was changing the arms race: “We know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn’t need to do. We were building things we didn’t need to build. We were harboring fears we didn’t need to harbor.” More than 20 years later the analyst Jeffrey Richelson described reconnaissance from space as “one of the most significant technological developments of this century. Indeed, its impact on postwar international affairs is probably second only to that of the atomic bomb. The photoreconnaissance satellite, by dampening fears of what weapons the other superpower had available and whether military action was imminent, has played an enormous role in stabilizing the superpower relationship.” What began as balloons over Civil War battlefields had grown into a linchpin of the national defense.