Taubman, Philip. Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage

Naval War College Review, Wntr, 2004 by Frank C. Mahncke

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. 441pp. $27

That the United States has conducted a program of high-altitude and spaceborne photographic reconnaissance since the mid-1950s is hardly a secret. With the public release of many previously classified source documents and project histories, the time is right for Philip Taubman's history of the strategic issues, politics, personalities, and technologies that drove the development of America's extraordinary space reconnaissance capability.

Taubman has reported on national security and intelligence matters for the New York Times for more than twenty years. He is clearly a thorough researcher; his list of consulted sources, documents, and technical reports runs to eighteen pages of small print. Much of it is material new to the public domain.

Strange as it may seem today, when the United States is rich in strategic intelligence, in the early 1950s it had no reliable estimate of the numbers of strategic bombers, missiles, or nuclear warheads in the Soviet Union. As Winston Churchill said, the USSR was "a riddle wrapped in an enigma." Bison bombers flew circles around Moscow to inflate the estimates of Western air attaches of their numbers; Nikita Khrushchev rattled rockets to add to the noise.

In this murky but threatening environment, the Eisenhower administration was struggling to develop a balanced defense policy, one that would offer effective defense against an opponent whose capabilities and intentions were imperfectly known, but one that would not break the nation's economy. Hard strategic intelligence--reconnaissance-based counts of strategic things--was key. However, the Soviet Union was then what was picturesquely called "a denied area." RB-47s and similar aircraft probed the borders but could not see deeply into the Soviet Union, and their reconnaissance flights often ended in political embarrassment for the government and tragedy for the crews.

At this point, a collection of remarkable men entered the game: Edwin Land of Polaroid, a politically well connected systems engineer; Kelly Johnson, head of Lockheed's fabled "Skunk Works" and builder of extraordinary aircraft; James Baker of Harvard, a most creative camera-system designer; and Arthur Lundhal of the CIA, a gifted photographic interpreter. Richard Bissell, the CIA's legendary manager of high-risk projects, assumed the leadership of this gang and with it brought the fabled U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft and later the first photographic reconnaissance satellites, Corona, to operational fulfillment.

Taubman paints these men unreservedly as patriots, putting their considerable technical skills and imagination at their country's service. That they were. More importantly, they grasped the need for hard strategic intelligence and had the perspective to see the promise of new technologies and their application to the problem of strategic reconnaissance.

The author does a splendid job of interpreting the significance of the technical problems encountered and the brilliant ingenuity of the solutions. Aircraft had never operated at the combination of altitude (over seventy thousand feet) and range (beyond three thousand miles) that strategic overflight of the Soviet Union would require. The solution from Johnson's Skunk Works was the U-2, a sort of jet-powered glider with the climb characteristics of a homesick angel. Baker designed cameras with long focal lengths that folded into tight fuselage and satellite spaces; Kodak developed films that could survive the temperature extremes encountered at reconnaissance altitudes; Lundhal organized a photographic interpretation activity to receive and analyze the pictures.

When satellite-borne cameras replaced the U-2, new and even more demanding technical problems arose. Just getting a satellite launched and into orbit was no mean trick. Choosing between relaying television pictures from space or returning exposed film was a subtle and demanding technical choice. Recovery of the exposed film was selected and became the coolest trick of all: film capsules, ejected from the satellite, reentered the atmosphere and parachuted down to where a specially equipped C-130 snagged them out of the air.

All this seems quite ordinary today, but in the 1950s these were innovative technical accomplishments. Too often strategic histories treat critical technical accomplishments lightly and gloss over their significance to strategic and policy choices. To Taubman's credit, he is attuned to the importance of the enabling technologies and brings their role and impact to the reader's understanding.

After getting the cameras aloft, Taubman turns his attention to the consequences of the pictures they returned. The first flights captured staggering numbers of detailed pictures covering vast sweeps of the hidden interior of the Soviet Union. The pictures revealed that Soviet Bison bombers were as rare as the animal is today in Montana and that Soviet intercontinental missiles, while large and ugly, were few and in a low state of readiness.