Spy Satellites and Other Intelligence Technologies that Changed History

Spy Satellites and Other Intelligence Technologies That Changed History Back in the deepest depths of the Cold War and the "bomber gap", and the infamous "missile gap", President Eisenhower proposed to to the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin the "open skies". But since the US is an open society it was easy for USSR attaches and agents to procure all the maps and guides, they wanted, while in the Soviet Union, in which its own citizens are subject to internal passport control of their movements, all foreigners were constantly tailed and subjected to movement restriction. Afte his proposal was summarily rejected by the paranoid Soviet leaders, Eisenhower authorized the construction of the U2 by the famous "Skunk Works" (c.f.)for the CIA. As a military commander he had made much good use of "all source" materials including the highest security ULTRA sigint. (The Bulge offensive had surprised everyone because the Germans used landlines for communication and the bad weather prevented recon aircraft from flying missions.) During the early 50s,there were peripheral flights for sigint and some brief penetration missions from the Baltic and weather and atmospheric sampling in the Far East which revealed the soviet atomic bomb tests. The U2 was successful but when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union and survived, the world knew the truth. Though the U2 never overflew the USSR again it had a long and useful career, participating in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The principal agency for foreign mapping in 1963 for US forces was the Army Map Service, a sub-command of the Army Corps of Engineers. A late sixties issue of the National Geographic magazine discussed the Engineer's Discoverer program in detail. This eventually was absorbed into the "Deep Black" (c.f.) program and nothing more was heard of it until the existence of the National Reconnaissance Office and the Corona program were revealed in the 1970s. All that photo based material has long since lost any military value especially the Soviet Union collapsed. Today after the end of the Cold War, the space programs at Tyuratam, now in Kazakhistan, were opened to the market place, and vast stocks of once classified maps and charts and the imagery as well have been available for many years now on the open market. Ike though, bided his time, even though the German expatriate group headed by Wernher von Braun (c.f) could have launched a satelite earlier the US Navy program, untainted by any historical allegations, sat poised to launch. Kruschev made the first move and since the Sputnik was an orbital vehicle which passed over most of the globe in each day, Ike now saw the way clear to openly begin launches, and did not protest but stated the obvious, that the free passage of Sputnik was an acceptable fait de accompli. As it was the first Soviet space vehicles were litle more than stunts, useful pay loads and heavy lifts of reconnaissance and sigint sensors were lacking. Instead one c