Secret Spy In Sky Helped U.S. Keep Lid On Cold War -- Satellite's Exploits Only Now Coming To Light

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - On Aug. 19, 1960, a U.S. Air Force C-119 cargo plane snatched an 84-pound gold-plated drum, suspended beneath a parachute, over the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

The Air Force announced the operation as recovery of the second payload in a scientific research program called Discoverer. The news attracted little attention at the time.

But that's not what really happened.

The capsule recovered that day marked the first successful operation of an orbiting spy satellite called Corona that had been designed and built under the deepest secrecy by Lockheed Corp. at a helicopter plant in Menlo Park, Calif.

Inside the capsule were a pair of reels holding 20 pounds of film packed with pictures of military installations inside the Soviet Union.

Corona operated until 1972, ultimately delivering images of 750 million square miles of the Earth's surface - mostly in the Soviet Union and China - that changed history.

But this contribution only now is coming to light because Corona remained classified until this year.

Corona gave a clear picture of our potential enemies, quelling the most paranoid Cold War fears of U.S. political and military leaders.

The satellites inventoried all the Soviet Union's nuclear missiles, bombers, fighters, missile-defense systems and submarines. Corona also monitored China's nuclear-weapons program and kept an eye on military buildups in the Middle East. Confidence in talks Satellite surveillance gave the United States confidence to negotiate nuclear-arms-limitation treaties with the Soviet Union in the 1970s because of the ability to monitor Soviet weapons production. Indeed, U.S. negotiators often knew more than their Soviet counterparts about the Soviet arsenal, said John McMahon, a CIA official in the 1960s who helped supervise Corona.

In 1960, when Corona first began delivering reconnaissance photographs, the United States was still traumatized by the Soviet launch of the first intercontinental ballistic missile in 1957, followed shortly afterward by the first satellite - Sputnik.

The supposed "missile gap" between the United States and the USSR was front-page news and a major issue in the 1960 election campaign.

Corona, however, revealed the truth: The Soviets didn't have 3,000 long-range missiles, as some U.S. analysts feared, but only about a half-dozen.

Although there's no way to prove or disprove McMahon's conclusion, independent analysts support him. Jeffrey Richelson, an author who has written several books on national security issues and spy satellites, goes even further.

During the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, the United States went to the very brink of a nuclear war. Without the knowledge of the Soviet Union's military capability that Corona supplied, Richelson suggests, President Kennedy might not have been able to pull back from Armageddon.

But the dramatic technical accomplishments of Corona and its immense political significance had been hidden behind an almost impenetrable shroud of secrecy until this year. Declassified in February In February, President Clinton declassified the Corona program. For the first time, the government officials and defense-contractor employees who worked on Corona could tell their stories publicly. And, also for the first time, the United States released spy-satellite photographs.

Corona was born out of anxiety and desperation. The Soviet Union in the 1950s was a tightly closed society, and the United States knew almost nothing about its military strength.

President Eisenhower reluctantly agreed to several ill-conceived reconnaissance projects. In January 1956, a program called "Genetrix" began launching high-altitude balloons with cameras to drift across the Soviet Union. But the Soviets immediately spotted the balloons and vigorously protested. The balloon flights were abandoned after a year.

The United States then switched to the high-altitude U-2 spy plane, built by Lockheed. The Air Force and Lockheed promised the U-2 would fly so high and so fast the Soviets would never detect it.

That was dead wrong - Soviet radar picked up the first U-2 flight in July 1956 and, again, loudly protested every subsequent U-2 overflight.

On May 1, 1960, the U-2 program came to a crashing halt when pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Soviet territory, captured and subjected to a show trial in Moscow. Suddenly, the United States was deprived of any visual way to inspect military activity inside the Soviet bloc. Satellites come into focus The possibility of launching spy satellites, however, had been studied for more than a decade. The Air Force created the first formal satellite development program, known as WS-117L, in 1953 and granted the first production contract to Lockheed in October 1956. But the effort didn't get top priority until the Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957.

WS-117L had developed enough security leaks that, in February 1958, the Air Force publicly canceled the photographic surveillance program. The project, given the new name "Corona," underwent "covert reactivation" under joint management of the Air Force and the CIA.

Lockheed got the go-ahead to build Corona shortly after. The security was so tight that James Plummer, manager of the Corona program at Lockheed, had to tell his friends he was resigning for a job elsewhere. He was then sent to work from a motel room until he could find suitable production facilities that wouldn't be publicly associated with Lockheed.

Security, however, was much less of a concern in 1958 than the awesome technical challenge facing Plummer and his colleagues.

"When Corona was started, no one knew if you could put a satellite into the orbit you wanted, that you could build a camera that would get meaningful information and that you could get it back," McMahon said.

"A lot of important people from big universities said it couldn't be done," Plummer said. "The thing we had going for us was that they (the Air Force and CIA) had no other solution."

This lack of alternatives was crucial in the early days of Corona. From January 1959 through July 1960, 13 launches failed, prompting some military leaders to push for canceling the program.

The first partial success came Aug. 10, 1960, when the capsule of Discoverer XIII was recovered from the Pacific Ocean - the first time an object had been retrieved from space. The Air Force, eager for publicity, touted the accomplishment, although Discoverer XIII was only a test flight carrying an American flag as its primary cargo. Nervous Corona technicians barely had time to extract a secret 10-pound device - intended to measure whether Soviet radar could detect the orbiting satellite - before the capsule went on a media tour.

The success of Discoverer XIV about a week later remained secret. The single mission produced more photographic coverage than the entire three-year U-2 program, although the images were fuzzy and couldn't distinguish objects smaller than 40 feet across.

The satellite cameras, known by the code name Keyhole, quickly got better. The original KH-1 was replaced by a succession of models, culminating in the KH-4 in February 1962. By the end of the decade, the KH-4 could pick out objects just five feet across - making it possible to distinguish between cars and trucks on the streets surrounding the Kremlin. Some embarrassments, too For all its accomplishments, however, Corona also suffered through its share of embarrassing moments.

Discoverer II on April 13, 1959, marked the first time a Corona satellite went into orbit and ejected a film capsule.

But the capsule went into re-entry at the wrong time and landed on a snowy island north of Norway instead of hitting its target near Hawaii. Air Force search planes rushed to the area but never found the capsule.

A Soviet icebreaker was spotted in the area, however, and the CIA suspects the capsule ended up in Moscow.

Another Corona capsule took a wrong turn on May 26, 1964. Mission controllers thought a defective satellite, which burned up during re-entry, had never ejected a capsule. But one of the golden buckets floated to the ground in a remote corner of southwestern Venezuela. Local residents recovered the strange object, broke it into pieces and presented the pieces to their children as toys.

Newspaper stories of this gift from the sky eventually reached the U.S. Embassy, and red-faced Air Force officials had to rush to South America with a hastily concocted story about an unimportant NASA science experiment gone awry.