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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781760872151 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 09/03/2019 |
| Sold by: | Bookwire |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 899 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
The space race
The detonation of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb on 12 August 1953 sent shockwaves rippling far beyond the test site on the remote Kazakhstan steppe. The test, known as Joe-4 (it was the fourth Soviet nuclear test announced by the Americans), had an explosive power of roughly 400 kilotons of TNT — around 30 times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. Although much less powerful than US thermonuclear tests conducted over the Marshall Islands, Joe-4 had — at least according to the Soviets — one big advantage: it was ready for immediate delivery by bomber.
The Americans understood at once the seriousness of the Soviet nuclear threat. The scientific advisory board of the National Security Agency entrusted a special study group to investigate. The top-secret Robertson report, compiled in 1953 and only approved for release in 2013, concluded that a surprise atomic attack on the United States 'would result in carnage, devastation, psychological shock, and curtailment of our retaliatory ability on a scale difficult to estimate or even to comprehend in terms of any previous experience'.
The same year the Continental Defense Committee, chaired by retired General Harold Bull, warned that existing US air defence plans were wholly inadequate and declared the need for strategic warning of a possible Soviet nuclear attack to be so great 'as to warrant any possible attack on the problem, regardless of its cost, funds and manpower'.
Existing radar and ground observer installations could at best give around 30 minutes' warning of an attack on coastal targets. Such a warning was only useful for a tactical response, since the attack would already be underway.
What the US government desperately wanted was to stretch the reliable warning period of a Soviet attack from minutes or hours to 'two or four days'. This, it was thought, would give the military time for 'the complete deployment of our offensive and defensive forces, which would increase the chance of turning the enemy's operation before its mission had been accomplished and might even induce the enemy to abandon the attack'.
The US air defence system as it existed in the early 1950s could not provide such a warning; in fact, previous studies had been undertaken on the understanding that, in the words of the Robertson report, 'no earlier warning will be available'. In order to obtain the desired early warning of Soviet attack, the US realised it would have to turn to 'other sources of intelligence'. As in the past, these could be divided into overt, covert and signals intelligence. While traditional overt and covert intelligence should be 'vigorously cultivated', the Robertson report warned that to rely on them would be to 'court disaster'.
Signals intelligence — 'above all COMINT [communications intelligence]' — was judged to be the most promising source of strategic warning of an impending attack on the continental United States. Interception of 'high-level cryptographic systems' and their exploitation 'on a timely basis' therefore became the primary recommendation of the Robertson report.
The strategic importance of signals intelligence had been repeatedly shown during the Second World War, with the interception of high-level Japanese and German messages allowing the Allies to penetrate the enemy lines, enter government ministries and military headquarters, and gain vital early warning of impending operations. According to the CIA's 'History of SIGINT [signals intelligence] in the Central Intelligence Agency, 1947–70', Japanese and German military communications and secret diplomatic communications were 'an open book to the US Government', while the Battle of Britain, the invasion of Europe, the war in Africa, and the Pacific war were 'all fought to a large extent with prior knowledge of enemy capabilities and intentions attained through US-UK COMINT'.
General Marshall acknowledged that Allied code-breaking had been crucial to both Eisenhower's campaign in Europe and Macarthur's in the Pacific and by helping to shorten the war had saved countless American lives.
The cost and difficulty of building landlines in a country as vast as the USSR made the Soviets especially dependent on radio communications. This, it was hoped, would give CIA eavesdroppers the opportunity to 'penetrate the frontiers and to share the secrets of the Soviet government'.
The Soviet atomic arsenal had grown rapidly since the first Russian bomb was detonated in 1949. Four years later the Robertson report estimated that Moscow had an atomic stockpile (excluding thermonuclear bombs) of about 120 weapons, which was predicted to rise to 300 by 1955. The Soviet long-range bomber force was believed to have 1000 propeller-driven medium bombers, which the report judged to be 'capable of reaching all parts of the United States on a one-way mission'. These bombers, similar to the US B-29, were expected to be augmented by approximately 180 heavy bombers that would 'most likely be capable of reaching all targets within the US from Soviet bases on a two-way mission carrying atomic weapons'.
To counter this threat, the Americans had 53 fighter squadrons, each with 25 interceptors (only 15 per cent of which could fly in all weathers) and 57 anti-aircraft battalions. The interceptors were fitted with forward-firing guns. 'Our present air defence system has a kill probability of between 0 and 15%', the report noted grimly.
By expanding the defensive radar network across Alaska and Canada, the government hoped to be able to increase the warning time for a coastal attack from 30 minutes to two hours. More interceptor squadrons would be added and anti-aircraft battalions would be equipped with guided missiles instead of guns. The cost of upgrading was going to be enormous: billions of dollars a year.
By the end of 1960 an estimated US$40 billion would have been spent on buying 90 minutes of extra warning time and a kill probability of 'approximately 50%'. It was not nearly enough. Military planners were determined to have an effective strategic warning system, a system that gave them days, not hours. Cost, in the words of the 'History of SIGINT in the Central Intelligence Agency', was a 'secondary consideration'.
The CIA began experimenting with 'sky spying' in the mid-1950s. Early efforts involved floating balloons equipped with cameras over Russia. The development of the U-2 spy plane allowed the CIA to conduct day and night ultra-high-altitude reconnaissance, with the aircraft capable of loitering for long periods over Soviet territory while staying beyond the reach of MiG fighters. U-2 surveillance flights over the Soviet Union came to a sudden halt when a plane flown by Gary Powers was shot out of the sky by a Russian surface-to-air missile on 1 May 1960, just two weeks before a keenly anticipated east-west summit in Paris. (In a paper entitled 'American geosynchronous SIGINT satellites', published in 1993, Major A. Andronov, a Soviet military expert, claimed that American high-altitude spy planes were shot down not just over the USSR but over China, East Germany and Cuba. Andronov estimated that 'in the period 1950–1969 about 15 US and NATO reconnaissance aircraft were shot down'.)
The loss of Powers' U-2 embarrassed President Eisenhower and eventually forced the United States to admit its airborne spying program. Gary Powers survived, but the incident — and the attempted US cover-up — scuppered the Paris summit and accelerated the US–Soviet arms race. Eisenhower suspended flights over the USSR, a decision informed by the knowledge that a new piece of surveillance equipment was about to become available.
In August 1960 the US obtained its first photographs from a satellite over the USSR. The project was codenamed 'Keyhole' and the first satellite, KH-1, did everything it was supposed to. Although the first surveillance pictures were not as clear as those taken by the U-2s, the Keyhole camera photographed more Soviet territory than all U-2 missions combined. Its best resolution of about 40 feet enabled analysts to count individual bombers on Soviet airfields. At a stroke, the mission disproved the scaremongers' claim of a 'missile gap' that favoured the Soviet Union over the United States.
Information about the Keyhole satellites remained secret until the 1990s. In his article 'What we officially know: Fifteen years of satellite declassification', Jeffery Charlston writes that President Bill Clinton signed an executive order in 1995 instructing the CIA chief, Robert Gates, to release information about three 'space-based national intelligence reconnaissance systems' dating back to the early 1960s. They were known as the Corona, Argon and Lanyard missions. All three acquired photographic images from space and returned the film to Earth for processing and analysis.
Retrieval of the film canisters was fraught with difficulties. After being hurled into orbit aboard a Thor rocket, the satellite was manoeuvred into place by controllers at ground stations until its camera was pointing towards Earth. Exposed film was wound onto a spool in the re-entry vehicle, known as the 'bucket', for eventual return to Earth. When the reconnaissance mission was completed, the ground-based controllers would instruct the bucket to separate from the booster stage and use its own retro-rocket to position it for re-entry. After hurtling through the atmosphere, the bucket had to jettison its heat shield and guidance system and release a parachute before either being caught by a passing aircraft or scooped out of the ocean before it sank. Between August 1960 and January 1962 there were 26 Corona satellite flights but only 11 successful recoveries.
Camera resolution improved over the decade and retrievals became increasingly reliable as more hazardous land recoveries were abandoned in favour of mid-air 'catches'. As well as improving film capacity, engineers added a second bucket, allowing for images to be urgently returned to Earth midway through a mission. Weather, however, remained an intractable problem for optical photography from space, just as it did on Earth. Huge quantities of precious satellite film came back with nothing but pictures of Soviet clouds.
By the start of the 1970s, according to the 'History of SIGINT in the Central Intelligence Agency', satellite photography had become 'the principal US intelligence tool in denied areas', providing the US military with 'routine surveillance through regular detailed photography of known target installations'.
Australia had been allowed to see surveillance photographs from US satellites since the 1960s and was on the distribution list for material from the Keyhole satellites. In his book Inside the Wilderness of Mirrors, Paul Dibb writes that throughout the 1970s Australia received photography from the KH-9 Keyhole satellites, which was 'delivered … by US military aircraft to photographic interpreters in the top-secret seventh floor of JIO' (Joint Intelligence Organisation, superseded in 1990 by the Defence Intelligence Organisation).
Soviet airfields and missile sites were constantly monitored by orbiting Keyhole satellites. Steady enhancements in the quality of photographs enabled CIA intelligence analysts to zoom in not just on military structures but on vehicles and equipment. But the limitations of the technology — a finite film supply, the need to return the film physically to Earth for analysis, and the relatively poor resolution of the wide-angle camera — spurred engineers to hunt for new solutions.
The CIA and the US Air Force each ran their own photographic satellite programs. Since August 1960 the two programs had been coordinated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Based in the Pentagon, the NRO was reported to have the biggest budget of any US intelligence agency. By the end of the decade it was effectively in charge of managing and operating all the United States' secret satellite reconnaissance programs.
The performance of the Corona satellites steadily improved, but they all suffered from a basic limitation: the wide-angle cameras were designed to search large areas for objects of significance, not to investigate specific targets. Increasingly, the CIA relied on intercepted Soviet signals to identify targets for its spy satellites. These signals came from sources including radio communications, electromagnetic radiation, telemetry signals (such as those emitted during missile tests) and radar. Of these, the CIA came to consider telemetry the most important.
Among the crucial electronic data sent back to Earth during a missile test was information about rocket-motor thrust, fuel consumption and guidance systems. Data about critical events such as the firing of explosive bolts to separate different stages of the missile or to release the warhead (or warheads) would also be conveyed by telemetry signals. Listening in on this continuous flow of missile data enabled CIA telemetry analysts to draw conclusions about the number and size of warheads carried by a given type of Soviet missile, the missile's range and the likely accuracy of the warhead after separation.
Much of the signals traffic generated by Soviet missiles was intercepted by ground stations operated by the CIA in countries bordering the USSR. Some of the most important sites were in West Germany and Iran. Although information about the specific purpose of such sites was highly classified, the CIA was allowed to share some information obtained from these stations with the host country.
While the CIA was tasked with penetrating the Soviet strategic nuclear weapons program, overall control of signals intelligence lay with the National Security Agency (NSA), a shadowy organisation that was to play a central role in the development of Pine Gap.
Created in total secrecy in November 1952 on the orders of President Truman, the NSA is still considered to be the most secret of all US intelligence agencies. The text of the so-called Truman memorandum remained classified for decades. Much of what became known about the agency only came to light as a result of congressional scrutiny of its illegal activities.
Much larger than the CIA, the NSA is housed at Fort George C. Meade, a US Army base in Maryland. In 1980 it was estimated to have 130,000 employees spread across the globe and an annual operating budget of US$50 billion. In his book A Suitable Piece of Real Estate: American installations in Australia, Des Ball reported that the NSA operated 'more than $3 billion worth of decoding machines, scramblers, computers and virtually all known forms of electronic equipment ever built to gather and process information'.
Within five years of its formation, the NSA had to deal with a quantum leap in Soviet surveillance capability. The launch of Sputnik — the first man-made object to orbit the earth — in October 1957 heralded a wave of Russian satellite launches. Keeping up with the telemetry generated by these satellites threatened at times to overwhelm US intercept stations listening in to the signals traffic. Before long (according to the CIA history) the NSA was 'up to its ears' in magnetic tape filled with recordings of Soviet telemetry signals.
Five years after Sputnik, the US launched its first so-called 'ferret' satellite designed to complement the ground-based intercept stations by gathering electronic intelligence from space. The main purpose of the ferret system, according to Jeffery Charlston, was to 'collect radar emissions and identify radar sites'. In the event of nuclear war, accurate information about radar locations and operating features would enable American bombers to evade Soviet (and Chinese) air defences. The ferrets were placed in relatively low orbits, usually between 300 and 400 kilometres. Such orbits were low enough to maximise the sensitivity of their signals monitoring equipment but high enough to ensure an orbital lifespan of several years. Effectively, the satellites could be relied on to function for as long as their batteries and recording equipment held out. Their usefulness was restricted, however, to intercepting electronic signals; the ferret satellites were no good, for example, for eavesdropping on Soviet telephone communications. For that, new satellite technology was needed.
In the summer of 1963 the New York Herald Tribune published an article about the Syncom satellite program, a collaboration between NASA, the US Department of Defense and Howard Hughes's Hughes Aircraft Company. The seeds of the program lay in an idea first put forward by the science and sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, who imagined a system of communications in which signals were bounced from one ground control station to a satellite and then bounced back to a different station on the ground.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Project Rainfall"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Tom Gilling.
Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction ix
1 The space race 1
2 Decision No. 546 17
3 Pine Gapski 25
4 Memo to Mr Bailey 33
5 Cooks, bakers, computer operators 41
6 No need to know 49
7 Make it 'no comment' 57
8 The beauty of the domes 69
9 An Aussie bomb 75
10 Chinese whispers 89
11 Keep your hands off 99
12 The birds 105
13 Number two on the shit list 109
14 'I can't stand that [****]' 121
15 NSSM 204 137
16 Never again 149
17 Drop that hamburger! 155
18 Apocalypse now? 175
19 Reds, ratbags and radicals 193
20 No admission 203
21 A magnet for protest 213
22 Desert Storm 227
23 The canteen tour 237
24 Hunting for Osama 245
25 Snowden 257
26 Rainfall 267
27 A saucerful of secrets 273
Bibliography 301