Discovery Channel Spies Above Documentary Narrated by Gillian Anderson (1996)

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you this is the Central Intelligence Agency the hub of American spying since its creation in 1947 the agency has been notorious for its covert actions and embarrassing public failures at cloak-and-dagger espionage but the CIA's most successful spying ring has never been compromised since 1960 a small network of secret agents has provided presidents with information that shaped national security policy and quite possibly averted a nuclear apocalypse these spies never sleep and they never defect they are America's powerful photo reconnaissance satellites the spies in space and they are the nation's most closely guarded secret now for the first time the intelligence community has allowed a glimpse beneath the veils of the spies above spy satellites are built and operated by a joint CIA Air Force agency called the National Reconnaissance Office an agency so mysterious that for 32 years even its name was classified copy from NRO facilities across the world space PI's are steered into position and given their orders the pictures they take are first seen at the National photographic interpretation Center everyday imagery analyst search for atomic and chemical weapons as well as warnings of war sometimes they look at photographs other times they look at something called soft copy imagery similar to what you're seeing now the actual look and feel of today's satellite imagery is a state secret these systems are magic as far as I'm concerned they are extraordinarily powerful and I just don't think it makes sense in this era for that information and those technical capabilities to be widely known throughout the world in an ideal world there would be no reason for us to protect this information but it isn't an ideal world that like now it but secrecy won't stop people from guessing this is Hollywood's best attempt at portraying spy satellites in action here CIA agents watch a British raid on a terrorist camp as it happens via real-time infrared imagery we all rush to those movies to see exactly what they're thinking because it's always interesting to see to see are they leading us or are we leading them it's price to say we are moving information worldwide very quickly that allows the u.s. to have a very capable intelligent system that's made of land-based sea based and space-based sensors and if you take all of these kinds of capabilities and put them together it's something that I think the citizens of the US can be quite proud of that is cute how real is it insiders say the pictures look right but it's physically impossible for any satellite to hover above a target generally intelligence agents do not watch live feeds from billion-dollar bank surveillance cameras hanging in space the truth is that imagery analysis is a matter of painstaking detective work more Sherlock Holmes than James Bond most analysts look at pictures through micro stereo scopes searching vast tracts of land for threats to peace and American interests hence the analysts look at everything here a 1970 photo shows gold dredging in Siberia this image helped the CIA estimate the Soviet Union's economic health this is what spying is really about determining the exact strengths and weaknesses of your enemies and your friends fortunately for analysts people are very predictable man lives by custom practices and laws and so if you draw a circle 25 miles circle in most areas of the world man lives and is born lives and dies within that circle and so if you analyze it closely you can find out what he eats and what he does and then get an approximate to an idea of how long he lives and then if you give me comparative coverage that is if you give me coverage over a period of time and then I can look down and I can tell you how many people have died in that area in a given period and by analyzing the graveyards and picking out the new graves this is a graveyard of another kind here in the late 1950s a small team of scientists and secret agents launched the first photo reconnaissance satellite using rockets launch pads and control rooms originally built to send nuclear missiles streaking into Russia they created a device that they hoped would prevent an atomic war the satellite they built was called Corona and it revolutionized the art of spine we were spies aerospace one of the things I wanted to do is position the things so that we weren't carrying armaments we weren't like a spy with explosives for sabotage we were like a spy that you know and I hope that gets caught red-handed if we got caught in there diplomatic protests galore but that doesn't blow up to international relations so but we were a spy it was a spying effort under international law and that was a reason for extreme secrecy that was Eisenhower's winery's space reconnaissance crew directly out of the Cold War race to build nuclear tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles rockets were expensive and dangerous for both the US and the USSR realized that if either side controlled the high ground of space they would have a deadly advantage in 1954 newly elected President Dwight Eisenhower was told by Air Force intelligence that the USSR was building enormous numbers of long-range bombers and ICBMs far more than America was building unless the u.s. acted fast the bomber gap and the missile gap would lead to a nuclear Pearl Harbor but others including the CIA and the Navy said the threat was being exaggerated facts were hard to come by the USSR was a huge police state nearly impossible for human spies to penetrate Eisenhower tried diplomacy at a 1955 summit the president introduced the open skies initiative open skies would let the US and the USSR fly over each other's territory this way both sides could see if the other was preparing to attack Soviet premier Khrushchev flatly rejected the plan Eisenhower felt he had no choice if the Soviets would not volunteer strategic information he would get it illegally in 1956 he authorized the first flight over Russia by the u2 a long-range spy plane built by Lockheed and directly controlled by the CIA it was hoped the plane would fly too fast and too high to be shot down using a rundown Washington car dealership as cover the CIA quietly assembled a small team of experts to analyze the u2's take all of the agents had worked with aerial photography during the Second World War so they had a unique knowledge of the bird's-eye view dino brugioni was one of the first photo interpreters to look inside Mother Russia we were determined to prove the value of aerial photography and later satellite photography we settled in in June and July 4th we had the first mission over the Soviet Union come in so we had to work very fast July 5th we had a mission over Moscow so we made an impact an impression very very fast we looked at the Soviet bomber bases and we couldn't see the number of bombers that supposedly were there we looked at Leningrad and we could see what the Soviet Navy was doing so it was an exciting period then as now the most important mission was finding engaging the strength of nuclear weapons by studying the size of the blast marks shown in this photo analysts realized that Soviet bombs were much less powerful than the USSR and the US military had claimed this was not a popular opinion to Express here we were we were saying in rapid succession the bomber gap doesn't exist the missile gap doesn't exist in and we have some doubts about their nuclear capabilities and so forth so we were at odds with the with the Air Force and many other organizations were saying that the Soviets that that a bomber gap had existed in a missile gap that existed and so forth and we were saying no that's not true the results of the u2 flights were kept top secret but the president found them coming they had the opposite effect on the Soviets who saw the illegal flights as a prelude to invasion I wonder standing of the yotube program why you're doing this why you're violating our airspace it was one idea because you are rushing to begin the war you want to do this even violating it was the same violations of our airspace by Germans in 1940 well you two photos revealed that the Soviet space effort was in many ways ahead of the American space program at the bakken or cosmodrome Russia was preparing to send the first man-made object into Earth orbit setting off a national alarm in America I was at the White House when Sputnik went up initially Eisenhower didn't think it was of great importance he thought this was rather inconsequential and one of his staff referred to it as a grapefruit in space or playing cosmic basketball well within about 24 hours we got word from all around the country that people didn't look at this facetiously at all they were deeply shocked and stunned that we were going to be second in getting into space with a satellite and within 36 hours I would say I sitar had redirected his policy to seeing what we could do to get into the satellite business in fact work on an intelligent satellite was already underway at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base the same Air Force team that was racing to build ICBMs was also exploring the possibility of using Thor Rockets to put reconnaissance satellites into orbit the program called WS 117 l was part of the pioneering aerospace effort led by general bernard Schriever until 1957 Schriever had fought a losing battle for satellite funding after Sputnik went up I used to go back and forth to the Washington from the west coast like a shuttlecock sometimes twice a week making presentations to the Pentagon why can't you go faster making presentations to the Congress congressional committees crisis does really speed things up and speeds them up very quickly because the American people are yelling at the politicians and the politicians are saying okay let's go why haven't we been doing it faster before Eisenhower brought in the CIA to co-manage a new high priority reconnaissance satellite this spies and soldiers partnership became formally known as the National Reconnaissance Office the CIA did have more flexibility in his procurement policies it could spend money faster and with less accountability than the Air Force and that when you're starting something that was an advance arting late which we were with a satellite ws 117 l was officially cancelled the highly classified corona satellite quietly took its place in 1958 I was called into my boss's office and he basically said Jim I want to give you a new assignment he says we want you to go underground and he had a covert program a truly solid need-to-know program that could tell no one I was only allowed to talk to two people in Lockheed those were my two immediate top bosses and our job was a very very short schedule maximum risk complete the design build it launch it and get some film back in the late 1950s rocket launches were too big and too unusual to go unnoticed so the corona satellite was hidden in plain sight a feel good space exploration project called Discoverer served as the cover story since the Thor Rockets and the upper stage of jeanna spacecraft that would carry Corona into orbit were not classified it was possible to put the entire resources of the aerospace community to work and still maintain near absolute secrecy most workers at Vandenberg and Lockheed liked the press we're told that Discoverer was a biomedical research project that would carry mice and monkeys into orbit since space missions were complex and compartmentalized it was easy to keep people confused never never was there a piece of paper in our office that said Corona and never in any conversation in our office was there any mention of the word Corona we were we were the discoverer program and to the rest of the world the press the rest the Air Force we work now there were witting guys along the line that knew that we really weren't regular but they were very few and far between as I say there were hundreds of people who worked on the program that didn't have a clue but there was Cam Ranh work in fact the Agena spacecraft would eventually hold the first 4kh or keyhole cameras this is the KH 4 the only remaining camera used in the corona program this later model device built by i-tech optical systems holds two cameras and two pods of 70 millimeter film for as rocket power increased engineers were able to squeeze in more payload the trick of designing spy satellites is to make cameras light enough to lift strong enough to survive a launch and equipped with enough fuel and optical power to make the trip worthwhile but in the early days of spaceflight just getting the rocket off the ground was no small feat I remember just the display during those early years that just one vehicle after another would would be lost for a variety of silly reasons some of them quite fundamental some of them really silly like we lost a Thor finally we had a good floor on its way and all of a sudden exploded turns out the Range Safety Officer had had detonated it why because on his little plotting board he'd reversed the coordinates he thought it was heading toward Miami and in fact it was a perfectly good flight we had failures all over the place and that's another thing that one has to accept and where you are on the leading edge of technology if you're not willing to accept a little risk you'll never get there as fast as as you can the other thing I object to is saying we had 12 failures he were not really failures they were early attempts at success which unfortunately failed there's a difference finally Discoverer 13 was accessible from start to finish it did not carry a corona camera but it proved the rocket systems were ready the breakthrough came just as time for the u2 had run out President Eisenhower was always very worried in authorizing the YouTube program and the overflights of the Soviet Union that they would shoot it down if they could detect it and get a missile or an aircraft up to you to altitudes and unexpectedly the Soviets tracked the u2 the radar attracted continuously from its first flight but they didn't have the ability to shoot it down until 1960 when they did on May 1st 1960 a u2 flown by Gary Powers was shot down over Russia Powers was captured and tried as a spy Soviet premier Khrushchev who had quietly protested the flights for years publicly excoriated Eisenhower the president was forced to stop all u2 overflights of Russia three months later Powers was sentenced but on the same day this very significant headline appeared only people with stratospherically high security clearances knew it but Discoverer 14 was the first successful flight of a spy satellite the first Corona had enough fuel to make 17 orbits of the earth after passing over tonight territory seven times the satellite ejected a capsule filled with exposed film back down to earth fears were high that Russian submarines might capture Corona capsules that they fell into the ocean so an audacious plan was formed whenever possible airplanes would snatch the capsules as they dropped from the sky I used to give briefings on the Discovery Program and I'd tell him about how the satellite was going to work what we're going to do we're going to apply mice and monkeys and all that junk and we had a capsule on board and that capsule was going to do orbit and it's going to come back to earth and it was going to float down and a parachute well the audience almost without exception had listened to all this stuff about the satellite and I was going to do this that and they didn't have any problem with that and then I'd say and the airplane was going to fly by with a trapeze off the back then it's gonna catch the capsule on roll it in and they'd say hey you're nuts that'll never happen well turned out that was the easiest part of it the hard part was getting the capsule anywhere near the airport once recovered Korona film was rushed to photo interpreters the first corona mission covered 1.5 million square miles of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe these are its first grainy images taken from 100 miles in space 64 new airfields were found but no new ICBMs over the next year picture quality improved and the debates over Soviet strength continued rona vehicle gave us more than we had ever gotten back from all of the u2 Photography taken but still it covered only a portion of the Soviet land NASA we didn't find any missiles in it about the summer of 1961 he began to firm up the impression that in fact there was no missile gap in the sense that the Soviets as a matter of fact were not head of the United States in fact the United States was ahead but there still persisted to be a difference in views actually for some years to come as to the rate at which the Soviets would deploy missiles in the future Corona had taken its first small steps but by the early 1960s America's ICBM program had moved out of the experimental phase and into operational readiness in missile silos like these small cruise set on doomsday watch waiting for the command to begin a nuclear war a new president who had campaigned on a hard-line anti-communist ticket had taken office having denounced Eisenhower for allowing the USSR to gain the lead in the missile gap John Kennedy initially refused to believe CIA estimates Defense Secretary Robert McNamara personally went through the spy photos and discovered there was no missile gap but missiles would continue to play Kennedy in the months ahead a communist revolution in Cuba had given the USSR an opportunity to place strategic bases 90 miles off the coast of Florida setting the stage for a crisis that proved the value of imaging intelligence we had an agent in Cuba that indicated that there was an area in which the Cubans were being moved out and the Russians were being moved in a mission was flown over the area and when we looked at the area that's when we found the missiles we knew that that was going to hit the president right between the eyeballs I mean this was something that they weren't expected expecting and that this was something that was going to create a major crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union because of its slow turnaround time satellite imagery was of little use in this crisis policymakers and analysts needed immediate updates and the best possible picture quality they turned to the u2 for their imagery low-flying missions were ordered and they revealed the Soviets were shipping in enough portable nuclear weapons to wipe out the East Coast in some cases now the photography was driving the crisis and in some cases we were seeing things on photography that the policy people were trying to draft documents to keep up with us as to what the president should do there was those who said do nothing and there was a military the military wanted bombing and invading of Cuba immediately they felt that the the Russians had had taken a calculated risk and we ought to take him up on it Kennedy opted for a middle course a naval blockade of Cuba the crisis worsened hardened nuclear weapons bunkers were found near completion and photographs proved that the Soviets had 24 missiles ready to fire at us targets all-out war was at hand but Kennedy stood his ground he knew from Corona that in a nuclear showdown the US had the advantage finally the Soviets back down the CIA watched and confirmed that all the missiles scheduled to leave were removed as promised for the analysts there was relief and disquiet but now keep in mind you saw what happened at Hiroshima with a 20-kiloton you had 1,200 sac bombers with nuclear weapons he had 400 ICBMs you had polaris submarines at sea with nuclear weapon you had carriers with nuclear weapons on them there was going to be lots if we went to war 70 Russian cities were scheduled for destruction by SAC so you can imagine if all of this weaponry was launched what would have happened not only to the Soviet Union but what would have happened to the world the close call of the Cuban Missile Crisis led to better communication between the US and the USSR but it did not slow down the production of nuclear bombs in fact the arms race continued at an even faster pace this Minuteman 3 missile silo is one of the thousands the u.s. built by 1970 warheads had become smaller and more capable one Minuteman now carried three mini missiles each of which could hit targets hundreds of miles apart with a 375 kilo ton blast - Amos missiles accurately the u.s. needed precise geodetic coordinates for every point on earth spy satellites provided the means to do this the argon or kh5 camera let America map the world for the first time data from Corona was then used to figure out exactly where to drop the bombs and the Soviets were offering plenty of strategic targets by 1970 they had built 2,200 ICBMs space-based reconnaissance was less of a priority for us it was even not the second and the third is not first priority all these photographs that military came in one and of course they told to who show Americans will be ahead they will know everything about us we have to do the same so it was signed the decree the decision of the government to begin of designing this and it was order to Corral Sergei Korolev Russia's chief space designer was ordered to quickly build a Soviet version of Corona he pragmatically chose to drop a camera inside the same Bostick pod he had built for the first manned space missions the spy satellite codename Zenit was launched in 1962 its primary task gathering geodetic data on the US for accurate targeting of ICBMs meanwhile improvements in rocket boosters and cameras had extended the life of corona satellites from hours to weeks launches continued roughly once a month with little notice NASA's manned space program had long since diverted public attention from the mysterious flights at Vandenberg slowly but surely the analysts at n pick were analyzing and cataloging every strategic threat in the world the National Intelligence Estimate an annual report used by policymakers to determine defense spending was no longer entirely built on guesswork Corona provided solid facts about military strength economic health and social organization photo interpreters probably knew more about the inner workings of the USSR than most of its citizens interpreters have to be able to recognize thousands of objects from overhead taking into account the effects of the 32,400 possible angles of the Sun on an object imagery analysis is still too subjective for computers to be of much help this mass of scars baffles ordinary viewers but analysts immediately recognize it as a tank firing range analysts also watched changes in key areas over time this is Russia's severa dansk shipyard in 1964 two submarines are docked in a holding pen this is the same shipyard in the winter of 1968 the curved markings were made by an icebreaker the Soviets had a great pension for security and they would secure their installations and not with one but sometimes with as many as five fences so looking down when you're scanning the photography if you see an installation that's heavily secured then you analyze it very very carefully a missile is a very precious thing it costs millions of dollars they're big and so good roads were constructed but the roads also had to be constructed with wide radius turns so that you could move the missile about and so all you had to do is follow these roads with the right radius turns and then they would end at a missile silo I was really surprised looking at satellite photography that we could see if you walk in a field in the early morning you create a path through the field when you disturb the do and this could be seen from a hundred miles up in space the point that I'm trying to make here is that we see things that the ground leader is not a cognizant of at all when he's doing things on earth the USSR and China knew they were being watched but they could not be certain how much detail we could see the Soviets launched a deception campaign with less than spectacular results but one that stands out most in my mind was the rubber submarine there was a replica of a submarine tied up at one of the piers and there was a considerable storm that blew by and on the next image we had this was half deflated and bent in half and it looked like a submarine that was at right angles with the were the two parts of it once a month Coronas latest findings were distributed to the national security community spy photos had changed the nature of intelligence and greatly enhanced the credibility of CIA analysts the biggest impact was felt in the White House every president became quite knowledgeable on intelligence when trouble developed in the foreign field you can ignore intelligence until you actually have to understand what the situation is on the ground so that you can make policy and it's particularly true in the national security arena when a miscalculation could very well lead to a major conflict of some sort all presence became experts on intelligence at that point the CIA operation center called the watch monitors breaking worldwide events the watch combines communication interceptions human source intelligence and imagery for his most important function preparing a daily briefing for the president's construction all of this area in here is new you see the fence line after guard normally a briefer will go in with a structured message that's so in effect you at least know what you're going to say and you won't be wasting a president's time you may also have some what we call briefing boards see their imagery or maps or diagrams whatever the topic of the briefing requires and you'll show these and go through them but you get a lot of questions not only from the president but from everybody sitting around the room everybody seems to jump in on these and ask questions or raise issues and you get a pretty good feel for what kinds of issues concern them and then you can go back and produce a more analysis that would be supportive of answers to those questions or you may find out where they're really skeptical about what the intelligence community is telling photoreconnaissance adds a degree of certainty to intelligence analysis but the cold truth is that nothing is certain in the realm of human behavior pictures don't lie but people do and some people including some American presidents don't want or can't bear to hear information that contradicts their view of reality case in point President Lyndon Johnson Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the war in Vietnam the CIA supported this war but its view of how successful American military efforts will be differed sharply from the White House here satellite reconnaissance was of little use the three layered canopies of Southeast Asian forests were too thick to see through large strategic complexes could be located and targeted for attack but by and large this war was not fought by conventional armies reliant on heavy industry for tanks and planes you just can't bomb people into submission let me give you an example of that the Ho Chi Minh Trail McNamara was determined that he could break the back of the North Vietnamese coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and so there was extensive Bonni and McNamara was indicating success and then we had low altitude mission and we would look and say hell no there's no success because we could see event amis with bicycles with two large baskets bringing supplies we could also see the Vietnam they were carrying it on their back and then we could also see where they were using small pack animals so they were weaving their way through the bomb craters and although you had intercepted it for a short period of time the supplies were still moving No tension between the intelligence community and the Johnson administration ran high as the war seemed to grow out of control they would send over briefers and so all the briefing material was under my jurisdiction I would lay it out and there was good bad and then different well they would always take the good they light at the end of the tunnel so one day I was really ticked off and I I jumped the colonel and I said damn it you're showing information only the good and he said yeah I know and I said dammit you ought to be giving the president the good and the bad and he said well he said when we give him the bad he gets mad as hell the best intelligence in the world is useless if policymakers choose to ignore it but also every means of intelligence-gathering has its flaws by the late 1960s the corona system was showing its weaknesses waiting for the film to be recovered processed and analyzed was becoming increasingly archaic in an ever faster paced world large armies were now able to move into battle much more quickly than before the bigger the delay the less relevant the imagery was to decision-making particularly crisis decision-making and you know there's probably no better example than what happened in 1968 with regard to Czechoslovakia the u.s. imagery satellite shortly before the invasion or a few weeks before the invasion sent back images that didn't seem to indicate that the Soviets were about to invade there was nothing on those images that would leave us to draw that conclusion well you don't get angry over that sort of thing here is a revolutionary new means of remote sensing and it has some limitations it's just an accident of timing that the invasion took place before the corona payload returned and was processed but there were other signs of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the problem was that there was a great debate of what they or wouldn't they it was no secret that people were worried it's no secret that the Soviets were threatening and it's no secret that troops were gathering the question of just how extensive and just which ones and so on could not be settled Corona was a search satellite its wide-angle view with six foot resolution was well suited for picking out large objects in vast terrain but with weapons getting smaller and more sophisticated the CIA needed the satellite equivalent of a zoom lens to pick out small details I said go spend some time with the photo interpreters and find out in an analytical precise way what resolution do we really need to make the finding of targets a high confidence process they report back to me rather and confirm the impression that we had by then reached the natural limits of the corona camera spacecraft design Corona was retired in 1972 everything that came after it remains classified but not entirely unknown current spy satellites are built and tested here at Lockheed Martin's Sunnyvale California compound Lockheed has been the prime contractor on virtually every imaging satellite the current state of the art is the advanced kh-11 which might go by the codename crystal introduced in 1976 and radically upgraded in 1990 it delivers real-time digital imagery via coded signals to earth the advanced kh-11 is similar to the Hubble Space Telescope while the Hubble's optics are designed for astronomy kh-11 s have flexible telescope mirrors that compensate for atmospheric distortions they can take sharp photos of objects the size of grapefruits and they have infrared capability that allows them to take pictures in low light or complete darkness they are solar-powered and have an estimated lifespan of six years these kh-11 images of a Soviet aircraft carrier under construction were leaked to the press by a naval intelligence analyst in 1984 he was sent to prison for compromising national security although a member of the CIA's watch had already sold the satellites technical manual to the Russians three years earlier these images were taken from approximately 200 miles in space kh-11 s can change position and fly lower to get better pictures the other cutting-edge imaging system has been called at various times indigo lacrosse and Vega it's NASA cousin is the Magellan spacecraft which Maps the planet Venus these amazing satellites do not take photographs in the conventional sense they bounce radar waves off the ground and measure their return time this information is then run through a computer mapping program that generates three-dimensional views of terrain resolution is approximately one meter at any time of day regardless of whether the advantage of radar imaging is that clouds or darkness make no difference interestingly the advanced imaging laboratory at the CIA known as envision uses similar technology to turn still imagery into three-dimensional real-time terrain maps this is a simulation of Rosslyn Virginia imagine the possibilities for CIA agents who need to quickly learn the alleyways and bazaars of say Baghdad today the National Reconnaissance Office controls at least four imaging satellites from its high-security compounds across the United States but all the technology in the world still canceled the central riddle of intelligence what is the other guy thinking what's happened over the past years is that the impact of imagery has been such that the debates get shorter and shorter because the imagery that comes in is in short fairly persuasive but Kuwait was one of the last and there was a debate on whether they would go or not go up until a day or so before the invasion actually took place because many countries move troops to the front and in this case you really moved but the question is what is their intention are they going to go will they invade and you find many folks that will argue it is not in their interest to invade it would be a stupid move and of course if this were always true and people always recognize that you wonder why so many wars occur okay I have a launch message for alpha zero six do you agree thank you sir okay that's going to pepper lodge with game keys out but the ultimate war total nuclear war with Russia never happened now it appears that it never will these men are the crew of an MX or peacekeeper missile complex Watsky in the event of a nuclear war they would run through this sequence of procedures why is insert as well let's go ahead and strap in in preparation for why an ICBM launch that they have rehearsed hundreds of times before okay watch her two six thanks to space-based reconnaissance this will probably never happen in the real world spy satellites give the United States and Russia the means to accurately monitor each other's weapons providing a reliable means of verifying compliance with arms control treaties three two one release Eisenhower's dream of open skies and mutual inspection has come true today overhead reconnaissance is written into every single one of our treaties with the Soviet Union it's called national technical means that's a small euphemism but that's what it is and so in the end after a good deal of patience we managed to persuade the Soviets that the that overhead reconnaissance was in their interest as well as ours that it had a great great calming effect they of course built their own reconnaissance satellites and that helped make the sale this is where weapons of mass destruction crawl off to die pilots call it the boneyard these b-52s have been chopped up and laid out so that Russian spy satellites can verify their destruction similar sites exist in the former Soviet Union they are proof that a global apocalypse is no longer close at hand but the nuclear threat has not disappeared Cheyenne Mountain the home of the North American Defense Command was built in the early 1960s when fears of World War three were at their height hidden under half a mile of granite this fortress was designed to weather a full-scale nuclear attack NORAD's command center watches the skies around the clock its cluster of early warning satellites look for missile launches and possible strikes against the US and Canada if this seems unlikely it might be remembered that Iraq's Scud missiles used World War 2 technology if an aggressor matched the feats of America and Russia in the 1950s they could have an ICBM no one can predict what the situation is going to be 10 years from now CIA predicts that that some 20-odd nations are going to have missiles of intercontinental range and some 10 or so or will have weapons of mass destruction and how do we know how much is being sold to two nations that do not have the indigenous capability themselves so I think we are living in a world now where the future is much more murky as to what might be a threat against us than it was when we had a bipolar situation a multipolar situation is very difficult for the intelligence community in another part of Cheyenne Mountain the Space Surveillance Network detects tracks identifies and catalogs every object in earth orbit part of their task is deciding if a satellite is legitimate or spy it's possible that some of the 7800 objects in orbit are so-called killer satellites orbiters that look normal but are equipped with explosive charges when and if an enemy decides to put out our eyes in space a D satellite warfare is really easy it's not very high technology to be able to lift a nuclear explosive a few hundred kilometers on a rocket booster with no particular guidance and to set it off and really would play havoc with many other satellites both in low and in high orbit but my point is that there there is no reasonable response in the satellite satellite world our satellites are much more important to us than Russian satellites are to them and even if we wipe the skies clean of all of their satellites it would not be a good deal for us I think what we ought to be doing is to have an international treaty banning space weapons and anti-satellite tests and of course destruction of other people's satellites inside this germ-free flag-draped coffin lies Milstar to Milstar is not a weapon nor is it a spy satellite at least not precisely it is the second of a planned network of communication satellites that will help field commanders tap into the enormous flow of information generated by space-based sensors it is suspected that Milstar can access kh-11 imagery and ferry it directly to the battlefield Milstar reflects the ever-growing hunger for data that has swept the world in the past decade but the incredible capability of today's imaging systems has reversed the dilemma that faced the intelligence community in the 1950s now instead of having too little information analysts have far too much to cope with this is one reason the u.s. does not and cannot monitor everything on earth all of the time it would cost probably around 30 billion dollars alone just for the satellites if we wanted to see everything we'd also need to spend many more billions of dollars on computer processing and we'd also have to turn everybody in the country into a part time imagery interpreter there's no way with present technology and present limited budgets to see everything there is also a quantity problem as sensors get better and better they can produce faster and faster and then you've got the flow of information issue and in some cases that flow of information will outstrip the ability of the analytical community to look at all of them question is how swamped you're going to be one sort of analogy or example that is often used is that it's like drinking out of a fire hose that you have an enormous flood of data coming in and you don't have the capacity to process at all so it's a question really of being selective we're watching things like weapons proliferation we're watching things like terrorism we're watching things like narcotics we're watching a whole shift in the fabric of how societies get together ethnic unrest is is getting larger and many of these problems have underpinnings of which information can help sort out what are the viable options for the u.s. the u.s. either as the world's policeman or the u.s. as an informed member of the world community taking pictures from space is a bloodless blameless business but once the data passes into human hands things become far less black-and-white few would dispute the importance of tracking nuclear weapons or looking for signs of war but at what point does collecting intelligence become a violation of a nation's privacy when de spying go from passivity to provocation these questions grow larger as capabilities increase one thing is certain if it happens on earth it can be seen by the spies above

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Channel: Mike Welch

Views: 138,656

Rating: 4.5359998 out of 5

Keywords: Gillian Anderson (TV Director), Discovery Channel (TV Network), Documentary (TV Genre)

Id: 53sAEQ0rYyU

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Length: 55min 0sec (3300 seconds)

Published: Fri May 23 2014

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