Eyeing the Red Storm: Eisenhower and the First Attempt to Build a Spy Satellite by Robert M. Dienesch (review)

Historians sometimes postulate that fine details are lost in just a few years, larger pieces of the picture in a couple of decades, and major elements in some time frame longer than that. The desire to pin down what happened is one of the things that make historians into detectives, continually rediscovering and reinterpreting the past. So it is, Robert Dienesch would say, of the reconnaissance satellite. Most people of the Boomer generation, who lived this history, remember Sputnik in October 1957. The shock that followed the Soviet Union's orbiting of a satellite, the radio signal emitted by the satellite, and the romance of the space-faring dog Laika, who followed in a second orbiter, captured the imagination. Details such as the relationship between space rocketry and the nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile, or the concept of satellites as platforms for other purposes—like spying—are dimly recalled if at all.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the helm then, championed something called the "International Geophysical Year" (IGY), a global drive to emphasize the use of science to learn about our planet. This ranks as one of those details almost completely lost to historical consciousness. Even more so is the fact that Eisenhower sought to use the IGY to establish the legal principle of the non-territoriality of space, as well as to serve as cover for the development of spy satellites. Dienesch sets out to fill this void. He discovers that even within the lost memories are other layers of missing history. Those who know of the origins of spy satellites as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program codenamed CORONA are often not aware that, before it, the U.S. Air Force labored to reach the same goal with its project called Weapon System (WS)-117L. Dienesch justifiably discusses Eisenhower's science advisers and their Technological Capabilities Panel study of 1954–1955, which provided impetus for the innovation of overhead imagery from aircraft (U-2 and SR-71) and satellites (WS-117L, CORONA). The scientists were also instrumental in the creation of the articulated-lens camera technology, which made satellite photography practical, and in the inception of the technology that eventually dominated satellite reconnaissance operations: the digital readout form of electronic transmission of the imagery obtained from reconnaissance mechanisms.

A sizable body of literature exists on the CIA's Project CORONA. But almost nothing is available about the Air Force's WS-117L program. In Eyeing the Red Storm, Dienesch goes back over this period and delineates several strands of the story. High-level decision-making concerning satellite reconnaissance has been studied in the last couple of decades, but only in the context of the CIA's initiatives, whereas Dienesch shows that the spy satellite development effort was government-wide. The concept of the spy satellite has been covered in some depth in earlier studies, but again only in the CIA context. The Air Force contribution was retarded by the unfortunate Vanguard rocket, the various mishaps of which are probably the one aspect of this history anyone remembers. Dienesch also explores the impact on the WS-117L of the assignment of the program to the newly formed Advanced Research Projects Agency (which became better known later on as DARPA after the addition of "Defense" at the beginning of its name). The relocation had an effect the opposite of what was intended, with the armed services sponsoring additional programs in hopes of being selected as "executor" for successively greater shares of ARPA's money pot.

The Air Force lost out to the CIA with CORONA, which had originally been a test bed for WS-117L and a component of the Air Force's umbrella program. Hampered by the long technological reach required to perfect the system, by the wide array of purposes intended for it (originally conceptualized as both an infrared and a photographic platform), and by the...