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Technology and Culture 45.1 (2004) 204-206



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Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage. By Philip Taubman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. Pp. xx+441. $27.

For scholars concerned with the cold war, journalists are unwelcome but inevitable competitors. Journalists tend to write better than academics, and they certainly have better ties to the publishing world, but they often lack either historical training or deep knowledge. Admittedly, a good popular account can both amplify the historical record and enhance public interest. One journalist who accomplished this in the mid-1980s was William Burrows, a former New York Times reporter who wrote a pioneering book on satellite reconnaissance, Deep Black, and substantially advanced our understanding of this secretive world.

Now Philip Taubman, currently the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, has written Secret Empire, a new popular history of the early years of strategic reconnaissance. Largely focused on the people who built the U-2 spy plane and the CORONA reconnaissance satellite, it is a readable book and Taubman certainly did a lot of work. Unlike Deep Black, however, Secret Empire breaks absolutely no new ground and primarily repeats information that has appeared in other accounts. For example, several chapters are simply retreads of information in Jeffrey Richelson's The Wizards of Langley (2001). Richelson's book did well and received wide exposure, but Secret Empire has the force of the Simon and Schuster advertising machine behind it, and Taubman has gotten wider exposure on television and radio as a result.

After recounting the development of the U-2, which has already been covered in greater detail by Chris Pocock, Secret Empire focuses on the development of the CORONA reconnaissance satellite. CORONA first achieved success in August 1960 after more than a dozen failures, and during [End Page 204] the next decade more than a hundred of these satellites were launched. (It was not declassified until 1995.) Taubman also discusses the bureaucratic fights that took place between the U.S. Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency during the mid-1960s, when some of the satellite projects were getting under way.

One of the foundations of cold war history is that the passage of time opens up new records and frees more people to speak about events, thereby enabling historians to present ever richer historical accounts; certainly we know more about the Cuban Missile Crisis today than we knew five or ten years ago. Yet Secret Empire actually contains less information than such earlier books as Jonathan Lewis's well-researched history of corporate involvement in CORONA, Spy Capitalism: ITEK and the CIA (2002). Taubman mentions almost nothing about the Samos satellite, the primary satellite reconnaissance program during the early years of the space race. The air force spent huge amounts of money on Samos before canceling it without a single success.

Even though there are important lessons of technological hubris to be learned from Samos, and air force mishandling of the program explains later bureaucratic squabbles, Taubman devotes only a few paragraphs to the subject. He is mistaken in calling Samos simply a video relay satellite, for it also included film return capsules, just like its offspring, CORONA. Similarly, he makes virtually no mention of the GAMBIT satellite that complemented CORONA during the 1960s: CORONA was the binoculars that scanned the Soviet Union looking for targets, and GAMBIT was the high-powered telescope that focused in on those targets. Neither does Taubman pay attention to the exploitation of the images returned by these satellites. What, exactly, did they see and how were their pictures used? A tremendous amount of information has been released on this subject in recent years, but almost none of it is included here.

Taubman did undertake extensive interviews, some with people who have not talked previously. But these appear to have provided only the information that had appeared in previous books; certainly there were other secrets to tell. Likewise, the substantial list of documentary sources includes nothing...

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