Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA, and Cold War Aerial Espionage (review)

There is a tremendous body of literature on espionage and intelligence collection during the cold war. Most of these works, including the highly esteemed books that occasionally hit the best-seller lists, contain a gaping hole. Whereas the public, and writers and historians who serve them, are engaged by the stories of spies and traitors, the most significant intelligence data were collected by machines. Machines make lousy protagonists, but the sheer volume and quality of the photographs and communications and signals gathered up by various aircraft, satellites, and other platforms had a profound effect on the cold war. Unlike spies, this intelligence never lied (though it could be misinterpreted). It prevented miscalculations and helped keep the peace. And this was a field where the United States clearly excelled.

Dino Brugioni served as a senior analyst in the CIA during the 1950s and 1960s when strategic photographic reconnaissance was born. Brugioni worked closely with the people who interpreted reconnaissance photographs and he turned their work into briefings, which he and others delivered to senior government officials, including President Eisenhower. He has previously written well-regarded books about the Cuban missile crisis and photo fakery.

Eyes in the Sky is Brugioni’s account of the extraordinarily productive time period from approximately 1954 until 1961, when a number of important new reconnaissance systems—most notably the U-2 spy plane in 1956 and the Corona reconnaissance satellite in 1960—were introduced, changing the way that the political leadership operated. The book contains sixteen chapters (including eighteen pages of photographs), running from early cold war–era flights over the Soviet Union to the collection of intelligence that finally solved the so-called missile gap problem, demonstrating beyond a reasonable doubt that the Soviet Union did not possess more intercontinental ballistic missiles than the United States.

The book is well-written, engaging, and filled with lots of color. For example, soon after the photo interpreters set up shop in the 1950s in a Washington, D.C., building on Fifth and K streets, they noticed a large limousine parked across the street. So Brugioni brought his own camera and a telescopic lens and photographed the occupant and license plates and the CIA determined it was a Soviet embassy car and Soviet intelligence agent. The book has other interesting anecdotes, such as the fact that low-altitude reconnaissance missions sometimes returned pictures of people throwing spears at the aircraft, or using a latrine.

For those unfamiliar with the subject, this is an excellent introduction. However, it is a little more difficult to place this book in the context of others on this topic. Philip Taubman’s Secret Empire covered much of this same territory, and Chris Pocock’s 50 Years of the U-2 recounted the history of the high-flying spy plane in greater detail; both were published in 2004. The Corona satellite has been covered in a number of other works, including 1998’s similarly named Eye in the Sky, which I edited. Overall, the Eisenhower era’s role in strategic reconnaissance has received a tremendous amount of attention, whereas later periods have received little coverage, due to continued classification of documents. A consistent theme of all of these histories, repeated by Brugioni, is that Eisenhower was tremendously thoughtful, even visionary, when it came to intelligence collection.

Although Brugioni’s book contains a number of new details and fascinating insider information (for instance, one source of information utilized by the CIA consisted of former Spanish Civil War veterans who had been imprisoned by the Soviet Union), it is missing any major revelations. Curiously, although the book is ostensibly about the Eisenhower period, it frequently jumps into the 1960s to include information about some later projects. For instance, it discusses the air force’s Mach 3 spy plane, the SR-71, which did not enter service until many years after Eisenhower’s presidency. It also briefly...