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

Robert Dienesch states that this work is the first comprehensive history of America’s initial reconnaissance satellite program, WS-117L, one that fills “a large gap in the literature of the cold war, Eisenhower, and satellite reconnaissance.” While previous works have held that the critical need for intelligence drove the development of these spacecraft, he asserts that President Eisenhower’s concerns about economic health as the foundation of national security and his desire to restrain defense spending also played important roles.

The author devotes most of the first half to the Truman and Eisenhower administrations’ defense policies—the dramatic increase in defense spending under the former after the Soviet Union’s first atomic test and the massive retaliation and New Look policies of the latter, which were intended simultaneously to build a nuclear deterrent and to stabilize defense spending in the face of pressure from the Pentagon and key congressional leaders for continued increases. Dienesch then reviews the influential work of the Technological Capabilities Panel in 1954–55 that led to the establishment of the U-2 and WS-117L projects and the hidden objectives of the subsequent International Geophysical Year and Project Vanguard satellite projects to provide the legal precedent for reconnaissance satellite over-flights. He then examines the role of the RAND Corporation in studying satellite reconnaissance beginning in 1945. Numerous works have covered these topics in considerable depth.

The author then reviews the WS-117L program. Established by the air force in 1954, its original goals were to build, launch, and operate photoreconnaissance, signals intelligence, mapping, and weather satellites. However, the program received little funding until after the Sputnik launches in late 1957. WS-117L soon focused solely on reconnaissance as the other missions were transferred to various agencies. Low-resolution film readout systems would perform broad area searches to locate and identify targets and high-resolution film return systems would acquire technical intelligence on them. The few that were flown from 1960 to 1962 did not return any useful imagery and this quickly led to their cancellation.

With the slow progress of WS-117L, President Eisenhower had ordered the Central Intelligence Agency and air force in early 1958 to develop an interim film return system codenamed CORONA for broad area search. It first successfully returned film in August 1960 and, with various improvements, soon became a reliable and capable system. GAMBIT high-resolution film return satellites, initially flown in 1963, provided increasing amounts of technical intelligence.

The section on WS-117L is a useful overview and contains some new information, on the pre-Sputnik period of the program in particular. Dienesch frequently cites the lengthy program histories written decades ago by National Reconnaissance Office historian Robert Perry, which are on the agency’s website. However, none of the over 1,000 program documents, which are also on the website, are cited. Some of these are themselves extensive histories. Additionally, the author provides very little coverage of the signals intelligence payloads. There is sufficient declassified data on them to merit a more detailed treatment.

This volume falls short of the claims made for it. Robert Perry’s works are the comprehensive histories of WS-117L. The histories contained in the large set of program documents released also contain considerably more detail. The fact is that the critical need for intelligence on the Soviet Union, particularly its strategic nuclear forces, was the driving force behind it. The U-2 partially filled this gap, but from the outset of overflights beginning in 1956 policymakers recognized that it was only an interim measure. The only permanent solution was reconnaissance satellites.

The author provides virtually no evidence to support his assertion that all subsequent satellite reconnaissance systems have been built on the foundation of WS-117L. While the three successful film return photoreconnaissance systems flown from 1960–84 (CORONA, GAMBIT, and HEXAGON) incorporated some...