Blank Spots on the Map Read online

  Right around Christmastime in 2000, work was slow at Molczan’s energy consulting business and he took some time to go through Russell Eberst’s records of unknown sightings: things that the arch-observer had seen in the sky but that no one had yet identified. “We have lots of these going back to the 1980s,” Molczan explains about the list of unknowns. He resolved to spend the holiday downtime trying to make sense of Eberst’s unknowns, objects Eberst had seen but no one bothered to ID. “I had one February 1997 observation of a 66.1 degree inclination,” he says. Having only two data points for the object, Molczan made the standard assumption that the object would be in a circular orbit, which put it at an altitude of 730 km. “I see this and think, ‘What could that be?’ Lo and behold, I find the same orbit and the same unknown in October of that same year.” Eberst had seen the same object in February of 1997 and again in October. “I thought, ‘That’s a lot like the orbit of AFP-731,’ ” Molczan recalls. The problem was that Eberst’s records showed that the unknown object he’d seen was exceedingly faint, and Molczan knew that AFP-731 should be one of the brightest things in the sky. Nonetheless, on a hunch, Molczan precessed the orbit all the way back to October 1990, when AFP-731 had disappeared for the second time. It fit like a glove. There had been no “sacrifice”: “All it did was drop altitude by sixty to seventy kilometers.”

  But that didn’t explain why the observers had lost AFP-731 in the first place. Such a bright object should have been child’s play to track. AFP-731 had most certainly disappeared, and Eberst’s chance “unknown” sightings were of an exceptionally faint object. It didn’t make sense. And then it dawned on him: AFP-731 wasn’t just randomly hiding. It was hiding from him: “Once we unmasked the orbit [back in 1990] we were added to the list of detection threats.”

  Discussions with John Pike, an analyst at Globalsecurity.org, and Allen Thompson, a former CIA analyst who’d also become fascinated by the AFP-731 story, revealed a plausible account of what had happened, one that supported Molczan’s view. The story goes like this: AFP-731 was the first object in a planned constellation of stealth satellites—spacecraft designed to take advantage of the stealth revolution in weapons design that was pioneered with the A-12 and SR-71 spy planes and reached maturity in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the HAVE BLUE aircraft and F-117A stealth fighter. A series of patent applications for stealth satellites had shown up in the “white” world (perhaps accidentally), lending credence to the notion that the United States had an active stealth satellite program. Allen Thompson uncovered old CIA documents showing that the intelligence community had spent decades trying to figure out how to make satellites “disappear.” It made perfect sense that the NRO would have a stealth satellite program.

  According to John Pike, the AFP-731 “explosion” back in March of 1990 was clearly some kind of subterfuge. The explosion explanation had never made sense. Paying attention to the “body language” of the Russians and Americans surrounding the “explosion,” Pike told me, it just didn’t add up. “The Russians weren’t normally in the habit of commenting on American satellite operations, and the Russians demonstrated some fairly serious consternation” over AFP-731. “If there were problems with American satellites, the Russians would act like nothing had happened,” said Pike.

  In Pike’s reasoning, the Russian reaction to the launch was another layer of deception: The Russians, pretending to have been fooled by the explosion charade, were trying to convince the Americans that they’d been duped when they knew full well what was going on. On the American side, the “body language” also didn’t add up to an explosion. “I guarantee you that if a billion-dollar satellite blew up one day, whatever consternation that was coming out of Moscow would be nothing compared to what would come out of Washington,” said Pike. “While most of what goes on in the NRO doesn’t see the light of day, something of this magnitude would. But the dog did not bark . . . the dog did not bark.” It would be impossible to keep such a catastrophic failure secret: “This town don’t work that way,” said Pike. The explosion reminded Pike of an old submarine tactic from World War II. When a sub came under attack, its crew would load up the torpedo tubes with flotsam and shoot it out, hoping that when antisubmarine ships on the surface saw pools of oil, life rafts, and maritime debris, they’d assume that the sub was sunk, allowing the embattled ship time to slip away.

  A stealthy satellite program would entail multiple layers of deception. First, try to convince an adversary that there is nothing to look for. The NRO couldn’t hide a rocket or space shuttle launch, but if a payload “exploded” it might convince potential onlookers to strike the spacecraft from their watch list. A second layer of deception would involve hiding the object from radar. This is a relatively straightforward engineering challenge: Weapons manufacturers like Lockheed and Northrop had already worked out stealth designs for everything from jet fighters to aircraft carriers. The last part of making a satellite “stealthy” would involve reducing its optical signature—making it invisible to the human eye. In the case of a stealth satellite, engineers could meet this goal by attaching a large mirror or other reflective surface to the spacecraft and positioning the mirror in such a way that it reflects the blackness of space to the earth below. The problem with this would be that the optical stealthiness would be highly directional. Ground controllers would have to dial specific ground-based “detection threats” into the satellites’ operating instructions.

  Molczan’s hypothesis, which Pike and Thompson consider quite plausible, is that AFP-731 was indeed a stealth satellite. Initially, the National Reconnaissance Office assumed that the only “detection threats” were Russian and Chinese military tracking stations. When newspapers published the amateurs’ AFP-731 sightings in the fall of 1990, the theory goes, the NRO looked up Molczan’s address in Toronto and Eberst’s address in Scotland, and added their houses to the satellite’s list of “detection threats.” When the spacecraft flew over their observing sites, AFP-731 would be camouflaged against the night sky. “If those guys with binoculars were giving away the store,” Pike told me, “that theory is entirely plausible.” But, he added, “I’ve thought enough about how these things work that I understand that I don’t understand it.”

  Molczan’s balcony is as threadbare as his apartment. There are no chairs, no barbecue, no tables, and none of the junk that tends to accumulate when urban balconies end up serving as makeshift outdoor storage spaces. As Molczan sets up his binoculars, I look out past the Toronto skyline to Lake Ontario. The sun is setting behind us and the evening lights are beginning to come to life. Below, floodlights illuminate a downtown tennis club. A building a few blocks away sports an illuminated sign: MAPLE LEAF FOODS. That’s where Molczan worked before going into business for himself.

  With the tripod set up, Molczan pulls out a tattered piece of foam and places it in front of the tripod. He’s found that the most comfortable position for observing is kneeling on the pad in front of his mounted binoculars. He’s chosen a faint pair of stars in the eastern sky to serve as guideposts for his observation. He’ll try to find the satellite along its predicted path, then press his stopwatch at the precise time the satellite bisects an invisible line between the two stars. He’ll then note where the object was in relation to the prediction he’s made and update his database accordingly. “I’ve got it,” he says, “I’m tracking it. . . . One third down . . .” Molczan walks inside to record his observation on the computer. It’ll be another hour or so before USA 144deb becomes visible.

  “I can’t speak for everyone involved in this hobby,” Molczan says about his pastime, “but for me, this is about democracy. There are elements out there who want to keep everything secret. I try to put pressure in the other direction. I try to put checks on that power. When people ask me about what gives me the right to make these decisions, I say, ‘Citizenship in a democracy gives me the right to make these decisions.’ I don’t break in, I don’t steal stuff. I assert my right to study the things that
are in orbit around the earth and study them with the belief that space belongs to all of us. I exercise my right to know what’s there.”

  Before meeting Molczan, I’d spent years hanging around the plane spotters, amateur radio engineers, and Freedom of Information Act-filing citizen-historians whose hobbies, often by chance, involved collecting data that described the black world’s outlines. Most of the people I met did the work for the thrill of the chase. I’d rarely heard people explicitly connect what they were doing to any kind of larger democratic project.

  Over our series of conversations, I couldn’t help but think of Molczan as a kind of latter-day Galileo, insisting on empirical truths in the face of official orthodoxies. In George Orwell’s 1984, the protagonist, Winston Smith, echoed the relationship between empiricism and democracy when he wrote in his diary: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else will follow.”

  Molczan’s observations and calculations described a space where the black world ran up against immutable laws of nature: No matter how secret a particular satellite was, it had to obey the same laws of physics as the rest of the solar system. A few data points could not only describe the motion of a body in Earth orbit but could allow accurate predictions about where it would be in the future. Tracking the NRO’s classified moons was really no different at all from tracking the moons of Jupiter. They were there for all to see.

  Molczan and the other satellite observers use telescopes and binoculars to look at secret spacecraft in the night sky. Many of those spacecraft are themselves essentially telescopes. It’s a tension that has characterized the telescope since its invention in the early seventeenth century, a tension between the use of telescopes as instruments of reason in the service of the public good and as instruments of reason in the service of domination.

  Legend holds that the telescope appeared in 1608 when a spectacle maker named Hans Lipperhey presented Prince Maurice of Nassau of the Netherlands with a crude scope that he thought would give the Netherlands an important strategic advantage over the Spanish, with whom they were at war. The story of Lipperhey might be little more than historical anecdote, but the fact is that telescopes appeared all over at almost exactly the same time. For his part, Lipperhey saw the advantages a telescope, or spyglass, would confer upon military strategists. But early scientists like Jacob Metius saw something else: a device one could use to peer into the depths of reality itself. In a patent application Metius filed in October 1608, he wrote that he was interested in “some hidden knowledge which may have been attained by certain ancients through the use of glass.”

  Fast-forward 450 years. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, to the horror of many Americans. Democratic senators railed against Eisenhower. Henry Jackson called Sputnik “a devastating blow to the prestige of the United States as the leader of the scientific and technical world.” His colleague Stuart Symington claimed the satellite was “but more proof of growing Communist superiority in the all-important missile field.” James Killian, the MIT president who had worked on the U-2 program, saw what many in the military and intelligence services understood. Sputnik was much more than a preliminary research craft: “The capacity to lift a satellite ninety or a hundred miles above the surface of the earth, and place it in orbit, ominously suggested a capacity to lift a nuclear bomb into the upper atmosphere and send it hurtling down upon its target of choice.”

  For his part, Eisenhower played down the achievement. White House press secretary James Hagerty tried to quell reporters’—and Americans’—fears, responding to the news of the Soviet satellite by explaining, “We never thought of our program as one which was a race with the Soviets.” Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson called the satellite “a nice scientific trick,” while White House aide Maxwell Rabb described Sputnik as “without military significance.”

  Then, on November 2, the Soviets launched Sputnik 2, carrying a payload six times heavier than the first. On board was a small dog named Laika. Washington reeled.

  On January 22, 1958, the National Security Council issued Action Memorandum 1846, making the development of a reconnaissance satellite the nation’s highest technical intelligence priority. In the meantime, Allen Dulles became convinced that the CIA, not the Air Force, should be in charge of any space-based reconnaissance systems, as they were with the U-2. Eisenhower agreed. A few weeks after the NSC issued its memo, Allen Dulles called Richard Bissell into his office and put him in charge of the CORONA program—the nation’s first spy satellite. CORONA would be a tremendous undertaking, one costing billions of dollars and entailing the creation of its own global geography. And like the other overhead reconnaissance programs, CORONA would be a deep black project. But with the inherent visibility associated with the United States launching its first satellite into orbit, CORONA required an elaborate cover story.

  Since 1955, the Air Force had been working on a satellite reconnaissance system code-named PIED PIPER but had made little headway. One of the many problems with PIED PIPER was how to get reconnaissance images down from space. The Air Force wanted to relay a television signal from the satellite down to Earth, broadcasting the reconnaissance “take” in real time down to ground-based interpreters. But the idea was far ahead of its time—in August 1957, RCA (the company responsible for the system) informed the Air Force that the television signal would provide such poor resolution that it wasn’t worth the effort to design and develop. The alternative was an ejectable film payload. When the satellite had exposed a requisite number of images, it would drop a film canister that could be recovered as it parachuted down to the earth. To the Air Force, the idea of scurrying around trying to snatch film canisters from midair was ridiculous. It chose not to pursue the idea.

  After Sputnik, U.S. space reconnaissance programs went black. Eisenhower publicly canceled the PIED PIPER program, unleashing a torrent of anger from congressmen who interpreted the move as Eisenhower pinching pennies where the nation could least afford it. “We of course couldn’t tell anyone that the Air Force program was being replaced by a bigger one,” Richard Bissell would later recall. The point of “canceling” the programs was to hoodwink both the Soviet Union and the American media into thinking that the United States had given up on the idea of space-based reconnaissance. Of course, the Air Force programs weren’t canceled at all—they were given to the CIA. The agency’s new space reconnaissance program would hide under the cover story of Discoverer.

  Spyglasses, as Lipperhey called telescopes, whether they’re in the form of spotting scopes, spy planes, or reconnaissance satellites, are more than simple instruments or tools. They beget infrastructures and geographies. Building secret aircraft or classified spacecraft means building new bureaucracies in the halls of government, new offices, new positions, and new budgets. Like the effort to build the bomb, it means building secret laboratories to conduct the basic research, classified design shops to engineer the hardware, and hidden factories to manufacture the instruments. Deploying spy satellites meant developing elaborate cover stories and security clearances, secure air bases and launch facilities. Just as maintaining a lie means creating more lies, or keeping secrets means creating more secrets, undertaking secret projects means producing ever-expanding black geographies. This was a central paradox of the U-2 and CORONA programs: The more effort the Air Force and CIA put into charting the Soviet Union’s blank spots on maps, the more the United States itself became secret.

  When the photographs from covert missions began returning home, secret geographies continued to expand. Not only did the technical secrets of spy satellites need to be protected, now their “product” also needed secrecy. To control the clandestine photographs, the CIA created new security compartments and “special access programs,” above-top-secret designations. TALENT KEYHOLE was the new compartment for CORONA imagery. The new security channel descended from a compartment called TALENT, created for overhead U-2 imag
ery. “KEYHOLE” referred to the newly created reconnaissance satellites. The security compartment allowed for the dissemination of reconnaissance imagery without revealing to the public the fact that the capabilities existed in the first place.

  On August 26, 1960, Eisenhower formally signed the new security channel into existence. The agency drew up security oaths for employees to sign: “I do solemnly swear or affirm that I will never divulge, publish, or reveal either by word, conduct, or by any other means any classified information, intelligence, or knowledge relevant to ‘Talent’ material or the nature of ‘Talent’ sources (KEYHOLE) except in the performance of my official duties and in accordance with the requirements set forth in the ‘Talent’ control system manual, unless specifically authorized in each case by the Director of Central Intelligence or his designee.”

  TALENT KEYHOLE was just half of the elaborate new secrecy mechanisms that were put in place around spy satellites. Another, entirely separate, channel granted access to engineering data associated with overhead reconnaissance. Created in 1960, its code name was BYEMAN: “a man who toils underground.”