INTERNATIONAL ESPIONAGE SPY IN THE SKY SATELLITES PEER OVER NATIONAL WALLS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31118, 22 July 1966, Page 10

INTERNATIONAL ESPIONAGE SPY IN THE SKY SATELLITES PEER OVER NATIONAL WALLS

(By Dr. ANTHONY MICHAELIS In the '‘Daily Telegraph", London) (Reprinted bp arrangement!

Space spies, human and electronic, will make 007 as old-fashioned as a knight in armour. Electronic computers and radio transmitters the size of a cocktail olive or a false tooth have all but ended the days of cloak-and-dagger spies. Allen Dulles, the former head of the Ameiican Intelligence Agency (C.1.A.), said: “It is much easier now to put a listening device in somebody’s room than a lady spy in his bed.

But Dulles spoke several years ago. and today listening devices, or “bugs” as the Americans call them, have shrunk to almost microscopic size.

For example, some American dentists recently developed broadcasting equipment that was small enough to fit into a hollow tooth. It gave information about the pressure exerted on teeth during chewing. It needs little imagination. and less research, to use such a device for passing information over several hundred yards to a radio receiver in a waiting car.

Reconnaissance, or spying over a long . distance, has graduated from balloon and aircraft to the orbiting satellite. “Spy in the sky” satellites are used by both Americans and Russians. Project Abandoned Some years ago there were British plans for such satellites. Instead of launching them by rocket a special satellite-launching aircraft was to be developed, powered by a new kind of engine—a turbo-rocket: a hybrid of a pure rocket and a conventional gas turbine engine. The development costs soon reached £lOOO million and the project was abandoned.

Few details are known of the highly-classified American unmanned reconnaissance satellites, and even less of the Russian ones. There are four American systems. Samos, now re-named Program 720 A, has a 300-mile orbit and takes about 95 minutes to complete it. It is an Air Force photographic satellite, equipped with tele-lenses of probably unsurpassed power. In use for the last five years, pictures of Russia and China have been recovered and closely studied. It is also supposed to be capable of electronic eavesdropping. The sister satellite Midas, now classified as Program 239 A uses infra-red detection equipment to give an early warning of enemy ballistic missile launches. The colossal heat of a rocket launch is picked up, pin-pointed and played back to America, thus giving a 30-minute warning instead of the 15-minute alert by radar. The third type is the nuclear explosion detection satellite, some of which are as far as 60,000 miles out in space. They can detect a onemegaton explosion millions of miles away. The Americans would have a decided advantage in the cold robot duel between unmanned satellites, as they alone have a world-wide satellite-tracking network. The sudden disappearance of any of their satellites would be immediately noticed. The Russians, on the other hand, would not know what had happened to theirs on the other side of the globe. A dozen natural causes could be the reason why their satellites did not broadcast any longer. This is no longer sciencefiction. The Americans have already demonstrated with the Early Bird communications satellite that it is perfectly easy for a satellite to be precisely guided to a predetermined position in space. A proximity fuse and a relatively small explosive charge are all that are needed to fire the first shot in space and disable a spy in the sky. Just because it is so easy to track and locate satellites, and destroy them, the next step in this kind of space war had to be thought out. One-day satellites are the answer, expendable after they have radioed back to earth their messages about troop concentrations or the movements of hostile fleets. A new one would be launched every 24 hours.

The manned spy in the sky satellites will not be so easy to destroy in space. The MOL will be the first, in 1970. A man can discriminate and evaluate a situation quickly, perhaps by-passing some of the complicated instrument computer mechanisms of unmanned satellites. Such satellites may later even be armed and shoot back at an attacking satellite. . Today the East-West struggle for world supremacy is being waged probably more bitterly on the scientific front than in the economic and political sectors.

Codes Useless

Codes have almost become useless. Housed in the basement of the 1) million squarefoot glass building of the National Security Agency

(N.S.A.) at Fort George Mead in Maryland is the new Whirlwind electronic computer. It is said to break any code. As no doubt the Russians have a similar computer somewhere, the Americans are now trying to think up an "unbreakable” code using an obscure Indian dialect.

As to radio-interception, N.S.A. has apparently 2000 stations dotted round the world, on ships and planes, recording every Communist electronic emission and committing it to tape recordings. A single example of what this means occurred in May, 1960, when a Russian ground-to-air missile crew shot down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane with its pilot, Gary Powers. The radio communications between the gun crew and its headquarters were monitored by N.S.A. who learned thereby that the plane had engine trouble. Thus apparently N.S.A. can pin-point the location of every military unit in the world using radio for communications.

Science has also made great contributions to the more conventional arsenal of the spy. More efficient poisons to swallow if he is caught; less visible invisible inks: microminiature cameras—all are part of the inevitable debasement of scientific progress. But noiseless bullets, penetrating 2ft of cotton at a distance of 30ft, were probably developed only for spying. Prime Function

The prime function of spying is still to get information and to pass it on as quickly and as secretly as possible. Just what electronics can do to help a spy in this may be seen from the “talking tooth.” Looking like an ordinary molar, and of the same size, a cube of 0.3 in, it contains 28 electronic components, including 6 miniature radio transmitters and 2 rechargeable batteries. Any good spy could use this for sending a coded message. With radio transmitters of this size now becoming commonplace, there is of course no limit to where they can be hidden. After the cocktail olive and the tooth, wrist watches, fountain pens, cigarette lighters, lipsticks, spectacle frames, ear rings can all be made to fulfil their normal function, in addition to

being microminiaturised broadcasting stations. The combined microphone and transmitter “bug” is extensively used In America by Government and industrial agents. The scientific basis is the integrated circuit, a kind of electrical sandwich, containing alternate layers of metals and non-conducting surfaces, each less than one thousandth of an inch thick. The cost has now come down to less than £1 apiece. Spying is expensive. N.S.A. has a budget of £l4O million and a staff of 20,000. If it is following the advice given by Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter, as long ago as 1947, that roughly 80 per cent of intelligence should be based on published books, magazines, technical and scientific surveys, photographs and so forth, then N.S.A. must have many scientists and engineers on its staff. For the best spy today is undoubtedly the one who can read scientific literature and see the future military applications of obscure mathematics and physics. Light Beam In 1952 the first scientific papers appeared on “light (or microwave) amplifications by stimulated emission of radiation," now known as laser or maser, and one may well ask how many Russian spies reported this to Moscow with the comment that here was the scientific base for a death ray, if ever there was one. This tight light beam, reaching a temperature of 8000 deg. C., in one fivethousandth of a second can drill a hole in a diamond, the hardest substance known. Directed against a human being, a large enough beam would almost certainly kill him, provided there was no cloud, mist or fog to stop it. The laser story may well repeat the story of the atomic bomb. Theoretical knowledge was free. Its application for destructive purposes topsecret.

The wisdom of devoting 80 per cent of available resources to scanning the “white” intelligence of published information is proved. The remaining 20 per cent is devoted to classical spying, or “magic,” in the American expression. James Bond would do well to add a science degree to his other exceptional qualifications.