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9-12-95. NYPaper:
"Spy Satellites' Early Role As 'Floodlight' Coming Clear."
Corona. Everything about it was beyond top secret -- its
name and history, builders and operators, cameras and
orbits, photographs and interpreters and, most important
of all, what it snooped on from space. It was officially
and assiduously treated for decades as if it did not
exist. The 95 Corona satellites that successfully
conducted espionage from 1960 to 1972 turn out to have
been remarkably advanced tools whose development, far
from the work of an inner circle, drew on the nation's
top scientific and industrial talent. More important,
the new disclosures show just how greatly the craft
revolutionized Washington's ability to understand its
cold war friends and enemies.
Sergei Khrushchev, son of the Soviet leader Nikita S.
Khrushchev, told the Itek conference that one Corona
film pod dropped into a Russian forest, where
ax-wielding woodsmen chopped it up. Another spy
satellite misdirected its film pod into a field in
central Asia, where peasants wrapped the precious Kodak
film around poles to provide solitude for a privy.
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