[A-List] US imperialism: tales of yore

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Washington Post Books

At the frontiers of secret information gathering

Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space
Espionage by Philip Taubman
Simon & Schuster 441pp $27
 Spies in the Himalayas: Secret Missions and Perilous Climbs by M.S. Kohli
and Kenneth Conboy
Univ. of Kansas 226pp $29.95
 Reviewed by Eric Umansky

A few months ago, Abu Ali, an al Qaeda operative thought to be responsible
for the bombing of the USS Cole, was speeding along a highway in Yemen when
a missile fired by an American Predator drone ended his trip. While the
Predator got most of the attention for the killing, another gee-whiz
technology played a crucial, less noticed, part: A spy satellite had
intercepted one of Ali's cellphone calls and guided the Predator to its
target. Whether about Iraq, North Korea or al Qaeda, our government gets
much of what it knows from spy satellites and Philip Taubman's Secret Empire
tells the story of how that came to be.

In the early 1950s, Soviet Premier  Nikita Khrushchev began to brag about
his country's growing number of bombers and missiles capable of striking the
United States. President Eisenhower had no idea whether to believe him. The
United States ended reconnaissance flights over Russia after Soviet air
defenses modernized and began to threaten them. "We didn't have . . . any
real information," remembers one CIA officer. "We just didn't know what was
going on."

Eisenhower prepared for the possibility that the USSR could launch a
surprise attack and knock out the U.S. ability to respond. He put the
country on a war footing. Then he ordered scientists to secretly develop a
surveillance system that the Soviets could neither shoot down nor see.

The first result was the U-2. The goal was to fly so high that the Soviets
would not know the plane was there. It did not work. Soviet radar picked up
the plane during its first flyover, and Eisenhower limited the U-2 to just a
few flights, one of which was shot down in 1960.

With the failure of the U-2 to go undetected, scientists concentrated on
photo satellites. As one researcher  recalled, trying to take a detailed
picture from space "was like trying to photograph the belfry in Boston's
North Church from the Empire State Building." And that was only the
beginning: How do you keep film stable during space travel? How do you
retrieve the photos? And how do you get the darn thing up there to begin
with? (At the time, U.S. rockets had a habit of exploding on the launch
pad.)

The story of how scientists broke through those barriers - thus showing
Eisenhower's successor, President Kennedy, that the "missile gap" was bunk -
could make for a fascinating tale. But Taubman is not a lively writer and
Secret Empire is not it.

While Taubman focuses on the CIA's feats in space, M.S. Kohli and Kenneth
Conboy unveil one of the agency's only slightly more earthbound achievements
in Spies In The Himalayas. In October 1964, China surprised the world by
testing a nuclear weapon. The United States and India freaked out and were
desperate to monitor the program. But the tests occurred in the middle of
China, out of reach of spy planes,  and satellites were not yet capable of
intercepting the test data. Eventually, the CIA came up with a plan: Send a
joint team of the best American and Indian mountain climbers to the top of
the Himalayas to plant a monitoring device. Oh, and the sensor would have to
be nuclear-powered. (Solar panels were still in their infancy, and gas could
not be regularly delivered.)
Kohli, who led the Indian half of the expedition (and once made a
record-setting Everest climb), and Conboy, a former Heritage Foundation
analyst, are not fabulous writers, either. But these two should line up some
Hollywood agents, because the story itself is repeatedly jaw-dropping,
alternating between something like a James Bond movie and Chevy Chase's
Spies Like Us.

Climbing some of the world's highest mountains is extraordinarily
difficult, even without a nuclear-powered sensor to lug along. Despite some
injuries, the team nearly made it to the top during their first try, only to
be turned back by bad weather.During the retreat, they decided to save
themselves extra work by leaving the monitor near the peak. Bad idea. When
they returned months later, it was gone, swept away by an avalanche. It was
never found. (The loss was made public in the 1970s and created a panic -
apparently unfounded - that radiation had contaminated Calcutta's water
supply.)

The crew kept trying, and failing. They once reached a peak, only to realize
they had forgotten to bring along anchors to hold the monitor in place.
Finally, three years after they started, they took a new device, this one
gas-powered, and scaled a lower and more manageable mountain. The system
worked perfectly - intercepting data from a test - exactly once. Then it was
replaced by a satellite. With the years of excruciating labor that Kohli put
into the project, that was surely not the ending he had hoped for. But his
journey is certainly fun to read about.

The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0515, page 30