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The army and air force had an idea. Lockheed had already shown that it could develop a surveillance plane, the U2 and eventually the SR71, out of the public view and run those flights without too much interference from Senate watchdog committees and out of the presence of any newspaper reporters. Could they do the same thing with a satellite? And if they could, would the satellite recon photos be as reliable as the photos we were getting from the U2s? Normally, | would have said that if the army were putting up a satellite, it could do anything it wanted because everything we did under our intelligence blanket remained relatively secure. However, both the army and the air force were effectively put out of the satellite launching business toward the end of the Eisenhower administration by the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Agency under a pooled resources crash program to get satellites up into space to show the world the flag. The Soviets had beaten us in the race initially with Sputnik, and the failed army and navy attempts to launch satellites only made us look worse. | learned for a fact that when the New York Daily News ran the full page headline, "Oh Dear, " after the Corporal rose a few inches, fell back onto the launchpad, and blew up into smithereens, no one was laughing harder than Nikita Khrushchev. After a few of these attempts, the National Security Council advised President Eisenhower to throw in the towel, pool all the national scientific resources he could, and turn the U.S. entry into the space race over to a civilian agency. The military services had learned their lesson about competing over the same technology the hard way and had to stand back and watch NASA take over. NASA had some immediate successes, and before the end of the Eisenhower administration in 1960, they had managed to put satellites in orbit and experiment with the effects of orbital flight on animals in far more sophisticated ways than the army's V2 experiments with small primates at Alamogordo in the late 1940s and early1950s. As the army and air force intelligence offices looked at the successes of these NASA satellites and at the increasing vulnerabilities of the U2 flights, they saw the possible answer to their need for a fail safe surveillance program. When NASA began its Discoverer orbiter program, launching a payload into low orbit and returning it, the military services thought they saw a solution. If they could somehow manage to build a workable photo recon satellite small enough to fit into the very limited space inside the Discoverer payload capsule, recover the surveillance device when the orbiter returned to Earth, and install the entire military spying program within a civilian scientific exploration program that was getting a lot of attention from the newspapers without alerting the public to the military's secret agenda, they would have their covert surveillance. We knew that the Soviets would very quickly find out about the program, but that wasn't such a bad thing. We reasoned that there was no way, given the CIA's penetration by the KGB, to keep the program completely covert, but if the Soviets knew we were able to watch them it might keep them honest. And Khrushchev wouldn't have to worry about our deliberately violating his airspace, so he was off the hook at the Kremlin and thankful for it. All we had to do was keep it out of the public arena and we'd be home free. The whole program rested on our being able to slip what we now called "Corona" into the existing Discoverer program without a whisper in the air, the Soviets would go along without a protest, and we would get our surveillance photos. We added an additional incentive for the Soviets to discourage them from getting their friends in the CIA to leak the story to friendly journalists and blowing the cover on the whole operation. We encouraged them to participate with us in the hidden agenda of Corona: surveillance of potential alien crash landings. Army Intelligence, upon Eisenhower's and the NSC's express approval, let it be known to their counterparts in the Soviet military that any aerial intelligence we developed as a result of Corona that revealed the presence of aliens on Soviet territory would be shared with the military. What they did with the information, we said, we really didn't care. But the military was more than grateful. The professional military didn't trust the commissars in the Communist Party anymore than we did and hated being under their collective thumb. Thus, in a perverse way, although we were tipping off the Russian military about alien activity in their territory, we really weren't sharing information with the Communists because of the deep division within the Soviet government between the Communist Party and the military. Our incentive worked and the KGB encouraged the CIA - even | was surprised at how effectively they worked together - not to leak the story. Now it was up to the air force and the skunk works division at Lockheed to build the Corona surveillance satellite out of the public arena and load the vehicle into the Discoverer rocket right under the noses of the American press. It was one of the trickiest operations of the Cold War because the Russians knew what we were doing, NASA was making the entire project happen, but the American press, hungry for even the smallest tidbit of spaceflight information, had to be kept completely in the dark. If necessary, we had to lie to them, provide them with cover stories, completely trick them into thinking that all the American people had to think about was the little chimp that was blasted into orbit wearing his custom sized space helmet. And we didn't have much time to do it because we knew the Soviets were trying to embarrass lke at the end of his term by bringing down one of our U2 planes with a live pilot inside. We were now in a race against the Soviets to replace the U2 with the Corona, even though the Soviets understood and accepted what we were doing every step of the way. It was one of the ironies of the Cold War. The engineers at Lockheed designed the satellite camera package to fit neatly into the payload cone of the Discoverer capsule. They worked under brutal time constraints because President Eisenhower was putting 60