Joe Poyer: North Cape

Another thought occurred to him. The — Red Chinese, who had taken some pretty embarrassing reverses in Africa and Southeast Asia in the past five years and who were presently, torn apart internally, would not want their preoccupation with the Soviets widely known. Although they could put a much larger army into the field than could the Soviets, a correspondingly greater portion of their total national effort would have to be devoted to supporting that army. And the Chinese Central Government would not logically want to risk their very shaky position in China at the moment. The neo-warlords would certainly be ready and able to take advantage of the situation. If the war got too far out of hand; the Chinese — could be damn sure that the United States and the Soviet Union would in due course make plenty of trouble for _them elsewhere. The more Teleman thought about it, the more he was ready to lay odds that the Soviets had initiated this particular fight by baiting the Chinese somehow. They must be realizing full well that they could not much longer tolerate the supercilious attitude of the present Peking leadership. That the Russians might have bitten off more than they could chew was also quite possible. Teleman shook his head at the childishness and complexity of international politics and began to set up his flight plan. The orders directed him to proceed to the war area — the desolate and rugged hills of the northern Sinkiang plateau and border region — some of the worst territory for fighting a war in the world, territory that made the Dakota badlands look like a children’s playground, he thought.

Teleman made the necessary final corrections and keyed the program into the computer. Seconds later the aircraft broke out of its orbiting mode and headed westward on a course that would intercept the go° meridian. He would pick up the meridian over Uedineniya Island in the Arctic Sea, less than seventy-five miles from the Soviet Mainland of the Taimyr Peninsula. He would then cross the Soviet Union from north to south at 150,000 feet with negative 4 radar disruption to avoid Soviet observation.

For the next hour Teleman sat staring out the observation slit at the frozen wastes of the Arctic slipping past below. He sat and stared and thought about the coming mission. He had no qualms about performing it, had no questions about its importance. But he was puzzled about the motives involved on either side. It was not spelled out in the orders, but years of intensive. training, covering a good bit more than flying this aircraft, had taught him that he must seek the reason behind anything the opposition did. He knew that he could not rely on the busy clerks and service officers in the State Department to read the correct interpretations into the intelligence that he gathered, It was, by its very nature, often nothing more than a broad overview. And then again, sometimes, the most minute details were found that brought the entire picture into focus. The trouble with the State Department. was its size. Its thousands of employees were all too often engaged simply in running a bureau where forty thousand people worked. His own agency had fallen into the same pattern of late.

There were just too many people involved, too many in decision-making positions, too many incapable of making the correct decisions or, for that matter, any decisions at all. Too many that spent all of their time pushing their own ideas, interpretations, and motives no matter how they conflicted with the evidence at hand. Nor were the problems of bureaucracy the problems of the United States alone. The interrupted mission to locate the new Soviet electronics research center after its recent move was a prime example. The present theory popular in his agency was that A. Sovulov Semechastky had been responsible. Semechastky was Second Party Secretary and he had come up the hard way in the new generation of Soviet leaders. He also had a son who was general manager of the Electronics Assembly Plant No. 2 in Magnitogorsk. The cocktail talk around Moscow was that Semechastity had been pressured by his son to shift the location of the research center closer to the assembly plant, ostensibly for reasons of efficiency. Covertly, for reasons of increasing family power. Several million rubles would be spent in making such a change, but it was reportedly common knowledge that Semechastky, Jr., was about to be named the new director of the research center.

Teleman could confirm the rumor by photographs from 120,000 feet that would identify the make, model, and, if lucky, the license plate number of the automobile in the factory manager’s parking space.

Teleman sighed. Such was the stuff of modern spying. License plates from 120,000 feet. He knew that he must look for similar signs along the Kazakh-Sinkiang border. In the meantime, he had nearly six thousand miles to go and it looked like a long day. He keyed the computer and PCMS into action and slept.

In 1964, as the A-11 project — later to become the SR-71, fighter Interceptor in an attempt to cover up its reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering role — came to conclusion, it had become extremely clear that the United States was badly in need of a stopgap method of acquiring intelligence information beyond the limited capabilities of the original SAMOS project. SAMOS was a classified Air Force satellite system, launched from 1958 to 1972 from both Cape Kennedy and Vandenberg AFB near Santa Barbara, California. Always shrouded under heavy secrecy, SAMOS — and later the expanded ADVANCED SAMOS — had one and only one objective: to keep an eye on Soviet and Red Chinese territory.

The state of the art in photographic techniques, lenses, and films in the early part of the project’s life was such that only fairly gross data could be obtained. The SAMOS satellites were at first limited to one-hundred-nautical-mile orbits in an equatorial path that covered, at best, only limited portions of USSR territory. But as more powerful launch vehicles became available and as the Vandenberg launch site was completed, the SAMOS satellites were launched with increasing frequency into polar orbits of altitudes from six to ten thousand miles, which provided coverage of Communist territory every two hours. By increasing the number of satellites in orbit and launching them into carefully prepared, overlapping orbits, complete coverage every three minutes was obtained.

Sensor technology increased quickly as industry was funded for billions of dollars. From the first crude infrared and black and white lenses, which were limited to coverage of open, daylight, cloudless territory, faster films, computerized programing, sensitive day-night television cameras, tape storage, and widely dispersed, secretly located mobile and fixed ground stations continually received microsecond-duration transmissions that were impossible to locate and fix, and relayed them to a central, monitoring station deep in the Virginia hills. From there, especially prepared abstracts were transmitted to Washington. But, even with sensors able to photograph a Russian guard sneaking a smoke on duty at the Number 3 gate at Kasputin Yar, or record the identification numbers on the locomotive and each of the freight cars moving along the Trans-Siberian Railroad with supplies for the naval base at Vladivostok, there were often, all too often, sites and areas spotted that needed further investigation, In the 1950s, before the SAMOS satellites were available, this Portion of the job had been performed in large part by a series of aircraft, the three most important of which were the U-2 and the reconnaissance versions of the B-47 and B-66. But in 1960, just prior to the ill-fated Paris Summit Conference, a U-2 had been shot down over the Soviet Union with a new type of missile. Nikita Khrushchev had used the incident to stop reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory. For some years after, the U-2 had continued to be operated over Red Chinese territory by the Nationalist Chinese, in spite of the ever-increasing number of the outmoded aircraft shot down and destroyed. By the late 1960s, both the United States and the USSR realized.that the continual surveillance of each other’s territory by their respective “spy-in-the-sky” satellites was doing a great deal of harm to their defense efforts. Such a great deal of harm that both nations on differing occasions were able to report such incidents as the explosion of a nuclear test rocket and the resulting destruction of a complete test complex — and several key officials — in the Soviet Union, and the similar explosion of the highly secret nuclear rocket-engine project at jackass Flats, Nevada, before the capitols were aware that the disaster had occurred, As sensor technology improved, steps were taken to move highly classified work into underground or camouflaged locations not visible to the spying satellites. It was this problem that brought several key officials, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Chief of Staff, the secretaries of State, and Defense, and the president of a large aircraft corporation together in the President’s office in late 1967. From this meeting had come the decision to build an aircraft that would carry many of the same sensors that were incorporated in the Advanced SAMOS. The aircraft to be designed would have long loiter time — on the matter of days rather than hours — coupled with high speed and an extremely high altitude ceiling, well beyond the range of high-altitude antiaircraft rockets.