Steve Blank

This post is the latest in the “Secret History Series.” They’ll make much more sense if you watch the video or read some of the earlier posts for context. See the Secret History bibliography for sources and supplemental reading.

No Knowledge of Computers

Silicon Valley emerged from work in World War II led by Stanford professor Fred Terman developing microwave and electronics for Electronic Warfare systems. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, spurred on by Terman, Silicon Valley was selling microwave components and systems to the Defense Department, and the first fledging chip companies (Shockley, Fairchild, National, Rheem, Signetics…) were in their infancy. But there were no computer companies. Silicon Valley wouldn’t have a computer company until 1966 when Hewlett Packard shipped the HP 2116 minicomputer.

Meanwhile the biggest and fastest scientific computer companies were in Minnesota. And by 1966 they had been delivering computers for 16 years.

Minneapolis/St. Paul area companies ERA, Control Data and Cray would dominate the world of scientific computing and be an innovation cluster for computing until the mid-1980s. And then they were gone.

Why?

Just as Silicon Valley’s roots can be traced to innovation in World War II so can Minneapolis/St. Paul’s. The story starts with a company you probably never heard of – Engineering Research Associates.

It Started With Code Breaking
For thousands of years, every nation has tried to keep its diplomatic and military communications secret. They do that by encrypting (protecting the information by using a cipher/code) to scramble the messages. Other nations try to read those messages by attempting to break those codes.

During the 1930s the U.S. Army and Navy each had their own small code breaking groups. The Navy’s was called CSAW (Communications Supplemental Activity Washington) also known as OPS-20-G. The Army codebreaking group was the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) at Arlington Hall.

The Army focused on decrypting (breaking/decoding) Japan’s diplomatic and Army codes while the Navy worked on breaking Japan’s Naval codes. This was not a harmonious arrangement. The competition between the Army and Navy code breaking groups was so contentious that in 1940 they agreed that the Army would decode and translate Japanese diplomatic code on the even days of the month and the Navy would decode and translate the messages on the odd days of the month. This arrangement lasted until Dec. 7, 1941.

At the start of WWII the Army and Navy code breaking groups each had few hundred people mainly focused on breaking Japanese codes. By the end of WWII, with the U.S. now fighting Germany, and the Soviet Union looming as a potential adversary U.S. code breaking would grow to 20,000 people working on breaking the codes of Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union.

The two groups would merge in 1949 as the Armed Forces Security Agency and then become the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952.

The Rise of the Machines in Cryptography
Prior to 1932 practically all code breaking by the Army and Navy was done by hand. That year they began using commercial mechanical accounting equipment – the IBM keypunch, card sorters, reproducers and tabulators. The Army and Navy each had their own approach to automating cryptography. The Navy had a Rapid Analytical Machines project with hopes to build machines to integrate optics, microfilm and electronics into cryptanalytic tools. (Vannevar Bush at MIT was trying to build one for the Navy.) As WWII loomed, the advanced Rapid Machines projects were put on hold, and the Army and Navy used hundreds of specially modified commercial IBM electromechanical systems to decrypt codes.

Dual-Use Technology
As the war was winding down, the leadership of the Navy Computing Machine Lab in OPS-20-G was thinking about how they could permanently link commercial, academic and military computing science and innovation to the Navy. After discovering that no commercial company was willing to continue their wartime work of building the specialized hardware for codebreaking, the Navy realized they needed a new company. The decided that the best way to do that was to encourage a private for-profit company to spin out and build advanced crypto-computing systems.

The Secretary of the Navy gave his OK and three officers in the Navy’s code breaking group (Commander Howard Engstrom, who had been a math professor at Yale; Lieutenant Commander William “Bill” Norris, an electrical engineer; and their contracting officer Captain Ralph Meader,) agreed to start a civilian company to continue building specialized systems to help break codes. While unique for the time, this public-private partnership was in-line with the wartime experiment of Vannevar Bush’s OSRD – using civilians in universities to develop military weapons.

Why Minneapolis/St. Paul?
While it seemed like a good idea and had the Navy’s backing, the founders got turned down for funding by companies, investment bankers and everyone, until they talked to John Parker.

Serendipity came to Minneapolis-St. Paul when the Navy team met John Parker. Parker was a ex Naval Academy graduate and a Minneapolis businessman who owned a glider manufacturing company and was well connected in Washington. Parker agreed to invest. In January 1946, they founded Engineering Research Associates (ERA). Parker became President, and got 50% of the company’s equity for a $20,000 investment (equal to $315K today) and guaranteed a $200,000 line of credit (equal to $3M today). The professional staff owned the other 50%. The new company moved into Parker’s glider hanger. Norris became the VP of Engineering, Engstrom the VP of Research, and Meader VP of Manufacturing.

The company hit the ground running. 41 of the best and brightest ex-Navy technical team members of the Naval Computing Machine Lab in Dayton moved and became the initial technical staff of ERA. When the Navy added their own staff from the Dayton Laboratory the ERA facility was designated a Naval Reserve Base and armed guards were posted at the entrance. The company took on any engineering work that came their way but were kept in business developing new code-breaking machines for the Navy. Most of the machines were custom-built to crack a specific code, and increasingly used a new ERA invention – the magnetic drum memory to process and analyze the coded texts.

ERA’s headcount grew rapidly. Within a year the company had 145 people. A year later, 420. And by 1949, 652 employees and by 1955, 1400.  Sales in their first fiscal year were $1.5 million ($22 million in today’s dollars).

During World War II the demands of war industries caused millions more Americans to move to where most defense plants located. Post-war era Americans were equally mobile, willing to move where the opportunities were. And if you were an engineer who wanted to work on the cutting edge of electronics, and electromechanical systems, ERA in Minneapolis-St. Paul was the place to be. (Applicants were told that ERA was doing electronics work for government and industry. Those who wanted more detail were given a number of cover stories. Many were told that ERA was working on airline seat reservation systems.)

How Did ERA Grow So Quickly?
The Navy thought of ERA as its “captive corporation.” From the first day ERA started with contracts from the Navy OPS-20-G codebreaking group. ERA built the most advanced electronic systems of the time. Unfortunately for the company they couldn’t tell anyone as their customer was the most secret government agency in the country – the National Security Agency.

ERAs systems were designed to solve problems defined by their Navy code-breaking customer. They fell into two categories: some projects were designed to automate existing workflows of decoding known ciphers; others were used to discover breaks into new ciphers. And with the start of the Cold War, that meant Soviet cryptosystems. ERAs cryptanalytic devices were most often designed to break only one particular foreign cipher machine (which kept a stream of new contracts coming.) The specific purpose and target of each of these systems with colorful codenames are still classified.

What Did ERA Build For the National Security Agency (NSA)?

By the end of ERA’s first year, ERA had contracts for a digital device called Alcatraz which used thousands of vacuum tubes and relays. A contract for a system named O’Malley followed. Then two “exhaustive trial” systems called Hecate for $250,000 ($3.2 million in today’s dollars) and the follow-on system, Warlock ($500,000 – $6.4 million today.) Warlock was so large that it was kept at the ERA factory and operated as a remote operations center.

Next were the Robin machines, a photoelectric comparator, used to attack the Soviet Albatross code. The first two were delivered in the end of 1950. Thirteen more were delivered to NSA over the next two years.

ERA Disk Drives
One of the problems code breakers had was the difficulty of being able to store and operate on large sets of data. To do so, cryptanalysts used thousands of punched cards, miles of paper tapes and microfilm. ERA was the pioneer in the development of an early form of disk drives called magnetic drum memories.

ERA used these magnetic drums in the special systems they built for NSA and later in their Atlas computers. They also sold them as peripherals to other computer companies.

Goldberg, which followed, was another room-sized special purpose machine – a comparator with statistical capabilities – that took photoelectric sensing and paper tape scanning to new heights.

Costing $250,000 ($3.2 million in today’s dollars), it had 7,000 tubes and was one of the first Agency machines to use a magnetic drum to store and handle data.

Another similarly sized system, Demon, followed. It was a dictionary machine designed to crack a Soviet code. It also used 34-inch-diameter magnetic drum to perform a specialized version of table lookup. Three of these large systems were delivered.

ERA engineers operated at the same relentless and exhausting pace as they had done in war time – similar to how Silicon Valley silicon and computer companies would operate three decades later.

For the next decade ERA would continue to deliver a stream of special-purpose code breaking electronic systems and subsystems for the Navy cryptologic community. (These NSA documents give a hint at the number and variety of encryption and decryption equipment at NSA in the early 1950’s: here, here, here, here, and here.)

ERA was undercapitalized and always looking for other products to sell. At the same time ERA was building systems for the NSA they pursued other lines of businesses; research studies on liquid fueled rockets, aircraft antenna couplers (which turned into a profitable product line,) a Doppler Miss Distance Indicator, Ground Support Equipment (GSE) for airlines, and Project Boom to produce instrumentation for what would become  underground nuclear tests. A 1950 study for the Office of Naval Research called High-Speed Computing Devices – a survey of all computers then existent in the U.S. As there was no single source of information about what was happening in the rapidly growing computer field, this ERA report became the bible of early U.S. computers.

The Holy Grail – A Digital Computer for Cryptography?
As complicated as the ERA machines were, they were still single function machines, not general purpose computers. But up until 1946 no one had built a general purpose computer.

With the war over what the Navy OP-20-G’s and Army SIS computing wizards really wanted was to create a single machine that could perform all the major cryptanalytic functions. The most important of the crypto techniques were based upon either locating repeated patterns, tallying massive numbers of letter patterns, and recognizing plain text, or performing some form of “exhaustive searching.”

How the NSA Got Their First Computers

Their idea was to put each of these major cryptanalytic functions in separate, dedicated, single-function hardware boxes and connect them through a central switching mechanism. That would allow cryptanalysts to tie them together in any configuration; and hook it all to free-standing input/output mechanisms. With a stock of these specialized boxes the agencies believed they could create any desired cryptanalytic engine.

Just as the consensus for this type of architecture was coalescing, a new idea emerged in 1946 – the concept of a general purpose digital computer with a von Neumann architecture. In contrast to having many separate hardwired functions, a general purpose computer would have just the four basic arithmetic ones (add, subtract, multiple and divide) along with a few that allowed movement of data between the input-output components, memory, and a single central processor. In theory, one piece of hardware could be made to imitate any machine through an inexpensive and easily changed set of instructions.

Opponents to the project believed that a von Neumann design would always be too slow because it had only a single processor to do everything. (This debate between dedicated special purpose hardware versus general purpose computers continues to this day.)

The tipping point in this debate happened in 1946 when an OPS-20-G engineer went to the Moore School’s 1946 summer course on computers. The Moore School’s computer group had just completed the ENIAC, arguably the first programmable digital computer, and they were beginning to sketch the outlines of their own new computer, the UNIVAC the first computer for business applications. The engineer came back to the Navy computing group an advocate for building a general-purpose digital computer for codebreaking having convinced himself that most cryptanalysis could be performed through digital methods. He prepared a report to show that his device would be useful to everyone at OP-20-G. The report remained Top Secret for decades.

The report detailed how a general-purpose machine could have successfully attacked the Japanese Purple codes as well as German Enigma, and Fish systems, and how it would be usefully against the current Soviet and Hagelin systems.

This changed everything for the NSA. They were now in the computer business.

ERA’s ATLAS
In 1948 the Navy gave ERA the contract to produce its first digital computer called ATLAS to be used by OPS-20-G for codebreaking.

Twenty four months later, ERA delivered the first of two 24-bit ATLAS I computers. The Atlas was 45’ wide and 9’ long. It weighed 16,000 pounds and was water cooled. Each ATLAS I cost the NSA $1.3 million ($16 million in today’s dollars).

In hindsight, the NSA crossed the Rubicon when the ATLAS I arrived. Today, an intelligence agency without computers is unimaginable. Its purchase showed incredible foresight and initiated a new era of cryptanalysis at the NSA. It was one of the handful of general purpose, binary computers anywhere. Ten years later the NSA would have 53 computers.

ERA asked the NSA for permission to offer the computer for commercial sale. The NSA required ERA to remove instructions that made the computer efficient for cryptography, and that became the commercial version – the ERA 1101 announced in December 1951. It had no operating or programming manual and its input/output facilities was a typewriter, a paper tape reader, and a paper tape punch. At the time, no programming languages existed.

ERA had delivered a breakthrough computer without having an understanding of its potential application or what a customer might have to do to use the machine. In search of commercial customers, ERA set up a ERA 1101 computer in Washington and offered it to companies as a remote computing center. As far as the commercial world knew ERA was a startup with no real computing expertise and this was their first offering. In addition, the only people with experience in writing applications for the 1101 were hidden away at NSA, and ERA was unable to staff the Arlington office to create programs for customers. Finally, ERA’s penchant for extreme secrecy left them unschooled in the art of marketing, sales, and Public Relations. When they couldn’t find any customers they donated the ERA 1101 to Georgia Tech.

With their hands on their first ever general purpose digital computer, the Navy and ERA rapidly learned what needed to be improved. ERA’s follow-on computer, the ATLAS II was a 32-bit system with additional instruction extensions for cryptography. Two were delivered to NSA between 1953 and 1954. ATLAS II cost the NSA $2.3 million ($35 million today.)

Late in 1952, a year before the ATLAS II was delivered to the NSA, ERA told Remington Rand (who now owned the company) the ATLAS II computer existed (and the government had paid for its R&D costs) and it was competitive with the newly announced IBM 701. When the ATLAS II was delivered to the NSA in 1953 they again asked for permission to sell it commercially (and again had to remove some instructions) which turned the Atlas II into the commercial ERA/Univac 1103. (see its 1956 reference manual here.)

This time with Remington Rand’s experience in sales and marketing, the computer was a commercial success with about twenty 1103s sold.

ERA’s Bogart
In 1953, with the ATLAS computers in hand, the Navy realized that a smaller digital computer could be used for data conversion and editing, and to “clean up” raw data for input to larger computers. This was the Bogart.

Physically Bogart was a “small, compact” (compared to the ATLAS) computer that weighed 3,000 pounds and covered 20 square feet of floor space. To get a feel of how insanely difficult it was to program a 1950’s computer take a look at the 1957 Bogart programming manual here.) The Bogart design team was headed by Seymour Cray. ERA delivered five Bogart machines to NSA.

Seymour Cray would reuse features of the Bogart logic design when he designed the Navy Tactical Data System computers, the UNIVAC 490 and the Control Data Corporation’s CDC 1604 and CDC 160.

By 1953, 40% of the University of Minnesota electrical engineering graduates – including Cray –  were working for ERA.

The End of an ERA
By 1952, the mainframe computer industry was beginning to take shape with office machine and electronics companies such as Remington Rand, Burroughs, National Cash Register, Raytheon, RCA and IBM. Parker, still the CEO, realized that the frantic chase of government contracts was unsustainable. (The relationship with the NSA’s procurement offices now run by Army staff, had become so strained that the Navy Computing Lab was unable to get an official letter of thanks sent to ERA for having developed the ATLAS.)

Parker calculated that ERA needed $5 million to $10 million ($75 to $150 million in today’s dollars) to grow and compete with the existing companies in the commercial computing market. Even after the NSA took over the cryptologic work of OPS-20-G the formal contracts with ERA were done through the Navy’s Bureau of Ships. NSA was known as No Such Agency and on paper its relationship with ERA didn’t exist. As far as the public knew, ERA’s products were for “the Navy.” Given that ERA’s extraordinary technical work was unknown to anyone other than the NSA, Parker didn’t think he could raise the money via a public offering (venture capital as we know it didn’t exist.)

Instead, in 1952, Parker sold ERA to Remington Rand (best known for producing typewriters) for $1.7M (about $12M in today’s dollars.) A year earlier, Remington Rand had bought Eckert-Mauchly – one of the first U.S. commercial computer companies – and its line of UNIVAC computers. They wanted ERA to get its government customers. ERA remained a standalone division. The ERA 1101 and 1103 became a part of the UNIVAC product line.

Parker became head of sales of the merged computer division. He left in 1956 and years later he became chairman of the Teleregister Corporation, the predecessor to Bunker-Ramo. He went on to become a director of several companies, including Northwest Airlines and Martin Marietta.

Remington Rand itself would be acquired by Sperry in 1955 and both ERA and Eckert–Mauchly were folded into a computer division called Sperry-UNIVAC. Much of ERA’s work was dropped, while their drum technology was used in newer UNIVAC machines. In 1986 Sperry merged with Burroughs to form Unisys.

Epilogue
For the next 60 years the NSA would have the largest collection of commercial computers and computing horsepower in the world. They would continue to supplement those with dedicated special purpose hardware.

The reorganization of American Signals Intelligence, leading to the creation of the Armed Forces Signals Agency (AFSA) in 1949, then the NSA in 1952, contributed to the demise of the special relationship between ERA and the code- breakers. The integration of the Army and Navy brought a shift in who made decisions about computer purchasing. NSA inherited a computer staff from the Army side of technical SIGINT. They had different ties and orientations than the few remaining old Navy hands. As a result, the new core NSA group did not protest when the special group that integrated Agency and ERA work was disbanded. The 1954 termination of the Navy Computing Machine Lab in St. Paul went almost unnoticed.

But the era of Minnesota’s role as a scientific computing and innovation cluster wasn’t over. In fact, it was just getting started. In 1957 ERA co-founder William Norris, and Sperry-Univac engineers Seymour Cray, Willis Drake, and ERA’s treasurer Arnold Ryden, along with a half dozen others, left Sperry-Univac and teamed up with three investors to form a new Minneapolis-based computer company: Control Data Corporation (CDC). For the next two decades Control Data would build the fastest scientific computers in the world.

More in part 2 of The Secret History of Minnesota

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This post is the latest in the “Secret History Series.”  They’ll make much more sense if you read some of the earlier ones for context. See the Secret History video and slides as well as the bibliography for sources and supplemental reading.

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By the early 1960’s Lockheed Missiles Division in Sunnyvale was quickly becoming the largest employer in what would be later called Silicon Valley. Along with its publically acknowledged contract to build the Polaris Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM,) Lockheed was also secretly building the first photo reconnaissance satellites (codenamed CORONA) for the CIA in a factory in East Palo Alto.

It was only a matter of time before Stanford’s Applied Electronics Lab research on Electronic and Signals Intelligence and Lockheed’s missiles and spy satellites intersected. Here’s how.

Lockheed Agena

Thor/AgenaD w/Corona

In addition to the CORONA CIA reconnaissance satellites, Lockheed was building another assembly line, this one for the Agena – a space truck.  The Agena sat on top of a booster rocket (first the Thor, then the Altas and finally the Titan) and had its own rocket engine that would help haul the secret satellites into space. The engine (made by Bell Aerosystems) used storable hypergolic propellants so it could be restarted in space to change the satellite’s orbit.  Unlike other second stage rockets, once in orbit, the CORONA reconnaissance satellite would stay attached to the Agena which stabilized the satellite, pointed it in the right location, and oriented it in the right direction to send its recovery capsule on its way back to earth.

The Agena would be the companion to almost all U.S. intelligence satellites for the next decade.  Three different models were built and for over a decade nearly four hundred of them (at the rate of three a month) would be produced on an assembly line in Sunnyvale, and tested in Lockheed’s missile test base in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Agena Ferrets – Program 11/Project 989
As Lockheed engineers gained experience with the Agena and the CORONA photo reconnaissance satellite, they realized that they had room on a rack in the back of the Agena to carry another payload (as well as the extra thrust to lift it into space.) By the summer of 1962, Lockheed proposed a smaller satellite that could be deployed from the rear of the Agena. This subsatellite was called Program 11, or P-11 for short (also called Project 989.)  The P-11 subsatellite weighed up to 350lbs, had its own solid rockets to boost it into different orbits, solar arrays for power and was stabilized by either deploying long booms or by spinning 60-80 times a second.

Agena Internals

And they had a customer who couldn’t wait to use the space. While the CORONA reconnaissance satellites were designed to take photographs from space, putting a radar receiver on a satellite would enable it to receive, record and locate Soviet radars deep inside the Soviet Union. For the first time, the National Security Agency (working through the National Reconnaissance Office) and the U.S. Air Force could locate radars which would threaten our manned bombers as well as those that might be part of an anti-ballistic missile system. Most people thought the idea was crazy. How could you pick up a signal so faint while the satellite was moving so rapidly? Could you sort out one radar signal from all the other noise? There was one way to find out. Build the instruments and have them piggyback on the Agena/CORONA photo reconnaissance satellites.

But who could quickly build these satellites to test this idea?

Stanford and Ferrets
Just across the freeway from Lockheed’s secret CORONA assembly plant in Palo Alto, James de Broekert was at Stanford Applied Electronics Laboratory. This was the Lab founded by Fred Terman from his WWII work in Electronic Warfare.

“This was an exciting opportunity for us,” de Broekert remembered. “Instead of flying at 10,000 or 30,000 feet, we could be up at 100 to 300 miles and have a larger field of view and cover much greater geographical area more rapidly. The challenges were establishing geolocation and intercepting the desired signals from such a great distance. Another challenge was ensuring that the design was adapted to handle the large number of signals that would be intercepted by the satellite. We created a model to determine the probability of intercept on the desired and the interference environment from the other radar signals that might be in the field of view, de Broekert explained.

“My function was to develop the system concept and to establish the system parameters. I was the team leader, but the payloads were usually built as a one-man project with one technician and perhaps a second support engineer. Everything we built at Stanford was essentially built with stockroom parts. We built the flight-ready items in the laboratory, and then put them through the shake and shock fall test and temperature cycling…”

Agena and Ferret Subsatellite credit: USAF

Like the cover story for the CORONA (which called them Discoverer scientific research satellites,) the first three P-11 satellites were described as “science” missions with results published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Just fifteen years after Fred Terman had built Electronic Intelligence and Electronic Warfare systems for bombers over Nazi Germany, Electronic Intelligence satellites were being launched in space to spy on the Soviet Union.

Close to 50 Ferret subsatellites were launched as secondary payloads aboard Agena photo reconnaissance satellites.

Ferret Entrepreneur
After student riots in April 1969 at Stanford shut down the Applied Electronics Laboratory, James de Broekert left Stanford. He was a co-founder of three Silicon Valley military intelligence companies: Argo Systems, Signal Science, and Advent Systems,

In 2000 the National Reconnaissance Office recognized James de Broekert as a “pioneer” for his role in the “establishment of the discipline of national space reconnaissance.”

See part 16 “Balloon Wars” of the Secret History of Silicon Valley here

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In 2023 China flying a “spy balloon” over the U.S. created an international incident.

It turns out the U.S. did the same to the Soviet Union in the 1950’s.

In the 1950’s the U.S. Military and the CIA enlisted balloons (some as tall as a 40-story building) as weapons systems targeting the Soviet Union. Throughout the decade they launched a series of Top Secret/codeword balloon projects and thousands of balloons, to gather intelligence about the Soviet Union. The individual stories of these programs are interesting but an unexpected consequence of their secrecy was that they created a mythology that outlasted the missions.

Why Balloons?
In the 1950’s balloons had attributes that airplanes couldn’t match. In the days before satellites they could stay aloft for a long time (days or even weeks,) they could reach altitudes where airplanes couldn’t fly (100,000 feet,) and they could go places that were too dangerous for manned aircraft (flying over the Soviet Union.)

The Search for Soviet Nuclear Weapons
Project MOGUL was an Air Force balloon program to detect Soviet nuclear tests by listening to sound waves traveling through the upper atmosphere. During World War II, scientists had discovered the existence of an ocean layer that conducted underwater sound for thousands of miles. They thought that a similar sound channel might exist in the upper atmosphere. If they could put microphones in the upper atmosphere, the U.S. thought they might be able to hear Soviet nuclear tests and even detect ballistic missiles launches heading toward their targets. Designed to test this theory, Project Mogul balloons carried microphones up to the sound channel to “listen” and radio transmitters to send the sound to the ground. At first, project MOGUL flights involved trains of small weather balloons up to 600 feet in length. Later MOGUL flights used the large polyethylene balloons developed for the Navy’s SKYHOOK.

Flying Sandwich Bags – SKYHOOK
SKYHOOK balloons, funded by the Office of Naval Research, were designed to stay at a fixed altitude (~100,000 feet) and carry a payload of thousands of pounds. They were huge, 400 feet high, made possible because the then new material called polyethylene. These “flying sandwich bags” were built by a company that had experience using this material in packaging – General Mills the same company that makes Cheerios. (Like many American companies in the Cold War they worked on other defense problems.)

Sniffing for a Reactor – Nuclear Air Sampling – ASHCAN
In 1957 the Air Force started Project ASHCAN (using SKYHOOK class balloons at 100,0000 feet) to take high altitude air samples and search for nuclear particles and trace gases in fallout from tests in the Soviet Union. For the first time, U.S. intelligence could estimate the amount of plutonium being produced by Soviet weapons production reactors. These balloons were secretly launched from Brazil and the Panama Canal Zone, and from air force bases in the U.S.  Over time, U.S. intelligence also used reconnaissance planes like the U-2, RB-57’s, and C-130 aircraft to collect air samples.

Genetrix Launched from the U.S.S. Valley Forge

Ballooning Over the Soviet Union – GENETRIX
While the nuclear detection balloons did their spying while flying above the U.S. or allied countries, the next series of balloons flew over the Soviet Union.

In the 1950’s, while U.S. reconnaissance aircraft flew around the periphery of the Soviet Union, U.S. military planners still had virtually no information about what was going on in vast areas of the Soviet territory. While there were a few overflights of the Soviet interior in the early 1950’s these missions were extremely risky and couldn’t provide enough information to assess Soviet military strength. Spy satellites and the U-2 spy planes were still far in the future so the U.S. military became big fans of reconnaissance balloons as a solution to this problem.

In 1950 the Air Force thought that high-altitude balloons might be used to perform photo and ELINT spyflights over the Soviet Union.  They placed aerial reconnaissance cameras on the balloons and ran a series of test programs (code names of GOPHER, MOBY DICK, GRANDSON and GRAYBACK) launching 640 balloons from New Mexico, Montana, the West Coast, Missouri and Georgia. With the tests completed, the program name changed to GENETRIX and was given the designation of Weapons System 119L.

In late 1955 President Eisenhower gave the ok to launch the GENETRIX balloons over the Soviet Union. Hundreds of these balloons took off from secret sites in Norway, Scotland, West Germany, and Turkey carrying a gondola with two reconnaissance cameras.

The United States launched 516 of the GENETRIX balloons but only 44 or so made it out of the Soviet Union.  The rest landed on Soviet farms dumping 600-pound cameras in hayfields. We did get coverage of about 8 percent of the Soviet Union, but politically it created a lot of tension as cameras were popping up on Khrushchev’s desk. “Oh, another balloon Mr. Premier.”  The Soviets put on a public exhibition of the equipment.

Bigger and Better- MELTING POT
Never one to give up, the military suggested a bigger and better balloon program. Since the GENETRIX balloons flying at 55,000 feet were relatively easy for Soviet fighters to intercept, the new balloons would be built around the Navy SKYHOOK design and fly at 100,000 feet for up to a month. These balloons would carry a new reconnaissance camera, built by the Boston University Physical Research Lab. Three of these balloons were launched in July 1958 from an aircraft carrier off the east coast of Japan (in those months the jet stream at the altitude went west to east.) All three accidentally dropped their gondolas over Communist territory. President Eisenhower cancelled all the balloon overflights.

Unexpected Consequences – UFO’s in the 1950’s
All these balloon flights had an unexpected consequence on a jittery and paranoid nation in the Cold War. Before sunrise and after sunset, while the Earth below was dark, high altitude balloons were still lit by sunlight, and their plastic skin glowed and appeared to change color with the change in sun angle. Some of the Project Mogul balloon flights were launched from Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico in 1947, and a few crashed nearby – one near a town called Roswell. The military cover-up of the secret purpose of the balloon led to conspiracy theories about aliens and UFOs. The start of the Mogul balloon flights coincided with the first reports of UFO’s. To someone on the ground, these balloons may have looked like UFOs.

Because each of these separate balloon programs were highly compartmentalized programs it’s doubtful that there was any one individual who realized that the sum of the programs were putting thousands of high altitude balloons in the air in the 1950’s. The MOGUL, MOBY DICK, ASHCAN and GENETRIX programs were the CIA/military’s most closely guarded secret projects. Balloon sightings were dismissed with cover story: they were just weather balloons. Even as one part of the military tried to investigate these sightings, the other kept them away from the true purpose of the balloon missions.The reason for the denials – 1) the Soviets could have masked their nuclear tests and filtered their reactor emissions if they knew what we were sampling and 2) GENETRIX balloon flights over the Soviet Union were a violation of international law.

The thousands of classified and compartmentalized balloon flights (along with the first flight of the high altitude CIA U-2 reconnaissance plane in 1955) are a possible explanation of of UFO sightings in the 1950’s and the claim of military cover-ups.

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This post is the latest in the “Secret History Series.”  They’ll make much more sense if you read some of the earlier ones for context. See the Secret History video and slides as well as the bibliography for sources and supplemental reading.

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The Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic weapon in 1949 and the start of the Korean War in 1950 fed cold war paranoia in the military and political leadership of the United States. The U.S. intelligence community was determined to find out what was going on inside the Soviet Union. But Soviet secrecy had the country locked down tightly. Desperate for intelligence, the CIA would fly the Lockheed built U-2 spy plane into and over the Soviet Union on 24 missions from 1956-1960 taking photos of its military installations.

But even as the U-2 was beginning its overflights, the U.S. military had concluded that the future of intelligence over the Soviet Union would no longer be with airplanes, but would rely instead on spy satellites orbiting hundreds of miles above in space.

One company in what is today Silicon Valley would build most of them.

Weapons System 117L
In 1956 Lockheed Missiles had just won the contract to build the Polaris Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM) for the U.S. Navy in Sunnyvale California, and down in Los Angeles, the U.S. Air Force was on a “crash program” to build land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM’s) – the Atlas, Titan and Minuteman.

In 1954, three years before the U.S. or the Soviet Union ever orbited a single satellite, the Air Force asked the RAND corporation to study what satellites could do for the military. Their answer: satellites would enable us to peer over the closed border and inside the Soviet Union. In 1956, the Air Force organization building our ICBMs was assigned to build a family of satellites to spy on the Soviet Union from space. These satellites would be configured to carry out different reconnaissance missions, including photo reconnaissance, infrared missile warning, and Electronic Intelligence.

This military spy satellite program was called Weapons System 117L.

Spies in Sunnyvale
In 1956 the Air Force gave Lockheed Missiles Division in Sunnyvale the contract to build Weapons System 117L.

Over the next two years Weapons System 117L evolved into a large ambitious program with multiple satellites:

• The Satellite and Missile Observation System (SAMOS) would take low resolution pictures of the Soviet Union from space and transmit the photos electronically to earth.
• Another SAMOS version (called Ferrets) would collect electronic intelligence on Soviet radars and transmit the location and radar details electronically to earth.
• The Missile Detection Alarm System (MIDAS) would provide early warning of the launch of Soviet missiles heading to the U.S. by looking for the hot exhaust (the infrared plume) of rocket engines and transmit the location of the launch electronically to earth.

Crisis
In 1957, a year after Lockheed got the contract to start building WS-117L, the Soviet Union tested an ICBM – one that could carry a nuclear warhead to the United States. They quickly followed with the launch of Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite.

These two events jolted the U.S. intelligence agencies into crisis mode. The Soviet Union claimed they could turn out ICBMs like sausages, and the CIA desperately needed to know how many missiles the Soviets really had and where they were.

Not Good Enough
The photo reconnaissance satellite designed for Weapons System-117 would have let the U.S. military see objects larger than 100-feet from space.  This 100-foot resolution was sufficient for its original mission – to assess how effective the first wave of nuclear attacks on the Soviet Union had been. This “post-strike bomb damage assessment” would allow targets that had been missed by the nuclear armed SAC bombers to be retargeted for follow-on attacks. Because of the immediacy of the information, it required real-time electronic read-out of film developed on orbit.

The problem was that while 100-foot resolution was good enough to locate craters left in cities from space, it wasn’t sufficient for the new mission; to locate the new Soviet ICBM silos and bombers. In addition, the electronic read-out of film developed on orbit was nowhere near ready; it was too complex for its time and technology.

The CIA and Corona
The CIA convinced the Secretary of Defense that the best bet was to build a separate photo reconnaissance satellite carrying a camera that took pictures from space as it passed over the Soviet Union. Film from the camera would be de-orbited in a capsule that could survive the heat of re-entry from space. A parachute would slow the descent of the capsule, which would be snatched in mid-air over the Pacific Ocean by a recovery plane hooking its parachute.  The idea was that this film-based spy satellite would be a short-term project until the Lockheed electronic readout version was in better shape.

This Project was code-named Corona.

The Flamingo Motel
In March 1958 a few unassuming guests checked into the Flamingo Motel in San Mateo, California, near the San Francisco airport. The CIA, and their primary contractors Lockheed, Kodak, Fairchild and GE, met to hash out their roles and the schedule. The CIA was the customer. Lockheed would integrate and assemble the satellites, Itek (which replaced Fairchild) would provide the camera, Kodak the film, and GE would provide the recovery system that would bring the exposed film through the fiery re-entry back to earth.

After the meeting, the Lockheed manager for Corona rented his own hotel room in Rickey’s Hyatt House in Palo Alto to start to plan the program. He needed to find a factory, separate from the already secret Polaris factory in Sunnyvale. He found an unused facility at the Hiller Helicopter factory on Willow Road in East Palo Alto which became the Lockheed “Advanced Projects” facility.

Deception
To hide the fact that we were launching high-resolution photo reconnaissance satellites over the Soviet Union, the CIA had the Air Force publically cancelled the SAMOS photo reconnaissance portion of WS-117L. The program then was resurrected as a “deep black” “compartmentalized” CIA program. When the Corona satellites were launched the CIA used a “cover” story. They called the Corona satellites the  “Discoverer” program and claimed it was an experimental program to develop and test satellite subsystems and explore environmental conditions in space. The film recovery capsule was described as a “biomedical capsule” for the recovery of biological specimens sent into space as an early test of how humans would react to manned spaceflight.

East Palo Alto – Lockheed’s Satellite Factory
The Corona project was run like a startup – a small team, minimum bureaucracy, focussed on a goal and tightly integrated with customer needs. Starting in February 1959, only 12 months after the program began the Air Force launched the first  Corona reconnaissance satellite from the military’s secret spaceport on the California coast at Vandenberg Air Force Base. But the first 13 missions were failures. Yet the program was deemed so important to national security the CIA and the Air Force persevered. And when the first images were received they transformed technical intelligence forever. At first, objects as small as 20-35 feet could be seen from space, with later versions improving to be able to see 6 foot objects, over millions of miles of a formally closed country.

Corona Image of Stepnogorsk Bioweapons Facility

Over the life of the program there were 145 Corona launches – 120 were complete or partial successes. During that same decade the Corona program evolved into six different satellite models (the KH-1 thru KH-6) with three different intelligence objectives.

Lockheed turned the Hiller Helicopter plant in East Palo Alto into the control facility for all spy satellites and the Corona spy satellite assembly line – building about one a month and delivering ~145 Corona satellites over the life of the program.

Stanford, Jasons, WS-117L and Corona
In addition to Lockheed, Stanford University also had a hand in Corona. Sidney Drell, then a professor in the Stanford Physics department, was one of the dozen of young scientists who were founding members of the Jason Group (scientists working on national security problems.) His first project was understanding whether a Soviet nuclear burst in space could blind the infrared sensors on the Midas portion of WS-117L.  This research got him invited to be part of the President’s Scientific Advisory Council (PSAC). But it was when the CIA asked him to solve some technical problems with the film on the Corona spacecraft that his career became intertwined with photo reconnaissance. His studies convinced the CIA that photo interpreters needed an order of magnitude improvement in resolution, and Corona had been pushed to its limits. In the late 1960’s Drell, as a member of the Land Panel convinced the CIA that the next generation of photo reconnaissance satellites should transmit their images back to earth in real-time, and use CCD’s rather than film.

For his work, Drell, still at Stanford, was recognized as one of the ten founders of National Reconnaissance by the NRO.

Corona Firsts
While Corona had a number of technological breakthroughs, including the first photoreconnaissance satellite, the first recovery of an object from space, etc. it was Corona imagery in 1961 that told the intelligence community and the new Kennedy administration that the “missile gap” (the supposed Soviet lead in ICBMs) was illusory. By fall of 1961 Soviet Union had a total of six deployed ICBMs – we had ten times as many. In truth, it was the U.S. that had the lead in missiles.

Corona was just the beginning. Overhead reconnaissance would become an integral part of the U.S. intelligence community. Hidden in plain sight, Lockheed and the U.S. intelligence community were just getting started in Silicon Valley.

Next – Agena, Midas, Ferrets and the NRO in Part XV of the Secret History of Silicon Valley.

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This post is the latest in the “Secret History Series.”  They’ll make much more sense if you read some of the earlier ones for context. See the Secret History bibliography for sources and supplemental reading.

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The Future is Clear – Microwave Valley Forever
In 1956 Hewlett Packard, back then a maker of test equipment was the valley’s largest electronics employer with 900 employees. But startups were rapidly spinning out of Stanford’s Applied Electronics Lab delivering microwave tubes, components and complete electronic intelligence and electronic warfare systems for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. The future of the valley was clear – microwaves.

1956 – Change Everything
In 1956 two events would change everything.  At the time neither appeared earthshaking or momentous. Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the first semiconductor company in the valley, set up shop in Mountain View. And down the street, Lockheed Missiles Systems Division which would become the valley’s most important startup for the next 20 years, moves its new missile division from Burbank to 275 acres next to the Moffett Naval Air Station in Sunnyvale. (Lockheed’s 8 million-square-foot Sunnyvale complex, was the largest corporate real estate complex in Silicon Valley until the 1990s.)

Lockheed – Building Nuclear Missiles in Sunnyvale
Lockheed, an airplane manufacturer, was getting into the missile business by becoming the prime contractor to build the Polaris, a submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) developed by the Navy. The Polaris was unique: it would be the first solid-fuel ballistic missile used by the U.S.  Solid fuel solved the safety problem of carrying missiles at sea and underwater and also allowed for instant launch capability. Polaris launched SLBM’s would become the third part of the nuclear triad the U.S. built in the cold war –  the Polaris, the B-52 manned bomber, and the Minuteman, and Titan land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs.)

Each Polaris missile carried a 600 kT nuclear warhead, (later Polaris versions carried three) and each ballistic missile submarine carried 16 of these missiles. 10 years after the program started the United States had built and put to sea 41 ballistic missile submarines carrying 656 Lockheed missiles (28.5 ft high, and weighing 29,000 lbs.) The company acquired a 5,000 acre missile test facility near Santa Cruz, and for years would test it’s missiles in the mountains above the valley.

Between 1960 and 1971, Lockheed built three versions of the Polaris missile: with each successive version increasing its range and accuracy.

One can assume that with spares, Lockheed built close to 750 of Polaris missiles in those ten years. That’s ~75 missiles a year, 6/month flying out of Moffett Field.

In 1971, Lockheed built a longer range version of the Polaris—called the Poseidon by enlarging it to the maximum size to fit into the existing submarine launch tubes. In 1990, Lockheed delivered Trident – the current generation of submarine launched ballistic missiles.

You Can Be Sure if It’s Westinghouse
Polaris submarines carried each missile in a separate launch tube. Down the street from Lockheed in Sunnyvale, another American corporate icon, Westinghouse became the developer of the launch tube for the Polaris missile. To launch missiles from a submarine under water, Westinghouse had to solve several problems. The launch tube had to keep the missile snug in its tube until firing. It had to eject the missile with sufficient velocity so it would head to the surface from a 100’ feet under water, and it had to protect the submarine when ocean water came rushing in to the now empty launch tube.  Oil-filled shock absorbers solved the cushioning problem and compressed air launched the missile out of the tube through a thin diaphragm that separated the missile from the ocean once the missile launch covers were opened.

Zero to 28,000 people – We Become “Defense Valley”
By 1965 Hewlett Packard, the test and instrumentation company, had grown ten-fold.  From 900 people in 1956 it now employed 9,000. Clearly it must have been the dominant company in the valley? Or perhaps it was Fairchild, the direct descendant of Shockley Semiconductor, now the dominant semiconductor supplier in the valley (80% of its first years business coming from military systems) with ~10,000 people?

Nope, it was the Lockheed Missiles Division, which had zero employees in 1956, now in 1965 had 28,000 employees in Sunnyvale. The best and the brightest were coming from across the country to the valley south of San Francisco.

And they were not only building Polaris missiles.

By 1965 Lockheed factories in Sunnyvale, Stanford and East Palo Alto were building the most secret spy satellites and rockets you never heard of. While the 1950’s had made us “Microwave Valley,” the growth of Lockheed, Westinghouse and their suppliers had turned us into “Defense Valley.”

In the next post; Spy Satellites in East Palo Alto and Stanford – Corona, WS-117, Samos, Ferret’s and Agena in Part XIV of the Secret History of Silicon Valley.

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“In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Goodwill.”  Winston Churchill

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In March I was the keynote at the In-Q-Tel Venture Capital Conference, giving a talk on the Secret History of Silicon Valley. (In-Q-Tel is the Central Intelligence Agency’s Venture Capital firm in Silicon Valley.)
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The gist of the talk was that the needs of electronic intelligence in the midst of the Cold War and a single Stanford Professor was a key catalyst for entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley.

There were about 300 people in the audience, about 150 from the U.S. intelligence community.

Irony
Last week I was the keynote at the American Business Association of Russian Speaking Professionals.

There were about 300 people in the audience, almost all from the old Soviet Union.

I presented the same Secret History talk, pointing out that the launch of the first Soviet satellite (Sputnik) galvanized the U.S. government to accidentally contribute to the start the Venture Capital industry as we know it.

Afterwards a few of the audience came up and told me stories about Soviet weapons systems that could have won someone an intelligence medal 30 years earlier.

I would have loved to have given the talk to both audiences at the same time.

Close enough.
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