Applied witchcraft: American communications intelligence satellites during the 1960s

[Flyaway]

Another cracking article from Mr Day.

During the Battle of Midway in June 1942, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Fleet, monitored the battle from his command center in Pearl Harbor, picking up snippets of radio traffic from both American and Japanese forces. After hearing that American planes had spotted the Japanese carriers and started their attack, Nimitz and his officers heard nothing more from the Japanese carriers for a long period, but then intercepted a message from the Japanese force seeking the location of the American fleet. After another long silence, the Americans intercepted a coded Japanese message. The call sign on the message was Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, whose flagship was the carrier Akagi. But one of the American naval officers present had become an expert at identifying the styles of the Japanese operators who tapped out coded messages. This message was not tapped out by the Akagi’s heavy-handed warrant officer, but instead by the chief radioman in the cruiser Nagara. The Americans concluded from this small bit of evidence that the Akagi had been damaged too heavily to serve as flagship, and Nagumo had shifted his command to the cruiser. In fact, Akagi was in flames, Nagumo had barely escaped alive by climbing down a rope from the ship’s bridge, and the carrier, which had participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor, would sink within the day.

The Space Review: Applied witchcraft: American communications intelligence satellites during the 1960s

 

[sat_dxer]

"an expert at identifying the styles" don't know the source (other than Mr. Day) of this remark, but listening to lot of morse traffic one can easily developed the ability to recognize the "fist"

 

[Flyaway]

It’s interesting but perhaps not unexpected that anything signals intelligence related seems to remain classified far longer than say photo reconnaissance. That said I don’t think we’ve seen anything that much about early radar reconnaissance over the years or the early days of NOSS satellites. I really would have thought by now something would have been declassified about the first generation NOSS satellites or even their precursors.

 

[blackstar]

It’s interesting but perhaps not unexpected that anything signals intelligence related seems to remain classified far longer than say photo reconnaissance. That said I don’t think we’ve seen anything that much about early radar reconnaissance over the years or the early days of NOSS satellites. I really would have thought by now something would have been declassified about the first generation NOSS satellites or even their precursors.

The early radar reconnaissance program was called QUILL. There is a substantial amount of material that has been declassified about it. I have a draft article on QUILL that I have been sitting on for years and haven't published, but it uses the declassified material.

QUILL

NOSS has not been declassified. However, POPPY was the precursor to NOSS, and there has been a fair amount of material declassified on POPPY (and its predecessor, GRAB/DYNO). Unfortunately, the POPPY material is really hard to understand due to a combination of scattershot redactions of documents, poorly-written histories, and incomplete declassifications. I've written about GRAB, but I've stayed away from writing about POPPY because it gives me headaches when I try to make sense of that material.