America’s Secret Eyes

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How the U.S. built the most powerful surveillance system in history For sixty years, a classified constellation of satellites has watched the Earth with cameras sharper than anything publicly available. The system overhead right now has been flying continuously since 1976. It started with a failure. On May 1, 1960, a Soviet missile shot down a CIA U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk. The pilot survived. The program did not. The United States lost its most valuable intelligence tool in a single moment. Overflights of Soviet territory—once routine—became politically impossible overnight. What replaced them changed intelligence forever. Six weeks later, a U.S. Air Force C-130 intercepted a falling capsule mid-air over the Pacific. Inside was exposed photographic film taken from orbit. The program was called CORONA. The U.S. government would not admit it existed for another 35 years. From Risk to Reach CORONA was not elegant. Its early launches failed more often than they succeeded. Rockets exploded. Cameras malfunctioned. Recovery capsules vanished into the ocean. But when it worked, it worked at a scale nothing else could match. A single CORONA mission returned more imagery of the Soviet Union than all previous U-2 flights combined. That changed the nature of...