Itek Corporation was a United States defense contractor that initially specialized in camera systems for spy satellites and various other reconnaissance systems.[1] In the early 1960s they built a conglomerate in a fashion similar to LTV or Litton, during which time they developed the first CAD system and explored optical disc technology. These efforts were unsuccessful, and the company shed divisions to various companies, returning to its roots in the reconnaissance market. The remaining portions were eventually purchased by Litton in 1983, and then Hughes, Raytheon, and Goodrich Corporation.
Richard Leghorn was a former United States Air Force (USAF) aerial reconnaissance expert who had first proposed flying reconnaissance missions over enemy territory in peacetime.[2] Leghorn left the Air Force to become head of Eastman Kodak's European division,[3] and started writing about the "Open Skies" proposal, which he strongly supported.
Open Skies proposed to allow any signing nation to overfly any other, which Leghorn believed would lower international tensions by allowing countries to verify the actions of their adversaries. Eisenhower raised the issue at the 1955 Geneva summit meetings as a way to reduce mutual fears of a surprise attack.[4] At the time, the United States would have had a huge advantage if Open Skies was adopted, as their numerous European and Asian airbases would allow them access to the Soviet heartland, while the lack of USSR bases in the Americas — this being prior to the Cuban Revolution — would have made the treaty an empty promise. Unsurprisingly, the Soviets opposed Open Skies, something Eisenhower later admitted he fully expected.
While Leghorn's writings on the topic were being widely read, he was secretly informed that the United States had already taken him up on his initial proposal, and the United States Air Force (and Royal Air Force) were in the process of flying reconnaissance flights over the USSR.[2] Aware that this would generate vast amounts of photography over long periods of time, Leghorn realized that a major problem would be storing the resulting imagery and allowing it to be easily retrieved for study. Kodak was in the process of introducing its "Minicard" aperture card product, and Leghorn felt this was a natural solution for the problem.[5] Leghorn sought improvement by combining it with machinery dedicated to the task of indexing the information required for reconnaissance. Leghorn contacted his long-time friend Theodore "Teddy" Walkowicz about forming a new company to build such a machine for the Air Force. Walkowicz was an associate of venture capitalistLaurance Rockefeller, and eventually secured a seed loan for $600,000 in exchange for a directorship. Leghorn became president of the new company, whose ITEK name was a phonetic short form of "information technology".[3] Since Leghorn formerly worked at Kodak, there is speculation that the company name was an acronym for "I Took Eastman Kodak".[6]
Weeks after the company formed in late 1957, Leghorn took it in an entirely different direction by purchasing the Boston University Physical Research Laboratory (BUPRL), which researched reconnaissance cameras. BUPRL was designing the HYAC-1 camera for the USAF's reconnaissance balloon efforts, cameras that would eventually fly on the WS-461L balloons during 1957.[7] Now at Itek, the company won contracts for similar cameras for aircraft like the U-2 and SR-71.
The CIA quickly informed them of their top secretCorona to produce the first spy satellites, and asked them to bid on the camera systems. Itek returned a design that used a rotating mirror to record panoramic swaths of the ground. Film was delivered from a canister and wrapped around a cylindrical window that allowed the maximum length of film to be used in a single exposure, increasing resolution. The rotation of the mirror was timed to properly account for the movement of the satellite to avoid stretching the images on-film. The result was a single long photograph showing a "strip" of land. At the time, the CIA had already contracted Fairchild Camera and Instrument to supply cameras, but Itek's submission was technically superior and won them the contract in March or April 1958.[8] To soften the blow, the CIA had Fairchild build the devices until Itek could start its own manufacturing capabilities.
Leghorn was upset by the terms of the agreement, and at one point in 1959 issued a "stop work" order on the project to change its terms.[9] The CIA quickly acquiesced, although they were spooked by the event. Had Itek lost the Corona contract, it was highly likely that the company would have collapsed. This possibility so worried the CIA that they arranged a personal meeting between Rockefeller and the CIA's chief of technical development, Richard Bissell, to inform Rockefeller of the Corona project and make him aware that national security rested on the company's well-being. Leghorn, he felt, needed direct supervision.
Shortly after winning Corona, Itek also won the contract for the Air Force's satellite program, SAMOS. SAMOS originally envisioned a semi-real-time system that downloaded imagery via an onboard scanner, but later expanded to envision a number of different imaging systems based on a single airframe. One of these, E-5, was a project to provide low-resolution wide-area imagery for mapping purposes, which the Air Force needed to plan ingress routes for bombers during war. The SAMOS project was eventually abandoned, leaving several of the E-5 cameras in storage at a Lockheed facility.[10]
Diversification efforts
After winning the CORONA contract, Itek quickly grew from the executive staff to a company employing over a hundred scientists, engineers, and technicians. After only a year its revenues were in the millions, and the company started the process of raising an initial public offering. In public the company stated that while their work was classified, they were working in the field of "information management" (some writers have commented that this may be the first use of the term).[2] The real reasons for this growth - the BURPL purchase - remained secret, so on paper it appeared that Itek's information systems were generating huge orders that demanded a large staff. Writers speculated that the military might allow the company to release their work to the public, making the company highly valuable. Over the space of a few months, the value of the stock grew from $2 to $255, triggering a 5-for-1 split.[3]
Using the newly inflated value of their stock, Leghorn started an aggressive diversification effort. In 1960 Leghorn agreed to fund development of a computerized drafting system, EDM, based on the PDP-1 that had earlier been experimented on at MIT.[11] The same year he arranged a merger with Hermes Electronics (originally Hycon Eastern), makers of various military communications systems. This was followed by the 1961 purchase of Photostat Corp., maker of offset printing systems using Kodak patents.[3] In 1962 he lured Gilbert King away from IBM, where he had worked on the Automatic Language Translator and had developed the world's only working optical disc.[12] Meanwhile, work continued on the original archiving system, but the company proved unable to deliver a working product.
Meanwhile, none of Itek's purchases turned into commercial successes, and in 1961 Itek reported a $2,500,000 loss. Its stock began to drop, hitting a low of $9.50.[3] In spite of the CIA's warnings, Rockefeller did little to address Leghorn's problems, which grew out of control. Frustrated by Leghorn ignoring the reconnaissance side of the company in favor of the continuing string of information projects, the engineers revolted and demanded that he be removed. Walkowicz brought in Franklin Lindsay, a former CIA operative, to help Leghorn get the company back on track.[3] This effort backfired, as Leghorn was insulted by the effort and refused to cooperate. In May 1962 Leghorn was pushed out in favor of Lindsay, who became Itek's president and CEO.
With Lindsay at the helm, Itek returned to focusing mostly on reconnaissance efforts, although by this point their photocopying machines were starting to become successful as well.[3] As a side-effect of this newfound focus, Lindsay shed a number of Leghorn's acquisitions. The first to go was the EDM project in 1962, which ironically became a profitable division of Control Data as their Digigraphics system.[11]
By 1964 Lindsay had returned the company to profitability. By this time the CORONA program had overcome its initial failures and had become a success. Itek would eventually deliver about 200 panoramic cameras for the CORONA program. A further success involved the E-5 cameras originally built for the SAMOS project. In 1961 CORONA delivered low-resolution imagery of a new installation that became known as the "Tallinn line". A debate broke out over their significance; some suggested that it was an antiballistic missile installation using the SA-5 Gammon missile, while others pointed out that the resolution was too low to say anything of the sort. A rush effort started at Lockheed to adapt the E-5 camera to the existing CORONA airframe, resulting in the LANYARD project, today known as the KH-6. The project was, generally, a failure. Three satellites were launched, one returning no film and one only blank frames.[10]
Formation of the NRO
Both the CIA and Air Force continued development of new satellite systems, which led to concerns about the proper use of these valuable and expensive resources. These concerns eventually led to the formation of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in 1961, with the overall mission of ensuring that satellite data was distributed properly, and that the satellite time was not wasted, either by photographing the same area twice, or by allowing an area of interest to be photographed by the first available means. Although the Air Force was able to work within the new environment without any apparent problems, creation of the NRO led to serious political infighting with the CIA.[13]
In 1963 Albert "Bud" Wheelon took over from Bissell as the CIA's chief of technology development. Unlike Bissell, who worked almost entirely with outside contractors, Wheelon started internalizing the process and built up a much larger department.[2] In October 1963 he suggested forming the "Satellite Photography Working Group" to study their current efforts and suggest improvements. Under the new agreements, the NRO was supposed to supply funding for the effort, and on 18 November they agreed. In a following experiment the team attempted to determine the optimal resolution for satellite photography, degrading a series of high-quality photographs in stages to see how much information could be pulled from them at different levels of detail. The results strongly suggested building a new satellite with a 2-foot resolution, something what would not be able to be done by improving the existing CORONA system, which offered 10–25 foot resolution. The NRO declined to offer funding for the satellite, however, so Wheelon arranged funding from its own budget and started the "FULCRUM" effort.[14]
When news of the FULCRUM efforts later found their way to the NRO, a major fight broke out that eventually landed on the desk of Robert McNamara. NRO was supposed to be in charge of coordinating development, and was at that point funding development of the Air Force's 18-inch resolution design, KH-7 "GAMBIT". Stung by the outcome, the project suffered a further setback when Itek announced that they would no longer work on FULCRUM's camera because of a demand that they felt was unreasonable,[15] although other sources suggested it was the final result of a long stream of demands and design changes coming from the newly enlarged CIA division. Wheelon retaliated by handing the contract to Perkin-Elmer, which delivered the cameras for what would become the successful KH-9 "HEXAGON", better known as "Big Bird".[2]
There are two different versions of the story of what followed. Richelson states that the NRO quickly handed Itek a contract for their own "S-2" system, a follow-on to the Air Force's troubled SAMOS program. This project had originally selected a Kodak camera, and changed to an Itek design after their FULCRUM announcement.[15] He notes the suggestion that the offer was pre-arranged, in order to deprive the CIA of their camera, and thereby doom the FULCRUM effort. Lewis states that both the FULCRUM and S-2 projects had already been handed to Itek, and it was the internal power struggles between the CIA and NRO that led to Wheelon's stream of demands as punishment for accepting the S2 work.[2] Whatever the story, Itek was no longer the CIA's primary supplier after CORONA and LANYARD ended, allowing Perkin-Elmer to become a major supplier. S-2 was later downgraded.
Through the 1970s
Into this void came a number of different projects. One of these was the KA-80 "Optical Bar Camera" that flew on both the U-2 and SR-71, as well as a further development of the mapping camera from SAMOS/LANYARD that was used on some of the Big Birds. Itek also found a customer for their panoramic cameras with NASA, who used them both on Project Apollo for mapping the lunar surface,[16] as well as Project Viking's Mars landers.[17] Later they built portions of the Keck Telescope and similar projects.
During the same period, Itek's Graphic Systems division, originally supplying the printing systems, had greatly diversified.
Litton purchase
In 1982 Litton Industries was attempting to diversify their military holdings, and engaged Lehman Brothers to arrange the purchase of a company specializing in electronic warfare. Lehman found a number of companies that Litton might be interested in, including Itek, presenting a report on 20 September 1982. In October, Litton started purchasing Itek stock in the market in an effort to gain control of about 4.9% of the common shares before making a friendly takeover offer.[18]
On 23 November the chairmen of the two companies met, and by January 1983 the negotiations had progressed to the point of making a formal offer. At the advice of Lehman Brothers, Litton made an offer of the current market price plus a 50% premium. During this period the value of Itek stock was rising, so Litton had to increase their offer on several occasions. On 12 January 1983, Litton made an offer of $48, which succeeded on 4 March 1983.[18] Itek became Litton's Itek Division, although the Itek Graphic Systems division was sold off in 1985.[19]
In 1986 it was revealed that a Lehman Brothers trader had been purchasing Itek stock during the negotiations, part of a wider insider trading scandal. Ira Sokolow, part of the Lehman team arranging the Itek purchase, had leaked information about the deal to another Lehman employee, Dennis Levine. They agreed to make insider trades to drive up the stock price and then split the profits. Levine and other traders at Lehman (either tipped off or simply following Levine's trades) started collecting Itek stock and were thus rewarded with part of the 50% premium when the deal closed.[20] Litton later sued Lehman, claiming that their purchase would have been at a lower price had the insider trading not occurred. The stock price rose from $26 to $33 during this period, meaning that had the price stayed at $26 a fair offer would have been $39. A lengthy series of court cases followed.[18]
Hughes, Raytheon, and Goodrich purchase
Litton downsized dramatically in the 1990s, selling off many of its components. In 1996 Hughes Electronics purchased what was then left of Itek, Itek Optical Systems.[21] At the time they announced that Itek's own facilities in Lexington, Massachusetts would fold into their own Hughes Danbury Optical Systems in Danbury, CT. Later in the 1990s, after Raytheon's purchase of Hughes, Itek became Raytheon Optical Systems Company. In early 2000, Raytheon divested the Optical Systems group and it was purchased by Goodrich Corporation. Goodrich Corporation was subsequently purchased by United Technologies Corporation headquartered in East Hartford, Connecticut.[citation needed]
A reconnaissance satellite or intelligence satellite is an Earth observation satellite or communications satellite deployed for military or intelligence applications.
Cold War espionage describes the intelligence gathering activities during the Cold War between the Western allies and the Eastern Bloc. Both relied on a wide variety of military and civilian agencies in this pursuit.
The CORONA program was a series of American strategic reconnaissance satellites produced and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directorate of Science & Technology with substantial assistance from the U.S. Air Force. The CORONA satellites were used for photographic surveillance of the Soviet Union (USSR), China, and other areas beginning in June 1959 and ending in May 1972.
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is a member of the United States Intelligence Community and an agency of the United States Department of Defense which designs, builds, launches, and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the U.S. federal government, and provides satellite intelligence to several government agencies, particularly signals intelligence (SIGINT) to the NSA, imagery intelligence (IMINT) to the NGA, and measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) to the DIA.
BYEMAN codenamed LANYARD, the KH-6 was the unsuccessful first attempt to develop and deploy a very high-resolution optical reconnaissance satellite by the United States National Reconnaissance Office. Launches and launch attempts spanned the period from March to July 1963. The project was quickly put together to get imagery of a site near Leningrad suspected of having anti-ballistic missiles. The satellite carried Itek's "E-5" camera developed for the SAMOS program, which had been cancelled. The camera had a focal length of 1.67 m and could discern objects on the ground 1.8 m in size. The ground swath of the camera was 14 km × 74 km. The satellite weighed 1,500 kg (3,300 lb), and had a single re-entry vehicle in which exposed film was returned to earth for a mid-air aircraft recovery. The KH-6 was manufactured by Lockheed Martin and launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Thor-Agena D launch vehicles.
BYEMAN codenamed GAMBIT, the KH-7 was a reconnaissance satellite used by the United States from July 1963 to June 1967. Like the older CORONA system, it acquired imagery intelligence by taking photographs and returning the undeveloped film to earth. It achieved a typical ground-resolution of 0.61 m to 0.91 m. Though most of the imagery from the KH-7 satellites was declassified in 2002, details of the satellite program remained classified until 2011.
The KH-8 was a long-lived series of reconnaissance satellites of the "Key Hole" (KH) series used by the United States from July 1966 to April 1984, and also known as Low Altitude Surveillance Platform. The satellite ejected "film-bucket" canisters of photographic film that were retrieved as they descended through the atmosphere by parachute. Ground resolution of the mature satellite system was better than 4 inches (0.10 m). There were 54 launch attempts of the 3,000 kilogram satellites, all from Vandenberg Air Force Base, on variants of the Titan III rocket. Three launches failed to achieve orbit. The first one was satellite #5 on April 26, 1967 which fell into the Pacific Ocean after the Titan second stage developed low thrust. The second was satellite #35 on May 20, 1972 which suffered an Agena pneumatic regulator failure and reentered the atmosphere. A few months later, pieces of the satellite turned up in England and the US managed to arrange for their hasty return. The third failure was satellite #39 on June 26, 1973 which suffered a stuck Agena fuel valve. The Bell 8096 engine failed to start and the satellite burned up in the atmosphere. The KH-8 was manufactured by Lockheed. The camera system/satellite was manufactured by Eastman Kodak's A&O Division in Rochester, New York.
The KH-11 KENNEN is a type of reconnaissance satellite first launched by the American National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in December 1976. Manufactured by Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California, the KH-11 was the first American spy satellite to use electro-optical digital imaging, and so offer real-time optical observations.
The Satellite Data System (SDS) is a system of United States military communications satellites. At least three generations have been used: SDS-1 from 1976 to 1987; SDS-2 from 1989 to 1996; SDS-3 from 1998 to the present. It is believed that these satellites were known by the code name Quasar. The first generation was named simply 'SDS', the second generation was named 'Quasar' and the third generation each had their own designations.
The SAMOS or SAMOS-E program was a relatively short-lived series of reconnaissance satellites for the United States in the early 1960s, also used as a cover for the initial development of the KH-7 GAMBIT system. Reconnaissance was performed with film cameras and television surveillance from polar low Earth orbits with film canister returns and transmittals over the United States. SAMOS was first launched in 1960 from Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Lacrosse or Onyx is a series of terrestrial radar imaging reconnaissance satellites operated by the United States National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). While not officially confirmed by the NRO or the Government of the United States prior to 2008, there was widespread evidence pointing to its existence, including one NASA website. In July 2008, the NRO itself declassified the existence of its synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite constellation.
KH-9, commonly known as Big Bird or KeyHole-9, was a series of photographic reconnaissance satellites launched by the United States between 1971 and 1986. Of twenty launch attempts by the National Reconnaissance Office, all but one were successful. Photographic film aboard the KH-9 was sent back to Earth in recoverable film return capsules for processing and interpretation. The highest ground resolution achieved by the main cameras of the satellite was 2 ft (0.61 m). Another source says "images in the "better-than-one-foot" category" for the last "Gambit" missions.
The Missile Defense Alarm System, or MIDAS, was a United States Air Force Air Defense Command system of 12 early-warning satellites that provided limited notice of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile launches between 1960 and 1966. Originally intended to serve as a complete early-warning system working in conjunction with the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, cost and reliability concerns limited the project to a research and development role. Three of the system's 12 launches ended in failure, and the remaining nine satellites provided crude infrared early-warning coverage of the Soviet Union until the project was replaced by the Defense Support Program. MiDAS represented one element of the United States's first generation of reconnaissance satellites that also included the Corona and SAMOS series. Though MIDAS failed in its primary role as a system of infrared early-warning satellites, it pioneered the technologies needed in successor systems.
The Directorate of Science & Technology (DS&T) is the branch of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) tasked with collecting and analyzing information through technological means and develop technical systems in order to advance the CIA’s intelligence gathering.
Digigraphics was one of the first graphical computer aided design systems to go on sale. Originally developed at Itek on the PDP-1 as EDM, the efforts were purchased by Control Data Corporation and ported to their machines, along with a new graphics terminal to support it. Systems cost almost $500,000 and supported only a few users at a time, so in spite of a number of advantages it was not cost competitive with traditional manual methods and only a few systems were sold.
The United States' National Reconnaissance Office's Program A was a component of the National Reconnaissance Program (NRP). Program A took the remnants of the Air Force Office of Special Projects (the successor to the ill-fated SAMOS program office, and redesignated it and refocused its efforts onto the next generation of imagery intelligence gathering satellites.
The National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO) is the "hidden younger brother" of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). NRO was initiated in 1960 and developed as a common office for United States Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to manage satellite reconnaissance. The first revelation about NRO came in 1973, but its very existence was not declassified until 1992. According to Jeffrey T. Richelson, "[m]ost often the Under Secretary of the Air Force served as a Director of the NRO". NURO was initiated in 1969 and developed as a common office or liaison office for the United States Navy and the CIA to manage underwater reconnaissance. NURO used "special project submarines" like USS Seawolf(SSN-575), USS Halibut(SSN-587), and USS Parche(SSN-683) deep inside the waters of the Soviet Union to put out listening devices, tap communication cables, monitor Soviet Navy bases and record sound signatures of Soviet submarines. NURO is a little-known agency; even its name has been secret and its very existence was first revealed in 1998. The United States Secretary of the Navy has served as its director.
Carl Ernest Duckett was the founder of the Central Intelligence Agency's science and technology operations.
UPWARD was the code name, within the National Reconnaissance Office's Byeman Control System, for assistance given to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during Project Apollo. The camera designed to survey the lunar surface was a modification of the GAMBIT design and utilized a 1.5 inch focal length camera for a terrain mapping apparatus. This camera system was present on both the CORONA and GAMBIT survey systems.
David Kosowsky, "Alumni Profiles", RLE currents, MIT, Fall 1996 pg. 10
Further reading
A.W. Tyler, W.C. Myers and J.W. Kuipers, "The Application of the Kodak Minicard System to Problems of Documentation", American Documentation, 6:1, (January 1955), pp.18–30
James Marquardt, "Transparency and Security Competition: Open Skies and America's Cold War Statecraft, 1948-1960",
Johnathan E. Lewis. "Spy Capitalism: Itek and the CIA New Haven", CT: Yale University Press. 329 pages.
Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 9 Number 1 (Winter 2007), pp.55–87
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