US spy satellite agency declassifies high-flying Cold War listening post

The JUMPSEAT satellites loitered over the North Pole to spy on the Soviet Union.

See full article...

 

[Chuckstar]

The name seems pretty appropriate. Like someone looked at the satellite and said “you know what that kinda looks like…”. And it stuck.

 

[Chuckstar]

I taught the 20-WPM typing block at the command post school at Keesler AFB in the '70s. We got a lot of Morse code operator cross- trainees when they closed that career field; had one fellow who could do 70 words per minute with his two index fingers. In a timed trial he'd scan the text, flurry of fingers, done, no errors. Refused to learn home- row touch typing, but he easily did 20WPM so I passed him...

The class in high school I took that was most directly relevant to the rest of my life was typing. I don’t deny those other classes helped add up to who I am today, my analytical and cognitive skills, etc. But from the perspective of direct applicability: typing.

 

[Chuckstar]

You would think that the Germans would have had "tourists" drive up the coast with a camera. Those radar installations were hard to conceal. Or they could take photos from "mapping" aircraft, etc.

Why bother when you have a blimp? The U.S. did not invent over-reliance on remote intelligence gathering. We just perfected it.

 

[Chuckstar]

Free countries often are denied access to authoritarian countries, we could not just get in a car and drive around. In pre-WWII England, a German agent could have rented a car and driven where ever they wanted. It would be easy to use a citizen of a third country to avoid suspicion/followers. But in 1934 Germany, every foreigner was considered a spy. In the Soviet Union it was not possible to just drive around the country.

In the US, we have people worried about balloons! But a Chinese (etc) agent could hire all kinds of people to drive around and put listening posts in range of interesting locations.

Good point. But it is true that the Germans had a blind spot regarding HUMINT, as has the U.S. in the time since countries like Russia were no longer closed off.

 

[Chuckstar]

One of the more-overlooked examples is the mission of the Graf Zeppelin II, sister airship to the Hindenberg, up the UK coast just before the war, trying to learn about the British Chain Home radar defense system. The operators heard the radar signals but thought they were electronic noise from the power grid - because the British used their power grid as a frequency standard for the radar system to synchronize the towers! So the airship flew up the entire British coast, watched the entire time by the Chain Home radars, and then went home and reported, "We saw no evidence of a British defense radar system."

It was one of the biggest electronic intelligence failures in history, and directly contributed to the British victory in the Battle of Britain. The German Luftwaffe went in assuming the British had no extensive radar system, when the exact opposite was true.

The Germans knew those towers were radars, and did not mistake them for grid noise.

The Germans assumed that using 20-55 MHz frequencies with non-rotating antennas could not provide the precision needed for tracking airplanes, so they assumed it was designed for tracking off-shore ship traffic.