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.

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[PurpleBadger]

Started before the war - pre-war the Germans flew the Graf Zeppelin airship along the British Chain Home radar network looking for signals, found nothing (they were looking at too short a wavelength) and thus believed that the British had no operational radar ...

Another fun thing: When British aircraft began using radar to find U-boats, in '42 the Germans deployed an early detector called Metox, which was clunky to use but arguably better than nothing. In '43 U-boats began getting clobbered by British aircraft. A British prisoner told the Germans that British aircraft were homing in on signals from the Metox device itself. Metox did produce a little noise from oscillators in the circuits, but that wasn't what was going on. The truth was that British had begun using a higher frequency that Metox couldn't detect, but for a while the Germans believed the POW's line of BS.