By John Glassie
(Seed Magazine, March 2003, in somewhat different form)

We think of the Eisenhower presidency as taking place largely on the golf course. But there was a lot of intrigue and activity underneath the surface, or rather above it.

During the 1950s, in a major collaboration between science and government, Eisenhower's administration secretly built "the overhead spy machines that helped America manage and ultimately win the cold war."

Information about this satellite surveillance program was classified until 1995. Now, armed with thousands of newly available documents, Philip Taubman provides the details for the first time. Unfortunately, as it turn out, Secret Empire: Eisenhower, CIA and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage is a rather colorless account of an otherwise fascinating subject: one of the biggest covert operations in history.

Taubman, an editorial-page editor at the New York Times, begins with a two-part Eisenhower objective: Send aircraft to gather intelligence about the Soviet arms build-up; keep them from getting shot down and starting a nuclear war in the process. The solution was to fly higher, out of Soviet reach, first in the form of new high-altitude spyplanes, and then, as one proposal put it, in the form of unmanned "world-circling spaceships" -- that is to say, satellites.

The scientific obstacles were daunting. All these scientists had to do was shoot a half-ton contraption 100 miles off the ground -- a contraption that would orbit a precise path around the globe, take detailed photographs of Soviet installations, and send the film back to Earth in a combustion-resistant package for processing.

James Plummer, a young Lockheed engineer chosen to head the project, says he was handed a paragraph-long description and some rough drawings and then told to "go off and built that thing." No one and nothing had been to space before, and no one had electronic calculators or integrated circuits to do it with either; Plummer's engineers instead relied on slide rules and vacuum tubes, and "often made it up as they went along," says Taubman, "using hammers and wrenches to make adjustments on the fly."

There were a lot of mishaps along the way. Test satellites "spun out of control, burned up in the atmosphere, crashed, hopelessly lost, in the ocean, or exploded." Nevertheless, although the Soviets famously beat the Americans to the punch by sending Sputnik, the worlds first satellite, into orbit, American satellite technology was, by the early 1960s, providing us with a "tidalwave" of intelligence. (It ultimately became so sophisticated that, in recent years, as Taubman notes, it would be relied upon too heavily -- an over-reliance blamed in part for our vulnerability to terrorism.)

Taubman says the current administration can look to the Eisenhower years for "useful guideposts" as it works to deal with new national security threats. Yet Ike's activities raise serious red flags.

Eisenhower, who, as Taubman portrays him, fails to live down his reputation as a determined but dull man, ran the program through the CIA without congressional oversight. The CIA point man was deputy director Richard Bissel, later responsible for the botched plan to assassinate Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar.

They mounted their effort in complete secrecy -- which involved, among other cloak-and-dagger acts, paying "fictitious companies" from a hidden fund. And they implemented a "carefully orchestrated disinformation strategy" -- which involved lying, frequently, to the press, the public and the international community. Indeed, describing one such act of disinformation, Taubman admits the administration "set a shocking new standard of deceit" in American politics.

All this of course brings up a terribly important and timely question: How do we reconcile the need for security-driven secrecy with the principles of an open society and a free press? But this question is not to be found in Secret Empire.

And that isn't the only thing missing. A real sense of the human beings behind this Cold War intrigue gets lost in a mountain of previously classified detail.