Spy Plane Research Articles

Kitchen without the debate: The Yugoslav exhibition of consumer goods in Moscow, 1960

The Yugoslav exhibition of consumer goods in Moscow was the first of its kind organized by Yugoslavia in a communist country. It opened its door to the public on May 25, 1960, amidst the super-heated international political environment after the American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Following the colossal propaganda success of the 1959 U.S. National Exhibition in Moscow, the Yugoslavs managed to deliver yet another propaganda blow to the Soviet prestige, showcasing that even socialism outside the Soviet bloc and in close collaboration with the United States was not only possible but also better.

Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War

Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War

‘All we see is dots’: Aerial Objectivity and Mass Surveillance in Baltimore

In 2020, the Baltimore Police Department used aerial surveillance camera technology, dubbed the ‘spy plane’, that recorded the movements of nearly every citizen from above. Based on direct observation inside the programme’s operations centre, this article shows how a ‘grainy truth’ aesthetic, created by engineers to combat criticisms of the programme’s invasiveness, also influenced the actual labour of surveillance. An obsession in the public debate and within the operations centre about how the imagery looks, however, overshadowed the most worrisome aspect of the programme: its infrastructure of representation. City officials are now saddled with managing a massive database of citizen location data owned by a private company, prompting difficult questions about the privatisation of policing.

Air-LUSI: Development of a pointing and tracking control system for lunar spectral measurements

The airborne lunar spectral irradiance mission is an inter-agency partnership between the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology that aims to make SI-traceable measurements of lunar spectral irradiance at visible to near-infrared wavelengths with unprecedented accuracy. This information is vital to using the Moon as a calibration source for Earth observing satellites. To minimize uncertainty, the lunar measurements are made above 90% of the Earth’s atmosphere from an Earth Resources 2 aircraft, a civilian descendant of the U-2 spy plane. Situated in a large wing pod, a custom-designed telescope automatically tracks the Moon and the measurements are fed into a spectrometer. This information is being used to develop an extremely accurate model that can be used to calibrate satellites. An Engineering Flight Campaign was completed in August 2018 and a Demonstration Flight Campaign in November 2019, which demonstrated autonomous lunar acquisition and tracking as well as measurements of the Moon’s spectral irradiance from an altitude of approximately 21 km. This article presents the simplified double gimbal control system design that was used to manipulate the telescope, and was capable of targeting the Moon with a root mean squared tracking error of about 0.1∘.

Dancing on the Razor’s Edge: A Foundational Review of IoT Exploitation and Defense through the Lens of TECHINT Collection

From the Culper Spy Ring’s cyphers to the development of the U-2 spy plane, the history of American intelligence collection operations is defined by innumerable technological advancements, regretta...

Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage: The Declassified Stories of Cold War Reconnaissance Flights and the Men Who Flew Them. by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 291 pp.

<i>Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage: The Declassified Stories of Cold War Reconnaissance Flights and the Men Who Flew Them</i>. by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 291 pp.

To improve weather and climate models, researchers are chasing atmospheric gravity waves

On September 3, 2018, an unpowered experimental sailplane made history by flying into the stratosphere. After leaving from El Calafate, a town near the Southern Patagonian Ice Field in Argentina, glider pilots Jim Payne and Tim Gardner surfed on enormous airborne waves emanating from the Andes Mountains. They achieved a world record height of 23,203 meters—higher than a Lockheed U-2 spy plane’s cruising altitude. No other unpowered aircraft has ever achieved such elevation. It was a feat made possible by not just human ingenuity but also the incredible strength of a phenomenon known as atmospheric gravity waves. Atmospheric gravity waves—seen here over the Indian Ocean via the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer housed in NASA’s Terra satellite—emerge when parcels of air are forced upward. Image credit: Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC. Unlike the similarly named (and perhaps more famous) cosmic gravitational waves, which are ripples in the fabric of space-time, atmospheric gravity waves are a wholly terrestrial occurrence. They emerge when parcels of air are forced upward, for instance, by a tall mountain range, moving from a dense atmospheric layer to a thinner one. The heavier blobs of air then succumb to the force of gravity and fall back down, resulting in a periodic oscillation that can carry energy and momentum over vast distances. They are the smallest atmospheric waves that researchers study, generally between a few hundred meters and a few hundred kilometers in size. But their cumulative effects can be dramatic. The actions of atmospheric gravity waves bring energy from the troposphere—the lowest atmospheric layer, which ends at an altitude of about 10 kilometers—out past the edge of space, 500 or more kilometers above Earth’s surface. They play important roles in daily weather as well as long-term climate fluctuations, decelerating powerful jet streams and affecting the circulating …

Declassified U-2 spy plane photos are a boon for aerial archaeology

Declassified U-2 spy plane photos are a boon for aerial archaeology

Near Eastern Landscapes and Declassified U2 Aerial Imagery

AbstractRecently declassified photographs taken by U2 spy planes in the 1950s and 1960s provide an important new source of historical aerial imagery useful for Eurasian archaeology. Like other sources of historical imagery, U2 photos provide a window into the past, before modern agriculture and development destroyed many archaeological sites. U2 imagery is older and in many cases higher resolution than CORONA spy satellite imagery, the other major source of historical imagery for Eurasia, and thus can expand the range of archaeological sites and features that can be studied from an aerial perspective. However, there are significant barriers to finding and retrieving U2 imagery of particular locales, and archaeologists have thus not yet widely used it. In this article, we aim to reduce these barriers by describing the U2 photo dataset and how to access it. We also provide the first spatial index of U2 photos for the Middle East. A brief discussion of archaeological case studies drawn from U2 imagery illustrates its merits and limitations. These case studies include investigations of prehistoric mass-kill hunting traps in eastern Jordan, irrigation systems of the first millennium BC Neo-Assyrian Empire in northern Iraq, and twentieth-century marsh communities in southern Iraq.

Othering in Chinese official media narratives\xa0during diplomatic standoffs with the US and Japan

Based on two critical discourse analyses of Chinese media narratives on international incidents between China and the foreign ‘Other’ with an interval of nine years, this paper demonstrates continuity and consistency in Chinese official media discourse over the last decade when it concerns sensitive matters, such as sovereignty. The two case studies offered are: the 2001 diplomatic standoff with the US following the spy plane collision; and the 2010 conflict with Japan over the Chinese fishing boat collision with the Japanese coastal guard in the disputed waters of the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islets. Using theoretical insights and methodological tools from Language Pragmatics, Critical Discourse Theory and Analysis, and Positioning Theory, these studies find identical official Chinese media practices of Othering and self-glorification. The article presents concrete examples of categorizing processes that position the actors as antagonists within a victim/aggressor framework, discursive ideological mechanisms of reification, legitimation, dramatization and generalization, and linguistic power games through the employment of assertive speech acts.

James B. Donovan, Before the 'Bridge of Spies'

In the film “Bridge of Spies,” Tom Hanks plays James Donovan, a 1950s New York City lawyer who represented insurance companies.In 1957, Donovan also began to represent Rudolf Abel, whom the United States had arrested and charged with being a Soviet spy. Donovan represented Abel at trial and on appeal, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, all without success, except for persuading the trial judge not to sentence Abel to death.In 1962, Donovan, working closely with senior U.S. government officials, exchanged Abel on an East Berlin bridge for Francis Gary Powers, a U.S. spy plane pilot who had been shot down, captured, tried and convicted by the U.S.S.R. This essay sets forth some of Jim Donovan’s life and very relevant qualifications for his roles in these Cold War events. During World War II, Donovan was general counsel of the U.S. wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Later in 1945, he was a senior, very significant member of Justice Robert H. Jackson’s U.S. team prosecuting Nazi war criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg. Donovan headed the prosecution team that prepared photographic evidence for the trial. Before the IMT, he introduced film evidence of Nazi concentration camps, the Nazi rise to government power in Germany and then aggressive war making, and Gestapo extermination of a Jewish ghetto.This essay originally was an email to The Jackson List. It now is one of many dozens of essays on The Jackson List archive site.

Spies and Boats and Planes: An Examination of U.S. Decision-Making during the Pueblo Hostage Crisis of 1968

Hostage crises almost always involve a tradeoff between the “national honor”—bound up with national identity and a sense of self-esteem—and the desire to get hostages back safely and without loss of life. This was certainly the case in 1968, as President Lyndon Johnson and his advisers agonized over the crew of the USS Pueblo, which had been seized by North Korea while on an intelligence-gathering mission at the height of the Cold War. Such episodes also commonly lead to a frantic search for historical analogies and policy options that will attain one objective or another. Various historical analogies influenced the deliberations of U.S. policymakers as they looked beyond cases involving the seizure of intelligence-gathering ships to other types of hostage incident involving U.S. helicopters and spy planes. They gradually pieced together a solution to the problem at hand, much as one would a jigsaw puzzle.

Hotel California

This essay examines the song “Hotel California” by The Eagles, which has garnered legions of fans (and detractors) and taken on a variety of meanings as it has made its way around the globe. Well known in China and India, among other places, it even made a cameo appearance in the American spy plane incident of 2001, when Chinese guards asked members of the U.S. crew of a downed surveillance jet to tell them the words to this well known song from their country. The essay looks at the song’s popularity abroad, and the power of music in forming memories and conjuring a sense of place and time.

Undetected Media

During the early 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began formulating plans for a photographic reconnaissance aircraft designed to gather information about the Soviet Bloc. By looking at a collection of redacted and declassified CIA documents, this article analyzes the media apparatus of the spy plane, which materialized during the Cold War as the U-2 jet glider. This study delves into how a specific and professional type of knowledge practice known as “intelligence” has shaped and been shaped by aerial media politics and centralized its own vein of critical visuality. At once initiating a timely shift toward a more technological way to produce strategic knowledge, the CIA simultaneously situated the spy plane as a new media apparatus within the human parameters of planning, piloting, and interpretation. This article examines the professional deliberative practices that arose, largely within the CIA and centered on the U-2, to support aerial espionage and institutionalize analysis of its imagery to argue that the spy plane's media ushered in a rupture in photoreconnaissance analytics as well as technologies.

Blind over Cuba: the photo gap and the missile crisis

In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, questions persisted about how the potential cataclysm had been allowed to develop. A subsequent congressional investigation focused on what came to be known as the photo gap five weeks during which intelligence-gathering flights over Cuba had been attenuated.In Blind over Cuba, David M. Barrett and Max Holland challenge the popular perception of the Kennedy administration's handling of the Soviet Union's surreptitious deployment of missiles in the Western Hemisphere. Rather than epitomizing it as a masterpiece of crisis management by policy makers and the administration, Barrett and Holland make the case that the affair was, in fact, a close call stemming directly from decisions made in a climate of deep distrust between key administration officials and the intelligence community.Because of White House and State Department fears of another U-2 incident (the infamous 1960 Soviet downing of an American U-2 spy plane), the CIA was not permitted to send surveillance aircraft on prolonged flights over Cuban airspace for many weeks, from late August through early October. Events proved that this was precisely the time when the Soviets were secretly deploying missiles in Cuba. When Director of Central Intelligence John McCone forcefully pointed out that this decision had led to a dangerous void in intelligence collection, the president authorized one U-2 flight directly over western Cuba--thereby averting disaster, as the surveillance detected the Soviet missiles shortly before they became operational.The Kennedy administration recognized that their failure to gather intelligence was politically explosive, and their subsequent efforts to influence the perception of events form the focus for this study. Using recently declassified documents, secondary materials, and interviews with several key participants, Barrett and Holland weave a story of intra-agency conflict, suspicion, and discord that undermined intelligence-gathering, adversely affected internal postmortems conducted after the crisis peaked, and resulted in keeping Congress and the public in the dark about what really happened.Fifty years after the crisis that brought the superpowers to the brink, Blind over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis offers a new chapter in our understanding of that pivotal event, the tensions inside the US government during the cold war, and the obstacles Congress faces when conducting an investigation of the executive branch.

Plan Colombia’s Place in the Democratic Security Program of Alvaro Uribe Vélez

PLAN COLOMBIA’S PLACE IN THE DEMOCRATIC SECURITY PROGRAM OF ALVARO URIBE VÉLEZ James D. Henderson Coastal Carolina University “With the help of Plan Colombia the Nation has increased control of its territory and has improved public security. Hence it has helped bring about a sense of public tranquility.” Security analyst Alfredo Rangel 1 The world was charmed on July 2, 2008, when it received word that the Colombian military had neatly plucked fifteen hostages from hands of the FARC, and had done it by duping the guerrillas. Colombians were ecstatic when they heard the news. Operation Checkmate was very much made in Colombia. Never before had the old adage “In Colombia the civilians make war and the military brings peace” been proven truer. Even the military’s U.S. allies had been kept in the dark about the daring rescue. As one Colombian put it, “the gringos knew that something was cooking in the jungle, when their spy planes reported unusual movement of hostage groups a few days before the rescue. But it was not until the day before the hostage extraction that any high U.S. official learned what was afoot. Hours before the mission Juan Manuel Santos briefed U.S. presidential candidate John McCain on the matter. McCain, on an official visit to Bogotá at the time, could only respond “My God!” “Good luck!”2 For the FARC, Operation Checkmate was the humiliating climax of a disastrous six months. The year 2008 had begun with massive marches protesting its long-term holding of hostages. Then in quick succession the guerrilla group witnessed the deaths of three members of its directorate, chief among them its founder Manuel Marulanda Vélez. These events put Colombians into an extraordinarily happy frame of mind, and no one benefited more from this than Alvaro Uribe Vélez. Elected president six years earlier, at a time when academics were labeling Colombia a failed state, and when the FARC continued to believe that it would march triumphantly into the national capital, Uribe had won election on the promise that he would make the country a safe place for the average Colombian. That by 2008 the two-term president had indeed done so drove his popularity rating to heights never before seen in the country. Following the hostage Presented at the 57th Annual Meeting of the South Eastern Council on Latin American Studies, Mexico City, April 9, 2010 C 2011 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 3 The Latin Americanist, March 2011 rescue Uribe’s approval rating reached ninety-two percent, likely a record in modern democratic politics in any country, especially for a chief executive well into his second elective term. Uribe’s popularity and level of administrative success stands unparalleled in Colombian history. All other public figures of his stature suffered slings and arrows while they were in the public eye. Simón Bolı́var died a broken, embittered man. Francisco de Paula Santander suffered exile following a failed assassination plot against Bolı́var. Rafael Núñez gave the nation a new constitution and a national anthem, but not peace. Rafael Reyes set Colombia on the path to economic modernization but was driven from the presidency and into exile . And Alfonso López Pumarejo brought important reforms to Colombia but was driven from office prematurely owing to scandals surrounding his administration and members of his immediate family. Only the slight, bespectacled, youthful-appearing Uribe, among Colombia’s leading political figures, will leave office with his popularity intact and to the accolades of his fellow citizens. In fairness to the luminaries of Colombian political history mentioned above, it must be pointed out that Alvaro Uribe took up leadership of the country with a level of popular support, and with substantial attending benefits, that no previous chief executive had ever enjoyed. As the most hard-line candidate in the 2002 presidential contest it was clear a priori that he would vigorously address the massive violence and kidnapping that afflicted Colombia at the time. Uribe had campaigned on the concept of “Democratic Security,” vowing to attack these problems. Colombians put their faith in Uribe and were gratified to see sharp...

In Memoriam: Tom Budzynski, Friend and Colleague

Tom Budzynski's background and professional life are described. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Tom earned his electrical engineering degree at the University of Detroit, then worked for the aerospace industry in Southern California for several years, a period that included work on the Blackbird spy plane. Later, while a graduate student at the University of Colorado, he developed the first practical surface electromyogram feedback device, receiving his PhD in experimental psychology in 1969. In his biofeedback studies, he worked extensively with stress-related disorders, pioneering many widely used techniques. In his later years, he carried out research and clinical studies using electroencephalogram brain wave feedback. We recognize Tom both as a major innovator in biofeedback and as a great friend.

Special Issue: Remembering and Honoring Thomas H. Budzynski

The cover of this Winter 2011 issue of Biofeedback shows a photo of Thomas H. Budzynski, a pioneer in both biofeedback and neurofeedback. Tom died February 14, 2011, at the age of 77. Tom was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1933 and initially pursued a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Detroit. His early engineering career involved cutting-edge aerospace work for Honeywell, including his role in developing the inertial guidance system for the Blackbird spy plane. Fortunately for the field of biofeedback, Tom pursued new directions in the late 1960s, and brought his engineering acumen into the field of psychology. Tom earned a PhD in psychology at the University of Colorado, and the rest is biofeedback history.Tom Budzynski was a pioneer from his graduate student days onward. He produced a prototype surface electromyography biofeedback device, which served as the focus of his doctoral dissertation and his first publication with Johann Stoyva (Budzynski, 1969; Budzynski &amp; Stoyva, 1969). In collaboration with Johann Stoyva and Charles Adler, he developed a protocol for headache treatment (Budzynski, Stoyva, &amp; Adler, 1970). He pioneered many areas of neurofeedback as well. In this special issue, Tom's widow and several close friends and colleagues recall his personality, wit, and gift for pursuing the furthest edge in biofeedback technology and applications.This professional issues section presents an article by Fred Shaffer and Judy Crawford on “savvy marketing strategies” for Biofeedback Certification Institute of America (BCIA) certificants. The authors report increased consumer interest in biofeedback and neurofeedback services, an increase in enrollment in BCIA accredited training programs, and an increase in applications for BCIA's three certification programs. They describe a series of strategies that some BCIA certified biofeedback practitioners are following to promote both their practices and the field of biofeedback.This special issue opens with an article by Tom Budzynski's co-researcher and widow, Helen Kogan Budzynski. Helen narrates Tom's activities in biofeedback during each decade of his professional life: from the 1960s and graduate school; the 1970s during which his electromyographic biofeedback device went into commercial production and during which he introduced the twilight learning process; the 1980s when he began his work with photic and auditory stimulation; the 1990s during which he extended his research on sound and light stimulation into new applications.Next, three of Tom's closest collaborators, Johann Stoyva, Kirk Peffer, and John Picciottino, each share memories of their friendship with Tom, as well as observations of his greatest contributions to biofeedback instrumentation and biofeedback practice principles. Tom combined the gifts of an innovative engineer and inventor, with the business acumen to manufacture and market both biofeedback equipment and therapeutic audio programs, and the curiosity of a scientist intent on understanding the human brain, the human energy field, and the principles of feedback learning.Niels Bierbaumer describes his initial 1971 encounter with Tom's work through an unpublished paper by Tom Budzynski and Johann Stoyva, and the lifelong friendship and collaboration which followed. He honors Tom especially for conceptualizing a psychophysiological foundation for psychotherapy, for developing one of the first useable neurofeedback devices, and for his twilight learning protocol.Tom Allen tells the story of his friendship with Tom, and emphasizes Tom's use of storytelling as a therapeutic tool. He expresses gratitude to Tom for mentoring him in his early work developing the Windows-based Biograph™ software system for multi-modal biofeedback, and for unflagging support throughout the years of their friendship.Robert Austin narrates the two decades of his friendship and collaboration with Tom, including Tom's two years as Director of Research for Austin's company, Synchromed, LLC. He describes Tom's scientific investigation of sound and light stimulation systems, as well as his use of such devices in a clinical context. He also mentioned Tom's “Hemifield” project, and his development of subliminal audio techniques.Richard Williams relates his own experiences with a “guy named Tom.” Williams honors Tom especially for his work on aging and regeneration in the Ponce de Leon Project, and his “brain brightening project.”This issue also includes an essay written by Tom Budzynski, Twilight Learning Revisited, in which he reviews the scientific background from which he developed the twilight learning protocol. He discusses the protocol and compares it to Eugene Peniston's protocol, which was developed for the neurofeedback treatment of substance abuse. This essay is published here with the permission of FutureHealth, which originally included this essay in an e-book. (Our thanks to Rob Kall of FutureHealth.)We also provide a bibliography of the published works of Tom Budzynski. This bibliography is based on Tom's own records, with edits by Helen Budzynski and Donald Moss.

A Red Moon over the Mall: The Sputnik Panic and Domestic America

What happened after the fourth of October, 1957, was nothing short of a total crisis of confidence in the American way of life. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had just initiated the space age by launching the first manmade satellite, named Sputnik or fellow traveler and Americans suddenly had to adjust to the notion that Russia was not a backwards nation but a technological equal. The launch of Sputnik and the ensuing panic had vast consequences on American postwar culture. Most histories of the Cold War treat the Sputnik launch as a relatively minor event-surely not as important as the Berlin Air Lift or the Cuban Missile Crisis-and in tracing its effects the focus is often on the very obviousthe heightened international tension of the Cold War, the foreign policy response from President Dwight Eisenhower and his administration, and the resulting nuclear arms buildup. In most people's minds Sputnik is more important for the political and military responses it occasioned than for the actual event itself. Although the launch was of little strategic importance, its full symbolic effect on the Cold War is almost unrivaled, eclipsed only by the moon landing a decade later and, of course, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. However, along with these official responses, the launch and its symbolism unleashed vast and often unheralded effects on the domestic front due to the society-wide crisis mentality it engendered. It changed the very mind-set with which Americans viewed communism and the Cold War. In more concrete terms, it also allowed for the reorganization and revaluation of the American educational system and established an alliance between government and university research. Perhaps even more importantly, it fractured, or at least exposed the cracks of, the Cold War consensus and perceived complacency of the 1950s. Sputnik not only offered a political opportunity for the Democratic Party but allowed for a serious and critical nationwide discussion of American postwar culture for the first time, publicizing the basic critiques that would gain enormous currency a decade later in the late 1960s. Sputnik was launched as part of the International Geophysical Year, a world-wide program of scientific exchange and experimentation that lasted from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958 (Brzezinski 92-93). The IGY offered the perfect way for the Soviet Union to make a bold statement while deflecting criticism that Sputnik was either a propaganda event or a military project. The launch was internationally hailed as a bold scientific achievement, despite the satellite's lack of significant scientific instruments or utility (Sherry 214). In fact, the United States had been planning to launch its own Vanguard satellite as part of the IGY, but Eisenhower had given it low priority despite the administration's previous knowledge of Russia's plans (Killian xvii). As White House Press Secretary James C. Hagerty explained to the press corps a day after the launch, We never thought of our program as one which was in a race with the Soviets (Senators Attack Missile Fund Cut 1). Part of the reason for the low priority was because the armed forces ironically did not think a satellite had much military potential at the time (Furnas 23). Eisenhower was a little smarter, recognizing the potential to create an orbital replacement for the U-2 spy plane. By separating the IGY project from the military missile programs, he hoped, much like the Russians, to deflect any potential international criticism of a satellite launch. The US satellite project, dubbed Vanguard, was confining to a weakly-funded civilian program with plans to launch in December of 1957 (Divine 1-5). By that time, a Soviet satellite would have already been circling the world, and the United States, for two months. Also, a comparison of the two satellites did not sit well with the American people: Sputnik was a 22-inch sphere weighing 184 pounds, traveling at a speed of 18,000 miles per hour in an orbit 550 miles above the Earth; in contrast Vanguard was the size of a grapefruit: only six-inches and 3. …

Spy planes to recharge by clinging to power lines

Can a micro air vehicle land on a power line, disguise itself as innocent trash and suck enough power out of it to take off again?