North Cape

There were just too many people involved, too many in decision-making positions, too many incapable of making the correct decisions or, for that matter, any decisions at all. Too many that spent all of their time pushing their own ideas, interpretations, and motives no matter how they conflicted with the evidence at hand. Nor were the problems of bureaucracy the problems of the United States alone. The interrupted mission to locate the new Soviet electronics research center after its recent move was a prime example. The present theory popular in his agency was that A. Sovulov Semechastky had been responsible. Semechastky was Second Party Secretary and he had come up the hard way in the new generation of Soviet leaders. He also had a son who was general manager of the Electronics Assembly Plant No. 2 in Magnitogorsk. The cocktail talk around Moscow was that Semechastity had been pressured by his son to shift the location of the research center closer to the assembly plant, ostensibly for reasons of efficiency. Covertly, for reasons of increasing family power. Several million rubles would be spent in making such a change, but it was reportedly common knowledge that Semechastky, Jr., was about to be named the new director of the research center.

Teleman could confirm the rumor by photographs from 120,000 feet that would identify the make, model, and, if lucky, the license plate number of the automobile in the factory manager's parking space.

Teleman sighed. Such was the stuff of modern spying. License plates from 120,000 feet. He knew that he must look for similar signs along the Kazakh-Sinkiang border. In the meantime, he had nearly six thousand miles to go and it looked like a long day. He keyed the computer and PCMS into action and slept.

CHAPTER 4

In 1964, as the A-11 project — later to become the SR-71, Fighter Interceptor in an attempt to cover up its reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering role — came to conclusion, it had become extremely clear that the United States was badly in need of a stopgap method of acquiring intelligence information beyond the limited capabilities of the original SAMOS project. SAMOS was a classified Air Force satellite system, launched from 1958 to 1972 from both Cape Kennedy and Vandenberg AFB near Santa Barbara, California. Always shrouded under heavy secrecy, SAMOS — and later the expanded ADVANCED SAMOS — had one and only one objective: to keep an eye on Soviet and Red Chinese territory.

The state of the art in photographic techniques, lenses, and films in the early part of the project's life was such that only fairly gross data could be obtained. The SAMOS satellites were at first limited to one-hundred-nautical-mile orbits in an equatorial path that covered, at best, only limited portions of USSR territory. But as more powerful launch vehicles became available and as the Vandenberg launch site was completed, the SAMOS satellites were launched with increasing frequency into polar orbits of altitudes from six to ten thousand miles, which provided coverage of Communist territory every two hours. By increasing the number of satellites in orbit and launching them into carefully prepared, overlapping orbits, complete coverage every three minutes was obtained.