Dimensions
140 x 214 x 36mm
A small group of Americans in the 1950s, working in extraordinary secrecy, invented radically new espionage hardware to collect intelligence about the Soviet Union. They designed and built the U-2 and the supersonic SR-71 spyplanes and the first spy satellite.
They transformed the world of espionage by building machines that in a day could collect more information about a foreign enemy than an army of spies could assemble in a decade. They changed the nature of warfare with space-based reconnaissance, mapping, communications and targeting systems (many of these were used during the recent American military campaign in Afghanistan). It was the Cold War equivalent of the Manhattan Project.
This is the first panoramic account of this revolution in intelligence built around the inventors, visionaries, engineers, managers and politicians who made it possible. Taubman interviewed dozens of the key participants, visited the sites where the work was done and collected hundreds of long-secret documents recently declassified.
Many of the men had kept their work secret for forty years or more, not even telling their wives and children about the jobs or the clandestine missions they had flown. Often, they didn't even know one another until the government began dismantling the walls of secrecy in the mid-1990s.
Newly declassified documents reveal a vast amount of fresh information about the origins and evolution of the projects and how close they came to failing technically or failing victim to bureaucratic inertia and Washington's turf wars. The documents offer a behind-the-scenes look at the nation's most secretive institutions and how they operated during the most dangerous years in the Cold War.
