9-12-95. NYPaper: "Spy Satellites' Early Role As 'Floodlight' Coming Clear." Corona. Everything about it was beyond top secret -- its name and history, builders and operators, cameras and orbits, photographs and interpreters and, most important of all, what it snooped on from space. It was officially and assiduously treated for decades as if it did not exist. The 95 Corona satellites that successfully conducted espionage from 1960 to 1972 turn out to have been remarkably advanced tools whose development, far from the work of an inner circle, drew on the nation's top scientific and industrial talent. More important, the new disclosures show just how greatly the craft revolutionized Washington's ability to understand its cold war friends and enemies. Sergei Khrushchev, son of the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, told the Itek conference that one Corona film pod dropped into a Russian forest, where ax-wielding woodsmen chopped it up. Another spy satellite misdirected its film pod into a field in central Asia, where peasants wrapped the precious Kodak film around poles to provide solitude for a privy. NRO_puf (16 kb)