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[John Young]

   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.


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