Word: space
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Soviet Cosmos 954 naval reconnaissance satellite plummeted from its orbit and disintegrated over northwestern Canada last week, it underscored an inescapable fact of the space age: we are never alone. Nor, for that matter, is the other side. Day and night, little is hidden from the intelligence-gathering techniques of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Information is plucked from space, from the ground, from under the sea. A rundown of some of the most sophisticated methods for gathering data...
...Bird's coverage, though steadily improving, is still limited by the amount of propellant aboard to about 220 days a year. Meanwhile, the Soviets have gained an intelligence edge by again manning their Salyut space station, which passes over the U.S. twice a day. U.S. intelligence officials believe the Russians are likely to keep cosmonauts in space from now on. American astronauts, on the other hand, will not revisit the Spacelab system until the new space shuttle is launched in 1980. The Soviets have another advantage in space: the "hunter-killer" satellite that can track an orbiting vehicle, sidle...
...Camera, both made by Law Enforcement Associates, Inc., a New Jersey electronics firm. Compact handheld devices, they retail for about $3,000 and can be operated along with earphones and a parabolic reflector or "dish" that can pick up normal speech up to 800 yds. away in an open space or in a room across a noisy street. The Starlight Viewer amplifies light 50,000 times and is perfect for nighttime surveillance; the intensifier needs some light but produces more sharply detailed photographs...
What the spy trade calls ELINT (for electronic intelligence) seems limited only by the range of the human imagination; it is a tinkerer's dream so long as intelligence wizards bear in mind the unofficial motto of space age spying: think big and think dirty. But all their gadgets, no matter how effective and sophisticated, are unlikely to make the man in the trenchcoat obsolete. Satellites and planes and bugs might dig up secret information faster, but HUMINT (for human intelligence) is needed to interpret it, and to decide what to do next...
...Space age "difficulty"? It could have been a nuclear disaster...