About Israel

 

A Secret Agreement

America's most important military secret in 1979 was in orbit, whirling effortlessly around the
world every ninetysix minutes, taking uncanny and invaluable reconnaissance photographs of all that lay hundreds of miles below. The satellite, known as KH-11, was an astonishing leap in technology: its images were capable of being digitally relayed to ground stations where they were picked up—in "real time"—for instant analysis by the intelligence community. There would be no more Pearl Harbors.
The first KH-11 had been launched on December 19, 1976, after Jimmy Carter's defeat of President Gerald R. Ford in the November elections. The Carter administration followed Ford's precedent by tightly restricting access to the high-quality imagery: even Great Britain, America's closest ally in the intelligence world, was limited to seeing photographs on a case-by-case basis.
The intensive security system was given a jolt in March 1979, when President Carter decided to provide Israel with KH-11 photographs. The agreement gave Israel access to any satellite
intelligence dealing with troop movements or other potentially threatening activities as deep as
one hundred miles inside the borders of neighboring Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. The
Israelis were to get the real thing: the raw and spectacular first-generation imagery as captured
by the KH-11, some of it three-dimensional—and not the deliberately fuzzed and dulled
photographs that were invariably distributed by the American intelligence community to the
bureaucracy and to overseas allies in an effort to shield the superb resolution of the KH-11's
optics.

[The KH-11 was at the time known to be the most significant advance in outerspace
reconnaissance. The key element of the sixty-four-foot-long satellite was a downward-looking
mirror in front of the camera that rotated from side to side, like a periscope, enabling the satellite   to track a single location as it moved across the atmosphere. The result was a stereoscopic image of unusually high quality that could be even further enhanced by computer.]

It was a significant triumph for the Israeli government, which had been seeking access to the
KH-11 since the moment of launch three years before. Jimmy Carter's decision to provide that
high-tech imagery was suspected by some American intelligence officials as being a reward for Prime Minister Menachem Begin's successful Camp David summit with Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat the year before. These officials understood what many in the White House did not: adding an Israeli dimension to the system was a major commitment—and one that would
interfere with the KH-ll's ability to collect the intelligence its managers wanted. The KH-11 was
the most important advance of its time, explained a former official of the National Security
Agency (NSA), the unit responsible for all communications intelligence, and every military and
civilian intelligence agency in the government seemed to have an urgent requirement for it. The
goal of the KH-ll's managers was to carefully plan and "prioritize" the satellite's schedule to get
it to the right place at the right time, while avoiding any abrupt shifts in its flight path or any
sudden maneuver that would burn excess fuel. With good management, the multimillion-dollar
satellite, with its limited fuel supply, would be able to stay longer in orbit, provide more
intelligence, and be more costefficient. Carter's decision to give Israel direct access to the KH-11 completely disrupted the careful scheduling for the satellite's future use; it also meant that some American intelligence agencies were going to have less access to the satellite.
"It was an unpopular decision in many, many ways," said the former NSA official.
There were no official protests inside the administration, however: those few who were
distressed by the KH-11 agreement understood that any disquiet, or even second-guessing, could jeopardize their own access to such information and thus reduce their status as insiders.
The Israelis, not surprisingly, viewed the KH-11 agreement as a reaffirmation of respect and
support from the Carter administration, whose director of central intelligence, retired Admiral
Stansfield Turner, had abruptly cut back intelligence liaison with Israel and other friendly
nations as part of a restructuring of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Israelis, accustomed to
far warmer treatment by Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, saw the men running
the Carter administration as naïve and anti-Semitic; as men who perhaps did not fully understand how entwined Israel's primary foreign intelligence service, Mossad, had become with the CIA during the Cold War. The 1979 agreement on the KH-11 was no less than the twenty-eighth in a series of formal Israeli-American cooperative ventures in strategic intelligence since the 1950s......(continue)