Posted on 12/26/2011 5:30:15 AM PST by Daffynition
DANBURY, Conn. – For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.
They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized "cleanroom" where the equipment was stored.
They spoke in code.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Fred Marra, left, listens as Bob Zarba describes the camera operation of the Hexagon KH-9 secret spy satellite in Danbury, Conn. They have been meeting here for 18 years, whiling away a few hours nattering about golf and politics, ailments and grandchildren. But, until recently, they were forbidden to speak about the greatest achievement of their professional lives. (Kathy Willens, STF / December 1, 2011)
A tip of the hat, to Americas unsung patriots.
Ditos to that!!
In today's world, all one can really hope for is to keep the full functionality/capability from leaking before a system goes operational. The American People are far more in the dark than our enemies are.
>>He describes the white-hot excitement as teams pored over hand-drawings and worked on endless technical problems, using “slide-rules and advanced degrees” (there were no computers), knowing they were part of such a complicated space project. The intensity would increase as launch deadlines loomed and on the days when “the customer” — the CIA and later the Air Force — came for briefings. On at least one occasion, former President George H.W. Bush, who was then CIA director, flew into Danbury for a tour of the plant.<<
Slide rules? I can imagine what the napkins scribbled on, at the local coffee shop looked like! Top secret.
It truly used to be this way.
In today’s world, all one can really hope for is to keep the full functionality/capability from leaking before a system goes operational. The American People are far more in the dark than our enemies are.
++++++++++++
How true. The clock starts ticking once the operational capabilities of our systems become known to our enemies. That knowledge cannot be supressed indefinitely but good security practices can push that date far to the right. Good security pays big dividends.
By 1980, TI made the slide rule obsolete with hand held scientific calculators.
Little known facility in Arkansas was used in the “70’s for research on saccharine effects i.e. cancer. It was managed by FDA and was called NCTR. It was a converted WW2 Germ warfare research and development center. It had a room almost as long as a foot ball field that raised Mosquitoes that to be infected with malaria and dropped over the Japs... The unit had many work stations that had rubber gloves (to the shoulders) The bugs were to be infected and harvested by air pulling then to a collection chamber. Been there , saw it. It was bulldozed into a great pile on the back of facility and covered over! Don’t think it was ever put in operation. They did a lot of stinky stuff there!
Slide rules? I can imagine what the napkins scribbled on, at the local coffee shop looked like! Top secret.
You and I can laugh at that thought now. But I did know a young lady at the time whose primary job was a ‘minder’ and after every luncheon or dinner her ‘principal’ was at found her gathering up the napkins including the expensive linen ones.
She was also having to write out checks to reimburse the restaurants for confiscating them. She told some very funny stories that were made even funnier by all of the censoring she had to do. Half the time she would throw her hands up and just say,’well you just had to be there..’.
Ah yes, The cold war a damn serious yet funny and farcical time... I’m dating myself but in some ways I preferred that time to now. At least I didn’t have to deal with the TSA then or carry an electronic leash among other things so common to today.
Well done gentlemen, very well done.
I hope they gassed them skeeters first!
The technology for making the optics for Hexagon was, I suspect, used elsewhere in Perkin-Elmer for the optics to make the high-resolution “wafer steppers” that printed sub-microscopic lines on the silicon chips that made the PC/internet revolution possible.
For years, P-E was the leading manufacturer of these systems.
In the early ‘90s, they had to spin off their wafer stepper business, which carried on for a few years as SVG, then as SVG-L, and then as ASML.
In today’s State Department and for past twenty years, a foreigner can marry a US Department of State employee overseas and become a “Communicator”; they are accepted as foreign service specialists and given the crypto keys, management of long haul communications and even privy to the identities of our agency personnel at their mission, and insight into how to identify covert operatives. Worst though is that many hate the USA - and I doubt their alligence. It has long been my belief that it is policy’s like diversity and family member hiring preferences that make this situation a reality. Can you imagine granting a Top Secret clearance to someone just a few years removed from their homeland into a position where they handle all US Communications at an Embassy or Consulate? It may be possible due to the compartmentalization of information that the US uses these people to LEAK information which we want them to see. It is just unreal that in the 70s and 80s I would have lost my security clearance for marrying a South Korea (Ally?), but today we make it a matter of National Policy to hand the “keys” to Turks, former USSR soldiers, etc.
And let us not forget the chemical warfare research. Various stuff to various things.
We used to program them to play Yankee Doodle.
Then came the first electronic calculator, by Friden ...
.. priced at ~ $1,200 as I recall.
I worked in one of their clean-rooms (actually one of their spin-off companies) for three years (95 - 98) between gigs at aeropsace companies.
Learned a ton about optics and laser technology, not as cool as combat aircraft, but interesting as all hell.
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