Balloons and other high flying objects’ historic use for intelligence and military purposes

Screenshot of part of a declassified history of the U-2 and OXCART overhead reconnaissance programs on the Interagency Security Classification Appeal Panel website

There has been a lot of attention to the Chinese spy balloon that the US just shot down after it made its way across the US.

This is actually an old use of an old technology that has been upgraded with some modern tweaks.

The first recorded use of balloons for military intelligence gathering was in 1794 during the wars of the French Revolution.

Observers in the balloon could see the battlefield movements of the enemy and use signal flags to communicate to troops on the ground.

The French revolutionary government created in 1794 a special military corp called Corps d’ Aerostiers to conduct these balloon military intelligence operations.

This adoption of the balloon as a military intelligence tool took place only 11 years after the invention of human flight via hot air balloon, which had taken place in Paris in 1783.

A similar quick adoption of the airplane for military intelligence occurred. A little less than eight years after the Wright Brothers made the first flight at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903 the Italians used airplanes on October 23, 1911 to gather military intelligence against the Ottoman Empire in present-day Libya during the Italo-Turkish War.

Nine days after this first use of the plane for military intelligence, the Italians also became the first to use the airplane to drop bombs.

The Italian lieutenant who conducted that first aerial bombing wrote to his dad: “Today I have decided to throw bombs from the aeroplane. It is the first time that we will try this and if I succeed, I will be really pleased to be the first person to do it.” He describes in that letter home heading toward Ain Zara, a small oasis near Tripoli, where he expected to find 2,000 Arab and Turkish troops. He wrote: “After a while, I notice the dark shape of the oasis. With one hand, I hold the steering wheel, with the other I take out one of the bombs and put it on my lap…. I take the bomb with my right hand, pull off the security tag and throw the bomb out, avoiding the wing. I can see it falling through the sky for couple of seconds and then it disappears. And after a little while, I can see a small dark cloud in the middle of the encampment. I am lucky. I have struck the target.”

This quick adoption of the balloon and the plane to military and intelligence uses is relatively common with new technology.

Though our mental image of the US Civil War doesn’t immediately jump to battlefields with balloon observers, both the North and the South used balloons for battlefield intelligence. In addition to signal flags they also adopted the new technology of telegraph wires to communicate from the balloons to troops on the ground.

Even with the advent of the airplane, balloons remained a tool for intelligence gathering and intelligence operations.

During the Cold War balloons were a tool to get information countering the Soviet propaganda to those living behind the Iron Curtain and for those living behind the Iron Curtain to escape to the west. The National Declassification Center that is part of the National Archives published an article on this with the interesting detail that “radar stations in West Germany tracked these balloons as reaching altitudes as high as 84,000 feet over East Germany.”

The Smithsonian Magazine has published a fascinating article on how the “U.S. government launched high-altitude balloons into the ionosphere, hoping to monitor Russian nuclear tests” as part of Project Mogul and how the crash of one of these test balloons in 1947 led to the whole myth that space aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico. An intelligence officer from a US Army unit tried to spin a test balloon crash as an alien landing to avoid disclosing the balloon operation. This is a great example of how a cover story to protect classified information can have a very long ripple effect.

The very next day after this intelligence officer created the “aliens” cover story the War Department (later to be renamed the Department of the Army and combined with the Department of the Navy and a newly created Department of the Air Force to form the Department of Defense) issued a statement that according to the local paper “debunked” the intelligence officers “aliens” claim. Despite this the myth of Roswell has grown over the years.

The Air Force conducted an audit of all their records on this incident in Roswell and the report on that audit is available on the NSA declassified documents website.

In the early Cold War the US made a technical breakthrough that allowed them to use a plane named the U-2 and a later plane the A-12 OXCART to conduct overhead reconnaissance.

A declassified history of these programs leads off with a description of the complex national security policy issues resulting from the program that are very similar to the policy issues around the Chinese spy balloon that President Biden just had shot down:

The U-2’s “first flight over the USSR in July 1956 made it immediately the most important source of intelligence on the Soviet Union. Using it against the Soviet target it was designed for nevertheless produced a persistent ‘tension between its program managers and the President.’ The program managers, eager for coverage, repeatedly urged the President to authorize frequent missions over the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower, from the outset doubtful of the prudence and propriety of invading Soviet airspace, only reluctantly allowed any overflights at all. After the Soviets shot down Francis Gary Powers' U-2 on I May 1960, President Eisenhower forbade any further U-2 flights over the USSR. Since the Agency must always assess a covert operation's potential payoff against the diplomatic or military cost if it fails, this account of the U-2's employment over the Soviet Union offers insights that go beyond overhead reconnaissance programs.”

A key technical breakthrough behind the U-2, according to this report, was:

“Since the best Soviet interceptor at that time, the MIG-17, had to struggle to reach 45,000 feet, Leghorn reasoned that an aircraft that could exceed 60,000 feet would be safe from Soviet fighters. Recognizing that the fastest way to produce a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft was to modify an existing aircraft, he began looking for the highest flying aircraft available in the Free World…Leghom calculated that a Canberra [airplane] so equipped might reach 63,000 feet early in a long mission and as high as 67,000 feet as the declining fuel supply lightened the aircraft. He believed that such a modified Canberra could penetrate the Soviet Union and China for a radius of 800 miles from bases around their periphery and photograph up to 85 percent of the intelligence targets in those countries.”

For context the Chinese spy balloon just flew over the US at around 66,000 feet.

By 1960 the Soviets had developed the capacity to shoot down Francis Gary Powers' U-2.

Interestingly, the US was about to stop U-2 flights around the time Francis Gary Powers was shot down because its first photo reconnaissance satellite, CORONA, became operational in August 1960.

A declassified history of the CORONA program is available on the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) website. That history states:

“On 19 August 1960, just 110 days after the sudden termination of the last U-2 Soviet overflight, a critical goal was accomplished: the first successful air catch of a capsule of exposed film. This capsule was ejected from a photographic reconnaissance satellite that had completed seven passes over denied territory and 17 orbits of the earth. The feat was the culmination of three years of intensive effort to obtain intelligence from an imagery reconnaissance satellite.”

Note that these initial photographic reconnaissance satellites dropped film capsules from space that then had to be caught while they fell by an aircraft with a big hook to hook the parachute. That meant the satellites went up with all the film they were capable of using and once that film was used up a new satellite was needed.

Living now in the era of GPS it is a bit mind-blowing to think these early satellites dropped film capsules from space.

The image at the top of this article is a screenshot of a declassified history of the U-2 and A-12 OXCART overhead reconnaissance programs. It was declassified in part when it was appealed to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), which is the executive branch’s internal “supreme court” of classification issues. The panel is made up of senior officials from the National Security Council; Departments of State, Defense, & Justice; Office of the Director of National Intelligence; National Archives and Records Administration; and Central Intelligence Agency. The staff for the panel is made up of Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) staff and I served on and ultimately (several years after the U-2 and A-12 OXCART history was declassified) led that staff. You can review this redacted document here.