ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Espionage, Intelligence, and Security Volume ...

Balloon Reconnaissance, Historytoward the Blue Ridge Mountains, the opening movementsof a campaign that would lead to the decisive battleat Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.From the Franco-Prussian War toWorld War I (1870–1918)Balloons again proved their effectiveness for the Frenchduring the siege of Paris in 1870, when 66 balloons managedto transport 102 people and more than 2 millionpieces of mail past the Germans. Impressed, the Germansformed their own balloon corps in 1884, and the Austriansin 1893. Russia opened a school of aeronautic trainingoutside St. Petersburg. Britain, meanwhile, began militaryballoon training in 1880.Still, the experience of the French in 1870 illustratedthe limits of balloons. First, they could not be steered, andcould only go with the wind. Second, the Prussians wererumored to have developed anti-aircraft guns that couldshoot them down—which, while not true at the time,boded ill for low-flying craft.Rise of the airship. By that time, a new variation on the oldfashionedenvelope-and-gondola balloon had begun toshow promise. This was the airship, an idea whose originsdated back to the Montgolfiers’ era. Around the same timeas the first balloon launches, another French designer,Jean-Baptiste-Marie Meusnier, began experimenting witha more streamlined, maneuverable model.It was more than a century before Meusnier’s ideabecame a reality. In 1898, Alberto Santos-Dumont of Brazilcombined a balloon with a propeller powered by an internal-combustionengine. Although these men more clearlyqualify as the fathers of the airship, they were to beeclipsed in history by a figure whose name became asynonym for it: Germany’s Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.The Zeppelin. Zeppelin created a lightweight structure ofaluminum girders and rings that made it possible for anairship to remain rigid under varying atmospheric conditions.The Zeppelins of World War I were legendary, asterrifying to the enemy as they were inspiring to Germanswho sent them aloft.At first, the German army failed to grasp their potential,so the navy began using them to scout British cruisersin the North Sea. At a time when aircraft were still in theirinfancy, and when the British fleet used light cruisers forreconnaissance at sea, the Zeppelin was both safer thanan airplane and vastly more economical than a cruiser. In1914, Zeppelin’s company was turning out three airshipsa year; two years later, it was producing more thantwo a month.Along the way, the use of Zeppelins as bombersovershadowed their role as reconnaissance craft. In 1915—fully a quarter-century before the Nazis’ more famousEncyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Securitybombardment—the Germans launched the first air battleof Britain. Far beyond the actual physical damage theZeppelins wrought was the psychological effect of thedark shapes appearing in the British sky. At 10,000 feet(3,048 m), they were too high for antiaircraft guns of thetime to reach them, and therefore they rained terror at will.Even so, Zeppelins were cumbersome, dangerouscraft, and in the final analysis, they were not cost-effectiveeither for reconnaissance or for bombing. By September,1916, the British had at their disposal explosive bulletsthat, when fired from an airplane, could shoot Zeppelinsfrom the sky. Even the psychological value of Zeppelinsproved a double-edged sword: recruiting posters and anti-German propaganda made heavy use of the Zeppelin as asymbol of the enemy.Balloons from the 1920s tothe PresentFor a few years after war’s end, airships constituted theluxury liners of the skies, but the Hindenburg crash signaledthe end of relatively widespread airship transport. Inthe meantime, the U.S. Navy had taken an interest inairships, several of which were built for it by the GoodyearTire and Rubber Company during the 1920s and early1930s. After several mishaps involving rigid airships, thenavy switched entirely to nonrigid airships, or blimps.During World War II, the U.S. Navy was to be the onlyfighting force on either side to use airships. After the attackon Pearl Harbor, Congress authorized the construction ofsome 200 airships, which the navy used for photographicreconnaissance, scouting, minesweeping, antisubmarinepatrols, search and rescue, and escorting convoys. Some89,000 ships were escorted by airships during the war, andnot a single one was lost. Although they were slow comparedto airplanes, balloons could stay aloft for as much 60hours, a decided advantage in an era before in-flightrefueling.Non-reconnaissance uses of balloons during the warincluded their employment by the British as protectionagainst bombers, which had to fly over them to avoidtheir mooring wires, thus placing the Luftwaffe furtherfrom their targets and impairing accuracy. The Japaneseemployed some 1,000 “Fu-Go Weapons,” or balloonsequipped with bombs, which they sent eastward acrossthe Pacific. These landed in some 16 U.S. states, as well asin Alaska, Canada, and Mexico. They killed only sixcivilians—a mother and her five children in Lakeview,Oregon, in May 1945—and the fact that the U.S. mediaagreed not to report news of the bombings greatly bluntedtheir potential psychological effect.The Cold War: Project GENETRIX. By far, the most significantuse of balloon reconnaissance during the Cold War wasProject GENETRIX. The program had its origins in a 1951study by the RAND corporation, and in December 1955,93