The interviewer then asked, "Was this [REDACTED]"
Mark's response: "I don't remember the code name. That was never done, as you know."
The interviewer may have asked Mark about a program that I heard about after I was Byeman-briefed. My recollection is that it was called Damon, but Michael Cassutt has spelled it as Damien in his correspondence with me. However it was spelled, the program is still classified, or it wouldn't have been redacted in the Mark interview.
Damien replaced Teal Ruby as the military payload to be carried aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-4. I was Byeman-briefed about a year after Damien was canceled, so I was never briefed on that program and I saw no documents with the Damien caveat. What I heard was anecdotal from an Air Force officer who had worked that program during its short life. When I worked with him, his main job (as I discovered when I was briefed in) was Hexagon and Gambit. I initially knew him only in the context of P-380, my ice-box program. His remark about Big Bird (Hexagon), Little Bird (Gambit), and Turd (ESS) implied that the three programs were related.
The question has been raised as to whether Damien was a reincarnation of Dorian. For several reasons, I doubt that Damien had anything to do with Dorian. First, the similarity of the names invites the drawing of such a connection, which suggests an intentional ruse. Secondly, one must question whether a flight item KH-10 camera existed in June 1969 when Dorian was canceled, given that the first MOL launch was then scheduled three years later (1972), but it is conceivable, given that the December 1963 plan was for a first manned flight in 1968, and that the program constantly got its funding siphoned off for other Air Force priorities such as the Vietnam War. Third, if there had been such a camera, it would seem to have been too valuable an intelligence system to store in a black room for more than a decade without launching it. But the fourth consideration is the clincher: from what we now think we know of the KH-10 camera system, it would have been too large to be accommodated by Lockheed's Experiment Support System (ESS) pallet in the Space Shuttle payload bay.
Still, it is interesting that these two canceled IMINT programs from 30 to 40 years ago have not yet been declassified (some information is now available on Dorian, but it is far from being full disclosure). After all of the info that has been released on Corona, Gambit and Hexagon, why the hell not? Some "vanilla" classified MOL documents stored in the Los Angeles Air Force Base history office in the late 1980s (where Michael Cassutt and I first met). I ached to tell Michael what I was seeing that he could not.
Whatever the origin of the Damien camera, it did not develop under SP-21's direction. It was my understanding that SP-21 was a new designation as a system program office (SPO) under SAF/SP, the result of the consolidation of SP-7 (the Hexagon SPO, and formerly the Corona SPO) and SP-14 (the Gambit SPO) after both Hexagon and Gambit were "mature" (old hat) programs. Seven plus fourteen equals twenty-one; in those days we missed no opportunity to mystify Soviet intelligence. So, either the Damien camera was a KH-9 and came over to SP-21 from SP-7, or if it were some other system, it came to SP-21 from some SPO we don't know. My best guess is that Damien was what Richard J. Chester refers to as the Development Model of the KH-9, and that it was upgraded to a flight item to be cradled in Lockheed's ESS pallet, for the simple reason that it is the shortest path in connecting the dots. Whether science or intel, lex parsimoniae (Occam's razor) rules.
Why was Damien canceled? Probably because one or both of the Congressional intelligence committees asked, "Why do you want to spend money on this old film system stuff when we have [REDACTED] now?" A digital IMINT system had come online. Damien might been conceived either as a hedge against possible delays in the digital IMINT program or as a gap-filler in the Hexagon launch schedule that was being increasingly stretched out.
When Damien was cancelled in late 1980, the Air Force casted around for some other way to use its STS-4 payload opportunity and the ESS pallet, and it was a short schedule to the launch date. The result was P-380, my ice box project. It was not an impressive program in itself, as STS-4 commander Ken Mattingly described it, a "rinky-dink collection of minor stuff they wanted to fly." But P-380 did go from program start to launch in only about 18 months, which is impressive indeed. Also, the primary experiment, CIRRIS, was important enough to re-fly on STS-39, rather early in the post-Challenger period when payload opportunities were at a premium because of the backlog, which suggests that it was not so rinky-dink.
No comments:
Post a Comment