Satellite signals intelligence in the 1970s-1990s

[Blackstar]

I've been going through the SIGINT documents. Taking notes. A few things off the top of my head:

-there were two pallet proposals in the mid-1970s. One was called ESE, which was an acronym (I forget what). I forget the other name, but have it written down. I see no evidence that either one was approved, and I assume that the later LORRI pallet accomplished some of the same things.

-there was a proposal for a spacecraft called DIANNE (yes, two "n's"). This later became RAQUEL II. RAQUEL II was apparently not approved because it was too expensive, and instead the second RAQUEL mission was designated RAQUEL IA.



Other proposed pallet was BARNACLE. It appears that BARNACLE was not approved and ESE became LORRI, abut I'm not 100% positive of that.

[Blackstar]

Continuing to go through the documents. There are a number of documents from 1974/1975 dealing with RAQUEL II, which was going to be a much upgraded version of RAQUEL. The key proponents of RAQUEL II were USAF and some other military agencies (not Navy), and the reason was that they wanted RAQUEL II to provide technical data on radars that could be used to develop countermeasures for tactical aircraft. I assume that what they were hoping to do was to develop jamming and spoofing equipment for new Soviet SAM radar types.

The alternative at the time was to build another RAQUEL I, which they designated RAQUEL IA. RAQUEL IA was more useful for Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty monitoring, although I'm not sure how. CIA wanted RAQUEL IA, as did the Navy. State Department abstained, and the Air Force and DIA (and maybe another organization--I'd have to check my notes) wanted FARRAH II. FARRAH II was going to cost $8 million more.

Because there was disagreement over which system to build, the issue went to the DoD (I forget the office) and they decided in favor of RAQUEL IA.

[Blackstar]

I have been researching the URSALA and RAQUEL satellites during the 1970s. (Four URSALAS and two RAQUELS were launched.) This was the period when NRO systems really started to serve tactical military users. It started in the late 1960s with the DMSP weather satellites providing data to Vietnam forces, and then the MULTIGROUP and STRAWMAN SIGINT satellites providing data to USAF in Vietnam in the form of locations of surface-to-air missile sites (a program called PENDULUM). But in those cases, the ground stations were fixed, or back in the US (for instance, with PENDULUM I believe that the data was processed in the US and then sent via comsat to Vietnam). Also, POPPY was used to search for Soviet ships at sea starting in the late 1960s. We have quite a few references to these early efforts, but I have not seen any comprehensive overview of them.

By the early 1970s, there were some tests with using the P989 satellites to find ships at sea. Something that comes up in these newly released documents (mentioned in my notes) is that NRO also started using these satellites to shadow US Navy carrier groups. There are references to the carriers Kitty Hawk, Enterprise, and Nimitz, and it seems that the operations involved having the satellites look in the areas that the ships were traveling to detect Soviet vessels. There's reference to an incident where the Enterprise left port and headed to another location but didn't tell NRO it was doing it, so they could not use the satellite to monitor it.

There are some references to the development of mobile ground stations for receiving the P989 data in the field. I'm still trying to piece all of this together, but there were exercises in 1975 and 1976 to test this, but I'm not sure when exactly this became an operational capability.

There was a question of how to best accomplish this task and it's not entirely clear when/how/who sorted it out. For instance, should they do all the processing back in the US and then send the processed data to the field, or should they redesign the satellites to do more processing onboard and have them send it directly to mobile ground stations? Also, there was a requirement (not totally clear from available documents) that if they were going to send the data to an overseas mobile station, it had to be encrypted, but they did not need to encrypt it when sending to a US ground station. That and processing added cost. Awhile ago somebody told me that this also involved a bit of a turf war between NSA and NRO. NSA wanted to do the processing at their ground stations and did not like the idea of sending data directly to the field.

URSALA was a general search system that just looked around and picked up lots of emissions and noted their locations and types. RAQUEL was a technical ELINT system that did a lot more measuring of the signals it intercepted. It seems that during the 1970s, they wanted one of each flying simultaneously. By the late 1970s the plan was to combine both missions into FARRAH. Electronics were getting smaller. FARRAH was a very densely packed satellite. When FARRAH III was started, they made it a lot bigger because they had room in the shuttle payload bay. There are a couple of documents that indicate that they needed more room in the "host" satellite than they had for FARRAH I and II, and shuttle provided that. FARRAH III, IV and V ultimately flew on Titan II rockets. Apparently the STS/ELV capability was included from the start with FARRAH III, although they were planning for shuttle.

Apparently URSALA and RAQUEL were planned to go after tactical forces more than their predecessors. Soviet SAM radars, although it is unclear which ones. (This struck me as a rather stupid deletion, because one document mentions this was started in 1967, and there are not a lot of candidate Soviet SAMs in 1967. I'm guessing it was the beginnings of the Soviet SA-6 mobile SAM.)

Note that going after tactical targets is not the same as delivering the data to tactical users. But they do appear to have had that in mind from the early 1970s--after all, if they were going to track Soviet radars in Warsaw Pact nations, it made sense to deliver that data to USAF units in Europe.

One confusing aspect of the documents is that there are indications that people were talking about eliminating the P989 program in the mid-1970s (well, I think that they would make the decision to not build any more by the mid-1970s and the last ones would fly by the late 1970s). But the documentation is unclear on this. There's no information on what they expected to replace it with. My suspicion is that as PARCAE was about to come online, people were asking why they still needed P989, and so the program office believed they were under threat and they had to explain their unique capabilities.

But there's another aspect to this that's really interesting and it concerns the RAQUEL II in 1975. NRO had already built RAQUEL I, and there was a question about building another one, named RAQUEL IA, or building a new and more capable satellite named RAQUEL II. There are a bunch of documents about this and the dispute. Apparently the users of the data were much more involved in setting requirements for RAQUEL II than in the past. USAF in particular wanted RAQUEL II to provide detailed technical information about Soviet tactical radars in order to develop countermeasures. There was a meeting of some overall SIGINT coordinating group and they couldn't come to a consensus. USAF and a few others wanted RAQUEL II, but CIA (and maybe Navy?) were concerned that this would take too long to build and they did not want a gap between the first and second RAQUEL missions because of "surprise." They also didn't care about the same target emitters as USAF. Without consensus, the issue got kicked up to DoD to make the decision, and they ultimately decided on RAQUEL IA, which was built and flown.

Some of the documents indicate that USAF was rather adamant about getting RAQUEL II, so they were probably frakked when it did not happen. But the DoD memo implies that there were better ways to get that technical data than this particular satellite. It does not say what they are, but probably aircraft like the RC-135.

I'm working on a U/R article and it will be more detail than anybody wants to read, but we are now getting good, although spotty, information on the use of national level systems to serve tactical users. I may eventually do a FARRAH article, because that's a good example of a satellite planned for shuttle.

[hoku]

I have been researching the URSALA and RAQUEL satellites during the 1970s.
<snip>
Awhile ago somebody told me that this also involved a bit of a turf war between NSA and NRO. NSA wanted to do the processing at their ground stations and did not like the idea of sending data directly to the field.
<snip>

The "turf war" apparently started with an attempt to re-organize (unify) the various SIGINT efforts and programmes. J.T. Richelson did some research on it a while back (scroll down to "The CIA-NSA Relationship"):
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cyber-vault-intelligence/2015-03-20/cia-and-signals-intelligence

See also the section on "The HAC Investigation and the Negotiation of a Peace Treaty" in Book III of "American Cryp-tology during the Cold War". The 2013 ISCAP release states "What finally brought the long-running interagency disputes to a head was the covert program."
https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/scamlogic-histories/cold_war_iii.pdf

[Blackstar]

I have been researching the URSALA and RAQUEL satellites during the 1970s.
<snip>
Awhile ago somebody told me that this also involved a bit of a turf war between NSA and NRO. NSA wanted to do the processing at their ground stations and did not like the idea of sending data directly to the field.
<snip>

The "turf war" apparently started with an attempt to re-organize (unify) the various SIGINT efforts and programmes. J.T. Richelson did some research on it a while back (scroll down to "The CIA-NSA Relationship"):
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cyber-vault-intelligence/2015-03-20/cia-and-signals-intelligence

See also the section on "The HAC Investigation and the Negotiation of a Peace Treaty" in Book III of "American Cryp-tology during the Cold War". The 2013 ISCAP release states "What finally brought the long-running interagency disputes to a head was the covert program."
https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/scamlogic-histories/cold_war_iii.pdf

This is a bit different--Richelson mentions the CIA-NSA turf war, but what I've heard about is the SAFSP (NRO's Program A) dispute with NSA. I heard that this went back to at least the early 1970s, but I suspect it started way before that.