THE NPIC AND ITS WORK ARTHUR C. LUNDAHL

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• Collection: General CIA Records
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• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 26, 2013
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• Content Type: REPORT

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MEMORANDUM FOR:
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FORM NO. REPLACES FORM 10-101
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CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
Arthur C. Lundahl directs the National Photographic
Interpretation Center. His article is a64xted
from a lecture delivered at the DIA Intelligence
School.
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Highlights in the development and
exploitation of advanced strategic
photo reconnaissance.
THE NPIC AND 1TS'W0RK
Arthur C. Lundahl
I shall try here to sketch the origins of the National Photographic
Interpretation Center as It evolved from a Pilieffort set up in CIA, tell
something of how it operates, and illustrate some of the material it has
to work with.
Photographic intelligence is a relatively new field. It got its
main start in World War 11, where it piled up an enviable record of
accomplishment. At the conclusion of the war technical survey teams
went into Germany and Japan with the specific purpose of determining how
good our PI effort had been. These were the famous U.S. Strategic Bomb-
ing Intelligence Surveys, which after many months of study came to the
conciusion that between 80 and 90 percent of all of our intelligence In
World War II came from aerial photography and that this intelligence was
around 85 perCent accurate. At the conclusion of the Korean war,
simi-
larly, an Operations Evaluations Group report said that 85 per cent of
the intWigence there came from aerial photography.
It is rather surprising, in the light of this record, that as late
as 1952 there was no PI effort worthy of the name in CIA, no organized,
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instrumented, regularized program of photo interpretation. In early
1953, however, a Photographic Interpretation Division was established
In the Agency's geographic intelligence component. Because I had then
been at the Navy PI Center for some eight years and after the war had
converted it from an exclusively military activity to a combined
military-civilian organization, with all the paper work and planning
Involved in setting up a new outfit, I was asked to come over to
organize the CIA effort.. We started out with a very small group that
year, and from the very beginning we were almost completely overowhelmed
by clandestine requirements: in planning for parachute drops, getting
agents across beaches, landing supplies, blowing up radio stations, and
other such missions, photography was needed to pick out the right spots
and times. Thus we were largely engaged in the support of clandestine
activities through 1953 and 1954.
The U-2
At the end of 1954 I was summarily relieved of all my duties and
told to report to the Director's office. There I met a remarkable man,
Richard M. Bissell. He was one of the driving geniuses behind an
unprecedented airplane, one that as going to function as no plane had
ever functioned. This plane, which was to get pretty famous -- or
notorious, depending on how you look at it in May of 1960, was one of
the most fantastic accomplishments of our time. It went from a gleam
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in the eye to a flying machine in nine months, and without benefit
of any wind tunnel trials. It would have blown security to put it
in a tunnel anywhere, so the numbers that came off the slide rule
had to be right. The fact that the plane has operated so well is a
high testimonial to the designers and the engineers who built it.
Mr. Bissell pulled back the drape and showed me that this was
coming, and, it was my job to make sure that the unprecedented plane
had some unprecedented cameras to go into it. it didn't do you any
good to get up there If you couldn't do anything with the view when
you got there; you had to be able to record the intelligence on the
ground. For most of calendar year 1955 I was galloping around these
United States to various camera manufacturing depots and subcw9onent
manufacturers examining specifications, accepting some and rejecting
others, browbeating and encouraging them to do better, so that this
wedding of camera and plane would be the best match possible and ready
for consummation with the onset of operations in early 1956.
It was conceived from the beginning_that the take from this
effort would be very great indeed, and that some kind of large factory
would have to be set up to store and process the film. The 2,000 square
feet of space we were currently occupying at 141-Bleogiwou1d be nowhere
nearly large enough. .As I was moving about the country, my executive
officer was busy with the staffing-out operation and getting the space
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the la called for. The space we got was in the Stuart Building,
50,000 square feet of floor area. We developed from the start a prac-
tice of working closely with the military services. We broug!lt to this
plant, alongside the CIA staff, a large cadre of Army personnel, a fair
number from Navy, and a smaller group, mostly liaison officers, from
Air Force.
Initially this project was given a code name, and I had chosen
Automat, having in mind a place like Horn and Hardart up in New York,
where you can roll in any time, day or night, and get your hamburger
and custard pie. The photography was going to be rolling in night and
day. Saturday and Sunday, Labor Day and Christmas, and that is what it
did. In 1956 we rammed our way into this plant and were functioning at
, --------
BY 1958 our numberi-had grown from around
high blower from then on.
60 to about 225, and the overtime was going out at a mad rate. I think
We spent a total of 200,000 hours of overtime in the Stuart Building
alone. In August of that year wewere renamed the CIA Photographic
Intelligence Center and raised to Office status.
The National Center,
In the fall of 1960, after the fateful loss of one of our planes
in
near Sverdlovsk, the Joint Study Group which had been reexamNng the
capabilities and infirmities of the whole U.S. intelligence structure
issued its Report, a document about as big as a Sears/ Roebuck catalog.
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At its end were some 33 recommendations, one of which was that a national
photographic interpretation center should be established as soon as
possible. This recommendation was introduced into the 12318 ascnda in
December, and the debating began.
The participants agreed that there should be a national PI center,
but there were considerable differences on the point of who should control
It. The question was discussed in four sessions of the USIB that month
without resolution, and In January 1961 it was passed up to the National
C* ONC Pt--
Security Counsel. On 18 January, in the last NSC meeting President
Eisenhower chaired before he went out of office, NSCID 8 was cast and
signed, providing that a National Photographic Interpretation Center
should be established, that CIA would run it, logistically support it,
direct it. and maintain it, and that the military services would be
invited to participate to an extent commensurate with their interest.
In time of war, however, control of the Center would shift to the
Secretary of Defense; and with the advent of the Defense Intelligence
Agency this latent control is exercised through General Carroll's office.
After this action Mr. Dulles, in his usual magnanimous style,
offered the military services the option of providing the deputy director
for the Center and so set off a new debate over which military service
would do so first. General Graves Erskine, as the Defense Department US1B
member, resolved this one in favor of Army on the basis of its strong
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participation ever since Project Automat was launched. Army therefore
furnished my first deputy, to serve for two years. The present deputy
Is naval Captain Pierre N. Sands. But the CIA nominee for the EPIC
directorship itself has to be approved by the Secretary of Defense; my
nomination by Mr. Dulles was approved by Mr. McNamara, and I consider
myself. although I am paid by CIA, to stand at the apex of an inverted
equilateral triangle, equally responsible to the Secretary of Defense,
or to General Carroll acting for him, as to the Director of Central
Intelligence.
As we began functioning under our new charter, the President's
Board of Consultants on Foreign intelligence, headed by MIT President
Killian, made a couple of fd-site surveys and was much disenchanted
with the quarters in which we had to work. Reporting to the President,
it urged that this important national asset be relocated as quickly as
possible. Plans were in fact already under way to relocate us, with a
target date of 1 August 1963; but under the President's encouragement
Mr. HcCone undertook to get it done by 1 January 1963. The move began
at 0600 on that New Year's Day, and within 72 hours we were completely
tranplanted to our new quarters in building 213 of the Naval Weapons
Plant.
In this plant, with 400,000 sq. ft. of floor space, we have an
extremely fine collection of equipment and materials. It is the best
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equipped PI center, at least in the Western world, at toe present time.
I don't know what the Russians have, but they have had to .)e working if
theyle got some of the things that we have operating for us. The
staffing, too, has proceeded in rapid fashion: with about 760 on board
now, we are projecting a 1/0 of 1,000 people by the end of this f:scal
year. We conduct our own in-house PI training, area familiarization
programs, and so on. The very existence of this considerable activity
is classified Secret.
The NPIC organization, aside from the indispensable administrative
and support components, a reference staff to handle he myriads of
collateral intelligence documents the PI men use, and a crackerjack of
a publications shop, has four principal elements. The Operations staff
works 24 hours a day seven days a week, receiving thousands of cables a
week and sending out sometimes less, sometimes more, depending upon what
the situation is. The Photo Analysis group consists of Army, Navy,
Air Force, and CIA photo interpreters working together and dedicating
their efforts to the national PI objectives. These are backed up by
the photogrammetry people. Photogrammetry is the science of extracting
quantitative information on real objects from their photographic images,
figures on the size, shape, position, and orientation of any kind of
object or phenomenon imaged in any kind of photography -- aerial,
terrestrial, submarine, periscope, underwater, facsimili. TV screen, or.
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anything else.
But my Assistant for Plans and Development,
See his article, "Technical Factors in Aerospace Photovaphy,"in
Studies VI 4, p. 1 ff.
spends
most of the millions we spend every year, because you need all kinds of
sophisticated optical-meclanical hardware for the exploitation of photo-
graphy. You need new kinds of rectifiers and viewing devices, coherent
light sources, mazer emittari, all kinds of things which you have to
keep working on If yoLlre going to keep up with this business. In
photo intelligence, as in many other fields, you don't stand tiii; you
go forward or backward. There was a time after the war when we were
spending millions for sending out airplanes and hundreds of thciusands
0
for cameras, a towering mountain of expenditures An plot? reconnaissance;
but at the end of the process, down in the last hall of the building, the
Pits sat leaning over two-dollar stereoscopes trying to read a million
dollars worth of information out of them. It was like having a chain
with links made of raw steel, except down near the end you found some
made of wet kieenex. This Is what our R&D effort has been trying to get
rid of.
Nowadays the photo interpreters look through a $17,000 Richardson-
type stereoviewer, or each of them has at his left elbow a stereo-
microscope that comes at about $800, or they have on-line mensuration
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equipment whereby yau can bring your cross hairs into coincidence on
scmething, punch the real time into a 490, and get back bearing or
length or width or height or whatever you're after. These arc, the
frontiers that you have to keep probing if you're going to stay on
top of the kinds of problems given us in these times., Most of this
hardware comes out of Plans and Development.
The Take
When President Eisenhower gave his TV talk in 1960 about our plane
brought down near Sverdlovsk, he gave as an example of its take the photo-
graph in Figure i, made from 72,000 feet over the San Diego Naval Air
Station. Looking down on the parking lots, you see the 8-inch-wide white
lines that mark the separations between the cars, the center line of the
road, the lanes where the pedestrians cross, and many other details with
dimensions on the order of a foot, a little more or less depending on
atmospherics, from something approximating 14 miles up. This was the
kind of tool created to deliver the greatest amount of information in the
history of U.S. intelligence. It has come in in torrents, with tremen-
dous effect on the decision makers and policy planners. I shudder to
think where the United States would have been today in its estimative
processes were it not for this take. While all kinds of fictitious
things -- bomber gaps and missile gaps and other folklore items were
cropFing up in the newspapers, depending upon what side of the election
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or what side you were on, we had some fairly solid information about
the real situation. What we had is sampled in the accompanying illus-
Lrations.
The U-2 delivered to us thousands of square miles of coverage per
sortie, and it raised the whole level of the PI business by several
orders of magnitude. In World War 11 PI was the handmaiden of battlefield
intelligence, then broader tactical intelligence, then technical and
target intelligence -- Ploesti..oll, ball bearings, etc. But in the
late 50's and early 60's photography became a key ingredient of national
inteillgence, strategic intelligence, policy intelligence. Some high-
lights of its performance in this role are discussed below.
Tyuratam
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In Figure 2 you see the Soviet guided Missile launching complex at
Tyuratam on the shores of the Arai Sea, 45055' north, 63?18' east. Back
in 1957 we watched them starting to construct this first great
space-event and ICBM launching area. That winetglass-shaped hole in the
ground is some 900 feet long. 500 feet wide, and 160 feet deep. It has
a concrete pad 160 feet square and a 90-foot steel tower on the edge of
it. You see the double security fencing, the rail line coming up, and
various support, fueling, interferometer, and other devices aroc1 it.
it is from here that the Soviets have fired their shots into the Pacific,
their Venus ?robes, their Lunik shots, the Titov and Gagarin flights, and
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all the rest.
They weren't content with just one big pod and aii its supporting
Installations; over to the left of it they built themf,c.ives Lnother one.
1.,t the B pad the security fences are in, the excavatioa the
blast pit and the control bunkers being built. This one hooks around
on a bearing of 315; the other is on a bearing of 090 . In the early
days of missile launching you lifted them off as close to 0900 as possi-
ble to take advantage of the Coriolis kick; but when your boosters get
more powerful you can aim them more nearly on northerly orbits and lift
them over the pole. In fact you can even aim them slightly against that
kick, as the B pad does, If you have enough booster.
The R&D bases are probably the most important things we cover in
the Soviet Union, because there is where the missiles, nuclear weapons,
etc., pass from a gleam in the eye to hardware on the ground, still two
or three years away from a deployed threat in the field. %ja have learned
a great deal from watching them, and these efforts are paying off in more
ways than I could hope to enumerate. We don't want to get into a sub-
stantive discussion of missiles or/tomic Energy or SW or anything but
to illustrate the methodology, what the Pt's get inthe form of the
pictures, what they create from it, and what it means to the national
estimators.
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, Figure 3 is a composite sketch of the Tyuratam area. You see the
Syr Darya river, Tyuratam village on it, and the rail line that c7Ailcs
out some 25 miles into the desert. Near launch area A, the big hole in
the ground, Is the launch support complex -- personnel, storage, instru-
ment control center. Beyond/ launch complex B Is a third, launch complex
C. and they have continued to add details to this base. Toward the
bottom is storage construction in support of Tyuratam -- a
main water storage and tank area, a communications area, a propellant
production area. This diagram is much simplified; some of the later
Illustrations are more complicated and show something of the myriads
of details that photography is capable of providing.
Kapustin Yar
Figure 4 pictures another place the Soviets are petty proud of;
this is 4 Kapustin Yar, at the big bend where the Voica hooks around
south of Stalingrad. Here is where they fire their short and inter-
mediate missiles -- 350, 650, 950, 1100, 2000 miles -- on which -
have been busily working in R&D for many years. The surf,Lae-to-air
missile launch complex with the herring-bone pattern is the prototype
of those they deployed in a double ring around kloscow at 25- and 50-mile
radius, beginning in the early fifties. Then they stopped building these
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Si4 Is because they were too heavy, too cumbersce, too expensive, and
designed for mass bomber raids, not the kind of war we would be fight-
ing. They built another complex for developing the SA 2's and later
a third for the SA 3's designed to fill the low-altitude :,ap between
zero and a few thousand feet of elevation.
You see also the stakeouts for the electronics downrange tracking
of the missiles, the main school, nuclear storage support, the main
base support complex, launch complex E for surface-to-surface missiles,
launch complexes A, B. C, and at a distance D,,,the back-up electronic
ells, the main troop training complex F. and launch complex G. %:c even
found the old V-2 launch site here, as indicated. The complete setup
of this base would require scores and scores of pictures to ccv.r in
detail.
Figure 5 concentrates on the surface-to-air development and troop
training sites. Prominent is that herringbone of which they built some
56 around Moscow. These fire from triple bays on the outboard el s of
the ladder, lining up with the big Yo-Yo radar complex, all inside a
security fencing.2
In trying to find something that was better than the
2
For an account of the earlier identification of the deployee herringbone
sites and their Yo-Yo raear, see Charles R. 'Aprn's "The Yo-Yo Story"
in Studies VI, p. 11 ff.
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SA 1 module they first tried various combinations at another site but
finally settled on the S
complex, which you see is hexasonai, with
six firing positions, backed up by Yo-Yo radar and of course security
fenced.
When they were cbnvinced that this is what they wanted they put
three of them side by side for dry fire and two for live fire, and
they encamped 3000 troops nearby for training. We counted and cubed
up the tent spacing they had for their field exercise and pieced
together how they came for school work down to the dry fire and live
fire sites. When they had finished their training they were loaded
aboard trains, by organizational units, given their equipment and
supporting elements, and shipped right to wherever they were
their defense posts in the Soviet Union or in the Satellites.
Later on the engineers moved down the road and set up their first
$PO, the low-altitude surface-to-air missiles, in that splayed open H.
The trajectories are low, no trees or objects ahead of them. These
would probably be set up in places like the Baltic slot and where SAC
would be trying to run in low. Farther down you see the main adminis-
tration complex. The very big revetted buildings, it is supposed, are
to store the new warheads for these surface-to-air missiles of the
future, if indeed they are not already a part of the regular Soviet
arsenal.
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Figure 6 is one of the Sk sites, seen from 71,000 feet. We
eked up 24 of these around Cuba, starting in September of last year, 4,- 95-t
No
ring the whole perimeter of the country. It's about COO feet across.
The six firing positions, in double revetments, have an opcn roadway
connecting them. There are missiles on launchers in five of them; the
sixth is open at the moment. In the center are the radar van revetments,
with a stack out in preparation for firing. At the 1200 separation two
vehicles carrying missiles stand in bays. In reloading, these vehicles
come out, go through the double-wall revetments, stop at the firing
positions, swing open the turrets, and slide their missiles in on the
launchers. Then they go on up the road to a nearby support complex,
where we have seen up to 100 of these missiles in canvas covers on
trailers waiting to perform their resupply function when called upon.
On the periphery there's an athletic field, the Russian equivalent of
a PX, some associative features of radar and guidance equipment, and
the security wall.
This, then, is the second-generation surface-to-air missile site.
From the data that we've been able to piece together around the world,
from the sightings we've been able to make in the Soviet Union, and the
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offiloadings we've seen going on in Indonesia, .:stypt, Iraq, Cuba, and
elsewhere, the projected estimate is that there are probably in excess
of 1,000 such sites scattered through the Soviet Union, the Satellites,
and client countries around the world.
Figure 7 shows what launch complex E, surface-to-surface. at
Kapustin Yar looked like in mid-winter: a lot of snow on the ground,
triple security fences, security gate, main road in,
g concrete pad
about 230 feet on the side, loop road coming across, main control bunker,
lisht poles for illumination for night firing secondary control bunkers,
radio control towers. This is quickly pieced together.
I should explain that our PI men don't work from a screen or from
enlargements; they sit looking at transparencies, either on the big-screen
Richardsons or on stf'reomicroscopes. With their rheostats they adjust
magnification and illumination to optimum suitability for their individual
eyes and then proceed to traverse their cross hairs for measurements and
the other photogrammetric things I've described.
It is from this process that they develop the details that are
beginning to appear In Figure 8. There's the pad, 230 by 230, the main
control bunker, the secondary control bunker. They were laying out a
projected second pad off to the left; there are varied tanks and radio
towers. The light poles for night work are 70 feet hish. You may wonder
how we know these figures are right. The answer is very simple: we've
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flown the l2-2 over factories. depots
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INN, INN
Hanford, Oak Ridge -- and other
pieccs in the United States, obtained from the photographs of such places
eurements of details on the ground, and then actually gone in -- with
cooperation of the range manager -- and got the blueprints of the
place or measured them ourselves; and the dimensions detcrnarice front -----
photography have been very, very close to those obtained by ground
inspection.
Figure 9 is launch complex 0, way off by itself at Kapustin Var.
We think they are experimenting with air breathers in here. You see the
way it looked in 19r7, with the rail line looping up to a very compli- "
cated kind of firing pad. Then they continued to add more pads until
they had run them out almost a mile. By 1959 the complex had been
expanded in two other directions. This is typical of th-. cramism of the
Kapustin Yar activity on short and intermediate range missiies.
Vladimirovka airfield in Figure 10, which is also at Kapustin Yar
down along the river, is a kind of Wright-Patterson of the Soviet Union.
The strip is 8,200 feet. You can see the count of Bulls, Badgers,
Beagles, Faggots, Farmers, Flashlights, Crates, Cabs, Colts, Skreeks, and
Hounds, the main missile production complex, air-to-air and air-to-surface
missiles, the main airborne missile assembly and loading comp:exc.:).
For both offensive and defensive armaments, they do a great 00c of trial
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fitting, prototype, and check-out and running here.
Sharan
Another place we've been much interez,tee in is Sara Shaca. on the
shores of Lake Balkhash. Here is where the Soviets have been 1.arking
most energetically on antimissile missiles. In Figure 11 you can see
two types of firing pads -- one like a depressed roulette wheel and
then the rectangular pad farther down. This is in an impact area: they
apparently fire at this place from Kapustin Yar and as the missiles come
whistling in try to lift off from these pads to intercept them. Otherwise
we have no explanation for launching pads in a missile impact area.
Figure 12 shows the two pads. about 300 feet in diameter, microwave
towers, buildings under construction 21-foot radar dIshes, and then
actual vehicles' tracks going up to some of the launcher-erectors and the
trackout of radar vans etc. We've made a couple of conceptual construc-
tions of what the pad looks like, as ID Figure 13. Mary of the photo
Interpreters are skilled in sketching through the stereoscopeco_s:=1-- it's
surprising how many of our consultant scientists can't read blueprints,
so that frequently we have to make these perspective sketches to give
them the Idea of what we'Ke after. This shows the dishing in what
is probably a blast deflecting plate underneath the launefset p in
It. Probably storage and other materials are pulled out underneath
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on the side where you see one opening in the wall. 300 feet in diameter
makes it just about the size of a big radio telescope like the one at
Jodrell Bank.
Figure 14 shows a hen-roost type of building.)890 feet long, with
a big phase radar array looking to the west, in the direction from which
the missiles come.- There is a backscatter wall and all kinds of dishes
and mounds and antennas. The whole Sara Shagan complex spreads over some
1600 sq. miles, and the collection of radars in it is fantastic. Of
course that is what you would expect: If you have to get on your incoming
target fast and get his range, attitude, altitude, and plunge angle in
time to lift off at the right moment and have a chance for a hit, you need
as much of the radar information, including interferometer readings and
everything, as you can get.
The diagram of Figure 15 shows more methodology. As you can see,
they get all kinds of details -- burled water lines, power houses.,-tanks,
the 350-foot support building, the mound, or low wall, for the backscatter,
other mounds, tanks, lines, and poles. These all have to be pinned down.
The PI men identify these things,,measure the dickens out of them, and
draw up all kinds of engineering intelligence blueprints like these.
Analysts take this material and massage it with all kinds of collateral--
Interrogations, defectors' reports, national estimates. FBIS broadcast
items -- rejecting facts which are inconsistent with the photography,
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confirming others, and whipping together a tight mnange which then goes
up into the estimative process for the benefit of the decision makers.
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This, then, is the kind of raw material and the kind of analytic
processing the NPIC was established to handle. It is true thc't in
concentrating on the RE,D bases I have not illustratt.d ths- ev lee
bearing directly on putative missile gaps and other matters of .,,-:.rength
In being. But you can imagine how much simpler a thing it is to find
and reckon up the deployed force once the prototypes Lave been ide1:1-
fIed in this detai:. The development of this asset, beginning with
Project Automat, has been one of the greatest breakthroughs in the
history of Intelligence.
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