Aerial Espionage; Secret Intelligence Flights By East And West

Shrewsbury, England, United Kingdom: Airline Publishing, 1985. First English Language Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. The format is approximately 8.25 inches by 11.75 inches. 167, [1] pages. Illustrations. The illustrated DJ has some wear, tears and soiling. Dick van der Art was the Deputy Foreign Editor of the Dutch NOS Television News. He was a prolific author, contributing many newspaper and magazine articles dealing with aviation and defense developments. He wrote Aerial Espionage after intensive research which took more than ten years. Derived from a posting by David Roos found on line: In the early 1790s, the French first experimented with using hydrogen-filled balloons for battlefield reconnaissance. The balloons didn't actually fly over enemy lines; they were tethered to the ground by cables. The baskets held two soldiers: one manning a telescope and the other signaling observations to the ground with flags. The French balloonists formed the world's first air force in 1794 called the Compagnie d'Aéronautiers. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the American inventor and showman Thaddeus Lowe staged a balloon demonstration on the National Mall that convinced Abraham Lincoln to employ tethered balloons in the Union Army. The largest Union reconnaissance balloon, the Intrepid, could carry five people, including a telegraph operator to relay information about Confederate positions. While fighting in the Spanish-American War of 1898, William Eddy built a kite-mounted camera and used it to snap bird's-eye photos of enemy positions. Although photography existed during the Civil War, it was Eddy's kite that took the first military aerial surveillance photos in recorded history. Airplanes first went to war during World War I. Those early aircraft were used for reconnaissance. The two-seater planes carried a pilot and an observer, who observed enemy troop deployments with the help of binoculars. Then came cameras. The Eastman Kodak company in America designed some of the first aerial cameras to be hard-mounted on the side of British-made de Havilland DH-4 aircraft. Other World War I cameras could snap photos through a hole in the cockpit floor. At its headquarters in Rochester, Kodak ran the U.S. Aerial Photography School, an intensive training program for American soldiers tasked with developing surveillance photos under battlefield conditions. By World War II, surveillance planes started carrying a onboard darkroom for developing and analyzing aerial photos. During the Cold War, it became almost impossible to collect intelligence on the ground in the Soviet Union, so America's spy agencies turned to the skies. The U2 'spyplane' was equipped with a Hycon 73B camera, capable of capturing details as small as 2.5 feet wide from dizzyingly high altitudes. In 1962, a U2 captured images of Soviet nukes in Cuba, providing the impetus for the Cuban Missile Crisis. For the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the space race was about more than being the first to reach the moon. The nations' intelligence agencies were also racing to get the first spy satellites in orbit. The first jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs/drones) were employed in the Vietnam War as part of a secret American reconnaissance program. The AQM-34 Ryan Firebee, which ran more than 34,000 surveillance missions during the war, was equipped with radar-absorbing blankets and anti-radar paint to give it stealth capabilities. In addition to tracking Viet Cong positions and spotting targets, the Firebee was also used to scatter propaganda leaflets behind enemy lines. Aerial espionage in the 21st century continues to use exoatmospheric satellites, crewed aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles as key pillars the aerial reconnaissance infrastructure and operations.