The Motto Is: Think Big, Think Dirty

When Soviet Cosmos 954 naval reconnaissance satellite plummeted from its orbit and disintegrated over northwestern Canada last week, it underscored an inescapable fact of the space age: we are never alone. Nor, for that matter, is the other side. Day and night, little is hidden from the intelligence-gathering techniques of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Information is plucked from space, from the ground, from under the sea. A rundown of some of the most sophisticated methods for gathering data:

SATELLITES. In 1972 the U.S. and Soviet Union agreed that a "national means of verification" could be used by both sides, without interference, to police arms control pacts. In plain English: spy satellites were legal.

The star of the U.S. spy satellite stable is the Lockheed "Big Bird," a 12-ton technological marvel orbiting as high as 250 miles above the earth. Big Bird, 55 ft. long and 10 ft. wide, is equipped with electronic listening equipment along with black-and-white, color and infrared television and still cameras. It is able to make a low orbital pass at an altitude of 90 miles and take extraordinarily detailed photographs, which give U.S. intelligence information on Russian and Chinese harvests as well as clues to secret weapon construction. On one mission over the Soviet Union, Big Bird snapped the make, model, wing markings and ground-support equipment of a group of planes stationed near Plesetsk, Russia's key military launch center. Exposed film is stored in six cannisters that are periodically ejected into the earth's atmosphere, descending by parachute toward a point in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii, where they are snatched from the air by a giant Y-shaped sky hook bolted to the nose of an Air Force cargo plane. If that fails, the cannisters float on or just under the surface of the Pacific, giving off radio and sonar signals, and are recovered by frogmen.

Big Bird's coverage, though steadily improving, is still limited by the amount of propellant aboard to about 220 days a year. Meanwhile, the Soviets have gained an intelligence edge by again manning their Salyut space station, which passes over the U.S. twice a day. U.S. intelligence officials believe the Russians are likely to keep cosmonauts in space from now on. American astronauts, on the other hand, will not revisit the Spacelab system until the new space shuttle is launched in 1980. The Soviets have another advantage in space: the "hunter-killer" satellite that can track an orbiting vehicle, sidle up to it, and detonate like a hand grenade, blasting its victim to bits. The satellite killer's main potential target: Big Bird.

PLANES. After the embarrassing U-2 incident in 1960, President Eisenhower promised the Kremlin there would be no more U.S. spy flights over the Soviet Union. Three years later, however, Lockheed unveiled another super flying machine that could probably make the trip with impunity: the needle-nosed SR-71 (for strategic reconnaissance), a 12-ton aircraft that travels three times the speed of sound at more than 85,000 ft. Armed with electronic "spoofing" gadgetry capable of disrupting enemy tracking systems and even wiping its own image off a radar scope, the plane is nicknamed "Blackbird" for its sooty heat-resistant paint job. The world's highest-flying and fastest manned airplane, the SR-71 can travel more than 2,000 m.p.h. Though the U.S. has honored Eisenhower's promise, in 1967, as Communist Chinese nuclear technicians triggered their first hydrogen bomb, they were stunned by a blip moving across the radar scope; Blackbird was photographing the whole show. The plane carries high-powered cameras that can map most of the U.S. in three passes, as well as three-dimensional filming equipment that can cover more than 150 sq. mi. so precisely as to locate a mailbox on a country road.

"BUGS." Last month the Pentagon warned defense contractors to be wary of what they said in messages carried by commercial satellites because the Soviets are listening to every word. Using innocent-looking vans or "ferret" satellites or balloon-supported towlines, trailing from submarines, that act as 2,000-ft. antennas, the Russians pick up microwave transmissions from telephones, radios and satellites. Last year they installed huge eavesdropping antennas near Havana to intercept messages sent from the U.S. overseas. At KGB headquarters in Moscow, 30,000 workers specialize in computer analysis of miles of taped transmissions. The U.S. can scarcely complain; some 4,000 Americans employed by the National Security Agency, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and secret private contractors are doing exactly the same thing. Both Soviet and American technicians use advanced computers programmed to react to trigger words; a Soviet analyst, for instance, might sit up straight on coming upon words like Cobra Dane, a new radar installation in the Aleutians, or Trident, the giant U.S. submarine now under construction.

Microwaves, the short radio waves that have been adapted to cook roasts and heat frozen dinners in compact kitchen ovens, are also used to bug conversations in nearby rooms or vehicles. Metal resonators buried around a room will vibrate from sounds in the air. The microwaves are bounced off the resonator, carrying the vibrations back to the eavesdropper's receiver. The spoken words are then reproduced electronically. Such gear has allegedly been used for a U.S. surveillance project called Gamma Guppy that has tried to eavesdrop on conversations conducted by members of the Soviet Politburo in their limousines. Another James Bondian device: a laser bug. The laser shoots a narrow stream of light against a window, which will vibrate from the sounds in the room; the beam grabs an "image" of the vibrations, which is then converted back to sound by a special receiver.

CAMERAS. If a spy wants pictures to go with the dialogue he has bugged, all he needs is an unobstructed view of his target, a little quiet, and either a Starlight Viewer with a camera adapter or an Intensifier Camera, both made by Law Enforcement Associates, Inc., a New Jersey electronics firm. Compact handheld devices, they retail for about $3,000 and can be operated along with earphones and a parabolic reflector or "dish" that can pick up normal speech up to 800 yds. away in an open space or in a room across a noisy street. The Starlight Viewer amplifies light 50,000 times and is perfect for nighttime surveillance; the intensifier needs some light but produces more sharply detailed photographs.

What the spy trade calls ELINT (for electronic intelligence) seems limited only by the range of the human imagination; it is a tinkerer's dream so long as intelligence wizards bear in mind the unofficial motto of space age spying: think big and think dirty. But all their gadgets, no matter how effective and sophisticated, are unlikely to make the man in the trenchcoat obsolete. Satellites and planes and bugs might dig up secret information faster, but HUMINT (for human intelligence) is needed to interpret it, and to decide what to do next.

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