Deep dive into: US spy satellite agency declassifies high-flying Cold War listening post

The National Reconnaissance Office, the agency overseeing the US government’s fleet of spy satellites, has declassified a decades-old program used to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union’s military communication signals.

The program was codenamed Jumpseat, and its existence was already public knowledge through leaks and contemporary media reports. What’s new is the NRO’s description of the program’s purpose and development and pictures of the satellites themselves.

In a statement, the NRO called Jumpseat “the United States’ first-generation, highly elliptical orbit (HEO) signals-collection satellite.”

Eight Jumpseat satellites launched from 1971 through 1987, when the US government considered the very existence of the National Reconnaissance Office a state secret. Jumpseat satellites operated until 2006. Their core mission was “monitoring adversarial offensive and defensive weapon system development,” the NRO said. “Jumpseat collected electronic emissions and signals, communication intelligence, as well as foreign instrumentation intelligence.”

Data intercepted by the Jumpseat satellites flowed to the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and “other national security elements,” the NRO said.

The Soviet Union was the primary target for Jumpseat intelligence collections. The satellites flew in highly elliptical orbits ranging from a few hundred miles up to 24,000 miles (39,000 kilometers) above the Earth. The satellites’ flight paths were angled such that they reached apogee, the highest point of their orbits, over the far Northern Hemisphere. Satellites travel slowest at apogee, so the Jumpseat spacecraft loitered high over the Arctic, Russia, Canada, and Greenland for most of the 12 hours it took them to complete a loop around the Earth.

This trajectory gave the Jumpseat satellites persistent coverage over the Arctic and the Soviet Union, which first realized the utility of such an orbit. The Soviet government began launching communication and early warning satellites into the same type of orbit a few years before the first Jumpseat mission launched in 1971. The Soviets called the orbit Molniya, the Russian word for lightning.

The name Jumpseat was first revealed in a 1986 book by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on the Soviet Union’s 1983 shoot-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007. Hersh wrote that the Jumpseat satellites could “intercept all kinds of communications,” including voice messages between Soviet ground personnel and pilots.

Analysis & Development

“The historical significance of Jumpseat cannot be understated,” said James Outzen, NRO director of the Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance. “Its orbit provided the US a new vantage point for the collection of unique and critical signals intelligence from space.”

Jumpseat was “perhaps the most mysterious” of the NRO’s high-altitude surveillance satellites in its era, space historians Dwayne Day and Nicholas Watkins wrote in a 2020 article published in the Space Review. Day and Watkins wrote that the Jumpseat satellites “pushed the state of the art in terms of payloads, antennas, and satellite design.”

Now, we know exactly what the satellites looked like. They were built by Hughes Aircraft company, which specialized in producing satellites using spin motion to stabilize themselves. Therefore, the drum-like shape of the Jumpseat satellites in the newly declassified photos is no big surprise. The exact appearance of the antenna structure on the upper deck of the Jumpseat spacecraft was not public knowledge. The upper deck had a device to counter the satellite’s spin, allowing the antennas to point toward radio sources.

An illustration released by the NRO shows that the satellites carried a 13-foot antenna to intercept radio signals, somewhat smaller than prior open source estimates of the antenna’s size. The NRO has not disclosed precisely what kinds of signals the Jumpseat satellites intercepted, but Day and Watkins wrote in 2020 that an early justification for the program was to monitor Soviet radars, which some analysts might have interpreted as part of a secret anti-ballistic missile system to guard against a US strike.

The authors presented evidence that the Jumpseat also likely hosted infrared sensors to monitor Soviet missile tests and provide early warning of a potential Soviet missile attack. The NRO did not mention this possible secondary mission in the Jumpseat declassification memo.

Chris Scolese, director of the NRO, formally declassified “certain limited facts” associated with the Jumpseat program in December. The NRO made the information public in a press release on Wednesday. Scolese wrote that the declassification was “consistent with provisions” of an executive order signed by former President Barack Obama in 2009 that set guidelines for how and when to classify and declassify national security information.

“I have concluded that publicly acknowledging limited facts will not cause harm to our current and future satellite systems,” Scolese wrote in the Jumpseat declassification memorandum, dated December 4. “Additionally, acknowledging the program is consistent with our obligation to the American public to be both open and transparent where possible through declassification of historic programs.”

Future Impact

The NRO will evaluate a more complete declassification for the Jumpseat program “as time and resources permit,” Scolese wrote. He acknowledged that unclassified commercial ventures now operate signals intelligence, or SIGINT, satellites “whose capabilities are comparable if not superior to Jumpseat.”

The Jumpseat satellites were developed in partnership with the Air Force through a program called Project Earpop. The government’s first electronic surveillance satellites flew in low-Earth orbit, where they spent less than 15 minutes in range of Soviet territory on each pass.

The NRO and the Air Force launched the Jumpseat satellites aboard Titan IIIB rockets from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The agency said Jumpseat was a “foundational program” for the NRO’s subsequent highly elliptical orbit satellite programs. According to public sources, the NRO began launching a new generation of high-altitude eavesdropping satellites called Trumpet in 1994, but details remain classified.

The NRO has also launched a separate series of eavesdropping satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the equator with enormous mesh antennas, along with bus-sized Earth-pointing telescopes capable of viewing any location in the world. These satellites are among the largest in orbit, requiring heavy-lift rockets to get them to their observation posts.

The disclosure of the Jumpseat program follows the declassification of several other Cold War-era spy satellites. They include the CIA’s Corona series of photo reconnaissance satellites from the 1960s, which the government officially acknowledged 30 years later. The NRO declassified in 2011 two more optical spy satellite programs, codenamed Gambit and Hexagon, which launched from the 1960s through the 1980s. Most recently, the NRO revealed a naval surveillance program called Parcae in 2023.

Ars Technica has been separating the signal from the noise for over 25 years. With our unique combination of technical savvy and wide-ranging interest in the technological arts and sciences, Ars is the trusted source in a sea of information. After all, you don’t need to know everything, only what’s important.

Source: View Original