Cape Town, South Africa, 1968: Search or Surveillance? - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 39

3 Cape Town, South Africa, 1968:

Search or Surveillance?

The hinterlands of the Cold War —
also of interest to the Corona cameras

New York, 2012— President Bill Clinton's Executive Order 12951 in 1995 did more than
release thousands of spools of Cold War-era high-resolution satellite imagery to
the public. 26 Although ostensibly aimed at opening up and clarifying the past, it
actually pointed toward and even enabled a future. The vivid, if sometimes blurry
resolution of those spy images taken in the 1960s and 1970s made us wonder how
close the military could see now .
Compared with the highest-resolution imagery that was then available (Landsat,
30 meters; SPOT, 10 meters), the Corona images, which were the heart of the declas-
sified archive, offered an unprecedented opportunity to look close up at a distance.
But despite the glasnost in Washington, a complex cultural, political, and legal cloud
hung over contemporary satellite imagery in the mid-1990s. While the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia debated whether or not to admit images
of the Srebrenica massacre as evidence of war crimes, Wired effusively announced
the soon-to-launch next wave of what would become the first commercially avail -
able imagery that could be purchased from high-resolution satellites, complete with
lavish (and simulated) “images” of Washington, D.C., and Paris. 27
Since the commercial high-resolution satellites had not yet been launched, I
decided to look back. Corona satellites were always tasked to certain locations, so
the images in the archive were heavily weighted toward the predictable ones of
the early 1960s and 1970s—China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Bloc countries.
But the hinterlands of the Cold War, the spaces where proxies battled in smaller
but more lethal wars, were also of interest to the Corona cameras. And so, there
were myriad images from which to choose.
According to Keith Clarke, the Argon satellite missions (part of the Corona sys -
tem) were used to construct the “first high resolution image of Africa,” an eighty-
by-sixty-foot photomosaic. 28 This set me on a trail of looking for a Corona image