The Lockheed Constellation
was one of the most graceful propeller driven airliners
to ever take to the skies, considered by many to be the
pinnacle of the propliner in the 1950s, soon to be replaced
by faster and larger jets. Long and slender, with a gentle
curve to its back, like a greyhound, the “Connie”
was big for its day and had long range. The US Navy had
stuck a shark fin on its back and a squat dome on its belly
with radars inside, called it the EC-121M Warning Star,
and used it to spy on other countries.
On a cold January day in 1969 one of the Navy’s Warning
Stars turned south over the Sea of Japan as the pilot slammed
his throttles forward and tried to coax every bit of power
he could out of the aging propeller-driven airplane. The
plane had been on a routine mission, known as Beggar Shadow,
to intercept North Korean radar and communications transmissions.
But now the pilot was fleeing for safety from two North
Korean MiG fighters that had been scrambled to intercept
it, even though the plane was far out in international waters.
The MiGs caught the Navy plane over a hundred kilometers
from the North Korean coast and fired their cannons to blast
it out of the sky. In a double stroke of bad luck, the Warning
Star had carried a second crew for training, a total of
31 men, and they all died that day. The shootdown was proof,
for those who had forgotten the lesson, that signals intelligence
collection could be a very dangerous job indeed.
Such aircraft shootdowns were not uncommon during the Cold
War. Neither were other incidents at sea that placed humans
who were trying to gather sensitive signals at risk. But
by the time of the Warning Star attack, satellites had increasingly
taken over the duty of collecting the signals emitted by
Soviet and other radars. The Warning Star attack helped
to spur the Navy toward further development of its own signals
intelligence satellite system, known as POPPY. Only now,
over four decades later, is POPPY’s history slowly
being revealed. |
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