The CIA took spy photos of almost every part of Hungary in the 1960s – now you can check them out for free!

This is the most special content one can check for free on Mapire, Arcanum’s mapping service. The CIA took photos of almost every part of Hungary in the 1960s. In 2016, the Interspect Research Group put together those photos and formed a map, which is now available to everybody for free.

The map was put together from several hundreds of panorama photos taken from space, thanks to the work of a dozen people for over a month, Index reported. The world did not know about the existence of such photos until their classification was lifted in 1995. This is, of course, understandable since in the 1960s, Hungary was a part of the Communist block led by the Soviet Union, the main antagonist of the USA and its allies.

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The first satellite intelligence collection program in the USA was the Corona, run under the pseudonym Discoverer. This was followed by Argon, Lanyard, Gambit, and the Hexagon from 1959 to 1972, and the results provided the United States with many advantages in the Cold War. Interestingly, Corona satellites were the first ones in the world gathering information from space, and one of them was

the first human-made object that was able to come back from space safely. 

This was important because the CIA somehow had to get back the negatives taken from the satellites. Therefore, they were able to find out where the rocket silos, the secret industrial plants, and other important military objects were located.

So, the engineers of General Electric designed a capsule that could get loose from the satellite and was able to bear the high temperatures caused by the atmospheric friction while returning to Earth. Finally, specially designed planes, the C-119 and C-130 of

the American Air Force, intercepted the capsules.

The Corona program was very successful because the 145 satellites launched from the Vandenberg military base could send back more than 800 thousand photos taken mostly from the Soviet Union, China, and members of the Communist block. The quality of the photos was very good from 1967. If the atmospherical circumstances were ideal, the resolution was only 2 metres, and this is how, for example, the photos of Hungary were taken at the end of the 1960s.

The classification of the program was lifted by President Bill Clinton in 1995, and the original photos can be seen on the website of USGS’s EarthExplorer. It was hard to put together the photos to form a map, but according to the experts, the product is

not only interesting for historians, but it can also be used for geographical, geological, climate change-related, and biodiversity research.

Source: index.hu