The Sunday Times December 26, 2004
Dad's Army runs rings round CIA stealth satellites
By Tony Allen-Mills, Washington
EVERY time Michael Waterman picks up his binoculars and potters into his Hampshire garden to scan the night sky, the Pentagon and the CIA are praying he doesn't spot anything.
Waterman, a retired computer programmer who used to work for Marconi, the British electronics company, belongs to an informal global "Dad's Army" of ageing amateur sky-watchers whose hobby has emerged as an improbable threat to a $9.5 billion US intelligence-gathering operation based on "stealth" spy satellites.
The highly skilled group of between 15 and 20 British, North American and other civilian observers exchange data on military and intelligence satellites.
"I've been watching satellites since my schooldays in 1958," Waterman, 64, said last week. "Go out on a clear, dark night and you'll see them every few minutes."
Much harder to find are the heavily disguised reconnaissance satellites that belong to one of America's most secret intelligence programmes. To the US government's consternation, however, the group succeeded in spotting the first US stealth satellite, codenamed Misty, soon after its launch during the first Gulf war.
Designed to be invisible from Earth, Misty was spotted by Russell Eberst, a Scottish space buff whose observations helped other members of the group calculate the satellite's orbit. The group, whose average age is 62, repeated the trick several years later, when Misty's orbit was found to have changed. An elaborate game of cat and outer-space mouse has been going on ever since.
The group's activities have attracted renewed attention in the wake of a rare leak of classified information about the Misty programme. The US Justice Department is investigating complaints that members of a Senate intelligence committee revealed details of a secret Congressional debate on the financing of a new generation of spy satellites.
Senators opposed to the programme have argued that such craft are too expensive and of little use in the war against terror, which increasingly relies on old-fashioned human intelligence. Nor is it clear that stealth technology can reliably evade the binoculars of Waterman and Eberst.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the amateurs have aroused mixed reactions from the governments whose secrets they expose. "Some officials have expressed respect for our technical capability," said Ted Molczan, a Canadian who at 51 claims to be the "spring chicken" of the group.
"People on the intelligence side of things hate our guts."
Some analysts believe the group may be doing the Pentagon a favour. John Pike, a prominent US defence expert, said:. "They may actually be enabling us to understand what is easily in reach of (hostile) observers."
Copyright © 2004 The Washington Post Company
