The Falcon and the Snowman by Robert Lindsey

Union, China and other countries. Cameras carried in the satellites could photograph missile bases, airfields, submarine pens, harbors and other defense installations from a hundred miles or more in space with such clarity that they could pinpoint a single man walking alone on a vast desert. Sensors in the satellites were not blinded by the dark; radar eyes and heat-sensing infrared sensors penetrated clouds and dark skies and made photos almost as sharp as those made during a clear day by normal cameras.
    The espionage bureaucracy of which Chris had become a part was officially invisible because the United States did not admit it existed. Thousands of people worked on this national program to gather strategic intelligence information, each with a special security clearance more exclusive than Top Secret, and with special security apparatus designed solely for the satellite systems to ensure that Russian agents or spies of other countries couldn’t penetrate it. Men and women assigned to the operation were forbidden to admit to anyone without a similar clearance—including their wives and husbands—that they worked on the program or, indeed, that such satellite surveillance even occurred. There were occasional discreet official references to some of the agencies that were involved in the operation, such as the National Reconnaissance Office or the Committee of 40, a group of senior government officials with authority to order espionage operations and plan satellite missions. But such mentions were rare and usually purposefully opaque. It was the position of the CIA that in an era when annihilation of the United States was potentially only minutes away—the time it would take for a fusillade of nuclear missiles to lunge from Russia, arc through the fringes of space and rain H-bombs on America—no intelligence operation was more vital than the satellite patrols in space, because they enabled the National Security Council and the President to maintain minute-by-minute surveillance of Soviet military operations and preparations for war and, hopefully, prevent a surprise attack. (The satellite eyes were not turned off after they passed over the Soviet and Chinese borders; indeed, they could—and did—take photos of activities in any country of interest to the NSC.)
    A new breed of spy—a robot in space—had been created, and Chris was now about to help operate it from the earth.
    There were essentially three components in the national satellite intelligence-collection system that, to enhance secrecy, were narrowly compartmentalized so that specialists working in one area wouldn’t, under normal circumstances, have access to secrets involving the other elements. One component was assigned to build and operate the satellites; the second was responsible for collecting and initially processing the data (the “product” in CIA parlance) sent to earth by the satellites; the third was a massive, on-the-ground program to analyze the data to measure their military, economic or political significance. There were more than a dozen different types of satellites, each with its own project code name, mission and method of operating; each system might have three or four or more different satellites peering down from space at any one time, each sending back “product” for analysis. The code name that was applied to encompass the extraordinarily tight security procedures for all of these different systems was “Byeman.”
    During the briefing, Chris smiled after Rogers kept referring to the satellites as “birds.” The word was like a switch. It made his thoughts drift as if they had been lifted up on the wings of his falcon with its darting eyes that could spot a rabbit trying to find shade beneath the flimsy shadow of a desert cactus; and then he thought of the satellite: men watching men using eyes in space. It was Big Brother, a 1984 world. A “byeman” is a man who