Despite Thaw, U.S. Continues ‘Hosing’ of Soviet Satellites

Lasers fired from ground-based facilities in Hawaii are being bounced off Soviet spy satellites in what some critics say is a deliberate attempt to temporarily disrupt or “blind” the Soviet spacecraft--a violation of longstanding public U.S. policy.

But other U.S. scientists and government officials say the effort is simply a harmless range-finding exercise designed to collect intelligence about the high-flying spacecraft.

BACKGROUND: Despite the political sea change in the Soviet Union, Soviet satellites still try to observe the launches of U.S. missiles from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The satellites are “hosed,” or illuminated, by laser beams from ground-based facilities at Maui and Oahu and from a facility at Cloudcroft, N. M., according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Soviet satellites that regularly overfly Hawaii to peek at Pearl Harbor and other military facilities also are being illuminated, these sources said.

Air Force officials described the U.S. targeting of Soviet satellites by lasers as “mild hosings,” directed mainly at Soviet craft trying to observe the launching of U.S. missiles. They said lasers are used only “for range-finding purposes,” not to blind sensors.

But other U.S. intelligence sources--including Angelo Codevilla, space expert and former chief staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee--said they believe that U.S. lasers have been trained on Soviet satellites to disrupt their infrared equipment, a violation of the U.S.-Soviet Offensive Forces Act of 1972, a side letter to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty of that year.

Codevilla claims the U.S. activity is being done in response to much more severe Soviet “attacks” on U.S. satellites that began in the mid-1970s.

Ray Hill, a former chief of the Air Force’s Electronic Systems Division, which works with several classified U.S. space programs, said the Soviet Union regularly “pulses,” or targets--and has possibly damaged--super-sophisticated American spy satellites deployed to monitor missile and spacecraft launches at the major Soviet space center at Tyuratam.

John Pike, senior space analyst for the Washington-based American Federation of Scientists, said the two Hawaii facilities regularly use ground-based lasers to illuminate Soviet satellites. He added: “It’s the line of work they’re in.”

In Washington, D.C., Air Force spokesman Capt. Marty Hauser said the United States has never tried to permanently damage Soviet equipment and said the Maui and Oahu facilities are not weapons because their beams are not powerful enough.

However, Hauser said such disruptions are technically possible, depending on the power used by the laser, and the amount of time the instrument “paints,” or illuminates, the satellite.

Codevilla, currently senior research associate at the California-based Hoover Institution, agreed that U.S. illuminations were not intended to cause permanent damage.

But a former Hughes Aircraft vice president, Richard Freeman, said that the Cloudcroft facility has tried to damage Soviet craft and possesses a “full anti-satellite capability. If we didn’t succeed, it was because the equipment wasn’t powerful enough, not because we didn’t try.”

Air Force officials acknowledged that the New Mexico facility possessed a full anti-satellite capability, but declined further comment.

ANOTHER OPTION: Air Force and U.S. intelligence officials said a more effective technique for disrupting Soviet satellite observations is to use instantaneous computerized interferences, called jamming “in real time.”

“Stepping electronically in between a signal being transmitted by a satellite to its ground station is a much better way of blinding it than trying to damage the equipment,” one official said.

An agreement to head off provocative military maneuvers, or actions, has been signed by the two countries, but a prohibition on using lasers on each other’s satellites, whether to try to damage them or to simply upset sensors, is “conspicuously missing--it’s a huge loophole,” Pike said.