Bridgehead: Eastman Kodak Company's Covert Photoreconnaissance Film Processing Program

The success of the Cold War photo-reconnaissance missions during the pre-digital age of the 20th century, was dependent on the magic of photochemistry. The core of that magic—with its latent images, silver halide crystals, gelatin, acetate, and ESTAR—was located in a highly secretive film processing and camera development facility, run by Kodak, and operated behind the cover name of Bridgehead. Six former Kodak employees—Dick Stowe, Don Schoessler, Dick Sherwood, Joe Russo, Tom Havens, and Rand Warner—engineering managers who worked behind the Bridgehead security curtain, have documented their recollections of what that facility did and how it supported photographic missions of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). This book, Bridgehead: Eastman Kodak Company’s Covert Photoreconnaissance Film Processing Program, is the second unclassified story in our series, In the Words of Those Who Served.This book, from the perspective of participant observers, tells the history of Bridgehead’s most critical support efforts in early years of national reconnaissance. Both airborne and satellite photoreconnaissance programs became essential sources of intelligence by the early 1960s, and it was Bridgehead that converted the film of those reconnaissance missions into a source for imagery intelligence. First there were the U-2, A-12, and SR-71 high altitude aircraft platforms. For a time, the U-2 proved a reliable means for collecting badly needed photoreconnaissance, but the downing of the Francis Gary Powers’ piloted U-2 in May 1960 brought to a close the use of high altitude aircraft for collecting intelligence over the Soviet Union. In parallel to the high altitude aircraft, the United States defense and intelligence communities actively were developing satellites for collecting intelligence. The CIA and the Air Force launched and operated the nation’s first successful photoreconnaissance satellite, known as Corona. The authors tell much of their story within the context of the Corona program.