This summer, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) moved to all digital imagery after the agency finished the June processing of the final two miles of wet film from the KA-80 Optical Bar Camera (OBC), used by reconnaissance aircraft and satellites for nearly 70 years for precision, wide area synoptic coverage of the Earth.
Itek Corp., which eventually became Goodrich Corp., built OBC.
“That platform still reminds us of the enormity of our tasking,” NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said of OBC in a brief interview on Oct. 19 after a GEOINT awards ceremony and OBC forum at NGA headquarters in Springfield, Va. “OBC was remarkable for the width of the scan it provided and the opportunity to gain precision and context. There are new agile, commercial ways to exploit imagery, but the principle of precise and contextual imagery remains the same.”
Pentagon officials have said that the U.S. Space Force and intelligence community (IC) will increasingly use commercial imagery so that DoD and the IC are able to focus the use of their “exquisite” systems and let commercial imagery fill in any gaps. An increasing use of commercial imagery means NGA will continue its role of establishing a hierarchy of imagery needs among combatant commands, while also expanding the agency’s connections with industry to ensure companies are able to meet those needs.
Carrying OBC over the years were the SR-71 Blackbird and the U-2 Dragon Lady aircraft, and spy satellites, including Hexagon.
On June 24 last year, a 309th Reconnaissance Wing U-2 out of Beale AFB, Calif. flew the last OBC mission out of the base. RTX’s [RTX] Collins Aerospace has helped Beale AFB’s 9th Intelligence Squadron in downloading OBC imagery from global U-2 missions, the Air Force said after the last Beale mission last June. The service added that the OBC mission, “which captures daylight acquisition of high-altitude photographs, will transition to forward operating locations” at combatant commands supported by the NGA.
“This move allows processors to consolidate film closer to mission-required reconnaissance collection,” the Air Force said at the time.
OBC processing stemmed from a covert partnership in 1955 between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Eastman Kodak in Rochester, N.Y.
In the summer of 1962 just before the October Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA had received human intelligence (HUMINT) of Soviet missile placement on the island. CIA Director John McCone wanted reconnaissance to verify or disprove the HUMINT and needed a higher resolution camera than the one then used by the U-2.
While CORONA carried such a high-resolution camera, its weight would cause the U-2 to have to fly significantly lower and put it in danger of downing by surface to air missiles. Analysts at the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), created a year earlier in one of Dwight Eisenhower’s last acts as president, told McCone it would take six months to develop such a camera.
“You’ve got two weeks,” McCone told them, according to CIA historian David Welker, who spoke at the NGA OBC forum.
OBC soon helped verify the HUMINT on the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In the 1970s, OBC helped map the moon at a resolution of six feet for NASA’s Apollo 15-17 missions and began monitoring the Middle East ceasefire for Operation OLIVE HARVEST.
In addition, OBC provided imagery for more than 30 years to verify international compliance with the 1992 Open Skies Treaty, and, in 1995, imagery from OBC-equipped U-2s showed the mass graves of Muslims murdered by Bosnian Serbs.
In the 1990s, Kodak phased out its covert processing, as digital technology took the forefront, and long roll, wet film processing moved under the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center (DIAC), the headquarters of the Defense Intelligence Agency at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Washington, D.C.
“In 2002, organizational control of the film processing mission transferred to the NGA with the mission continuing to operate out of the DIAC lab for another nine years,” according to NGA. “Throughout this time, the NGA film processing team maintained an active mission roster that included support to Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. After OBC film was processed by NGA at the DIAC lab, a duplicate copy was sent to NGA-Arnold [in St. Louis] for exploitation. NGA also maintained a hard film library at DIA, which included each mission’s original negative from which all OBC photo-intelligence originated.”
NPIC became the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) in 1996, and NIMA became the NGA upon the enactment of the fiscal 2004 National Defense Authorization Act on Nov. 24, 2003.
Imagery from OBC aided humanitarian response to Hurricane Katrina in 2006 and to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011, and, in 2014, OBC photos helped reveal ISIS’ isolation of the Yazidi religious minority on Iraq’s Mount Sinjar. Images from OBC-equipped U-2s also aided U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa.
In 2021, after more than 30 years at DIAC, OBC film processing returned to Rochester where NGA processed wet film at an L3Harris Technologies [LHX] plant.
After the last flight out of Beale of an OBC-carrying U-2 on June 24 last year, “NGA’s facility became the last in-house Department of Defense Intelligence Community film processing operation in existence,” NGA said. “In its final years, the OBC mission narrowed to providing vital imagery enabling continued American support of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. In 2023, NGA’s wet film processing lab in Rochester was retired. While this marked the end of an era, the film captured by the OBC will continue to serve national security needs for years to come.”
NGA continued to use the camera even after Beale retired use of the OBC for its U-2s in June of last year, the agency said.
“The very last OBC mission ever flown was March 2023, and NGA processed the film in June 2023,” NGA said. “The six week delay in processing the film was due to transit of the film from a forward location to Rochester.”