Dan Snow's History Hit - Spies in the Sky

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Spy balloons are really blowing up right now. The US has shot down one confirmed Chinese balloon and has engaged several other unidentified flying objects. But like so many things we cover on this podcast, it's an old method in a new outfit. Spy balloons for reconnaissance go back all the way to the French Revolution and pop up again in the American Civil War.To talk through the history of spying from the sky, Dan is joined on the podcast by the curator at the International Spy Museum Dr Andrew Hammond who also hosts their podcast Spycast. They discuss the ideas that have taken off and the ones that haven't... including pigeons with cameras, drones disguised as dragonflies and satellites in outer space.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and mixed by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Everyone's talking balloons at the moment. The US military has shot down one confirmed Chinese balloon and has engaged several other unidentified flying objects, which may or may not be balloons. This story, although when I first heard it I thought it might be a bit of hot air, no, it's really blown up. As ever, you come to this podcast to remind you that what seems new is in fact very, very old. In the 18th century, building on the work of Robert Boyle, it was proposed that if you could fill a balloon with hydrogen, it would be lighter than the air surrounding it, thus would rise into the air. In the 1780s, Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers constructed airtight gas bags.

They filled these bags with hydrogen that was made by pouring sulfuric acid onto a big old pile of scrap iron. The hydrogen was then fed into the bags using lead pipes, and sure enough, it lifted off the ground. This particular balloon, it was in August 1783, flew for about 45 minutes and it landed around about 15 miles away where local peasants obviously were completely terrified and attacked it with pitchforks and knives, destroying it. Certainly a lot cheaper than firing an air-to-air missile from an F-22. About a month later, the Montgolfier brothers stuck a long-suffering sheep and a rooster in a balloon and made sure that it was safe to fly for humans before taking to the air themselves

in late 1783. It was the beginning of human flight. And as happens every time humans make a new discovery, militarization came quickly after. My favorite kind of trick pub quiz question is, in which war did we see humans take to the air for the first time? The kind of first primitive air force. And the answer is the French Revolutionary War of the late 18th century. Now to find out more about this and the entire history of the balloon from beginning to end, the rise and fall and rise again and fall again of the balloon, I've got a fantastic guest. He is Dr. Andrew Hammond. He's a historian. He's a curator at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC and he's the host of their podcast Spycast which you've got to go and

check out. He's a wonderful man. He was in photo reconnaissance in the ref before entering the museum so he's seen it all he's a legend he's just the man we need to talk to to get some context for these chinese spy balloons enjoy no black white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Andrew, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. Absolutely, it's a pleasure to be here, Dan. Balloon technology is a lot older than people think, isn't it? Take me back to the beginning.

Okay, absolutely. Yeah, it's quite fascinating because the story in the news recently, when I saw it, the very first place that my mind went to was our exhibit on seeing at the International Spy Museum in Washington. So we have this exhibit that basically looks at the development of aerial platforms for gathering intelligence. And one of the earliest ones is the balloon. So I think it's 1783, a couple of French brothers came up with this idea. They have a balloon. I think it ends up going up to several thousand feet. Not long after that, so that's 1783, 1789, the French Revolution, then 1794, the Battle of Fleurs. If you actually look at the order of battle, Dan, for the Battle of Fleurs, you know, normally it's

so many soldiers, such and such amount of cavalry, so much artillery, a balloon is actually listed in the order of battle for the French revolutionary forces. So a balloon gets used in that battle. This is the very early days, of course. But interestingly, that balloon is doing a very, very similar job. Like that balloon is not there to drop bombs and shoot people and project violence. That balloon is there, like these more recent balloons, to gather intelligence, right? Absolutely, absolutely. And a good example of this is, so these platforms can be used for a variety of different purposes. So let's think about the modern era drones. So drones were originally used for seeing, to see what was happening. Then someone thought maybe they could listen to,

maybe they could hear what was going on. Maybe they could pick up on signals intelligence instead of just imagery intelligence. And then what if we attached missiles to it? So you're right with the balloons at the very beginning, it was, we can see further, we can see what's going on. beginning it was we can see further we can see what's going on so if you think about it in the history of armed conflict for example for the vast majority of human history for Caesar for Alexander for Napoleon the way that you could see what the enemy was up to was by sending out cavalry doing some reconnaissance but what are the advantages and disadvantages of that well the cavalry if you find out where the enemy is you're not getting the full shape you're not getting the contours of the army you're only getting a data from a very specific point sure you may send out a variety of cavalry to try to get a sense of this but if you're up in the air

and you can see for miles and miles on a good day you can get a good sense of what size is the army that's coming towards us when are they going to get here what roads are they traveling down are there any natural things that we can do to block their advance or to slow down their advance. So it may seem very analog to us in our digital age, but if you think about it for military, for a general, how great would it be if you could see for 30 miles and see what the enemy was up to? So it was a real revolution at the time. What's so weird though, isn't it? That actually, as we see throughout history, sometimes the technology is almost,

it's almost too cutting edge because what strikes me about those early french revolutionary war balloons is you know you don't get napoleon and wellington using them later on indeed like a balloon above the battlefield of waterloo would have been a war with a battle winning technique for napoleon potentially like sorry about the pun it doesn't really take off does it until a bit later on yes i like the pun um It doesn't really take off until later but in the history of intelligence and espionage you see this quite often. There's a proto version, there's an embryonic early version. The technology's not worked out properly, some things don't function, it's very difficult to scale up, it's very difficult to replicate. things don't function, it's very difficult to scale up, it's very difficult to replicate.

So as we go into the 19th century, we see the evolution of the balloon and its use as an aerial reconnaissance platform. I think it's 1824, Michael Faraday, famous scientist, he makes an advance in balloon technology and the Chinese balloon to bring it up to the present day it may in some senses be very similar to the ones from the French revolution but in another way it's going to be equipped with all kinds of modern technological marvels so it's not your great great great great granddaddy's blend it's something that's a bit more up to date and it's probably using algorithms and so forth to help it make sense of the world and to help it go in to date and it's probably using algorithms and so forth to help it make sense of the world and to help it go in particular directions so it's really really fascinating. Balloon technology when does it next emerge it proves a bit too much Napoleon and the rest of

them get rid of it when does it next appear on the battlefield? Yeah so one of the main places that ends up and where the technology gets developed further is during the American Civil War. In our exhibit on seeing, this is one of the things that we speak about. So if you think about the geography of Washington, D.C., it's the capital of the United States. It's where Abraham Lincoln has the government set up. But just across the river is Virginia, which is where the capital of the Confederacy is. It's where Robert E. Lee comes from. It's where many of the generals from the Confederacy come from. And then Southern Maryland, which is also not far away, that's sympathetic to the Confederacy,

even though Maryland's actually part of the Union. So Abraham Lincoln is very worried that Washington DC is going to be captured, that it's going to be taken over. And of course, even for morale, that's quite a big deal. You don't want that to happen. So this gentleman called Thaddeus Lowe, he basically gives Lincoln a demonstration of the utility of balloons on the National Mall, so America's main street basically. And he gives it quite fittingly at the site of the current Air and Space Museum. And Abraham Lincoln, British red guy, he sees that this has got some good use for the Civil War. So a balloon up over DC, you could probably see 50 miles in a good day and just survey the territory around you. It's not the silver bullet, of course, but it's one way to

just try to protect the capital city and try to make sure that the Union ends up with eventual victory. Thaddeus Lowe, he becomes the chief aeronaut of the Union army. There's some other interesting developments that we see. Some people have said that the world's first aircraft carrier can be traced back to the US Civil War. And if you think about it, most of these early balloons were attached to the ground via cables. But if you think of a ship going up and down the Potomac or going up and down the Mississippi River, if you attach balloons to that, all of a sudden you've got a mobile surveillance platform that can see for miles and miles and you can take it down the river or up the river. So I do hear what you're saying. If you look at the Civil War, it's not like, you know, when you see these paintings, there's balloons everywhere. I think it's more just a technology that they're figuring out.

They're trying to find ways to implement it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But it's part of the story that brings us up to the Chinese balloon, which is up there at 60,000 feet and traveling slowly over the United States. 60 000 feet and traveling slowly over the united states and then we go from lighter than air flight which is the balloons are full of gas which is lighter than the atmosphere around them to heavier than air we get to manned aircraft but we go via kites don't we bizarrely i mean we humans we're so ingenious we tried every single way imaginable getting in the air and getting that vantage point we really have even going back to the drawings of leonardo da vinci you know he had some ideas about how this could happen way before the technology managed to catch up so what's really fascinating to me dan is that for most of human history for millennia what's the best way that you could see? So it would be climbing up a tree,

going up a hill or a mountain, trying to look into the distance. So that is the case for millennia. And then in the modern period, we just see such profound technological change. We go from the balloons to the kites. Then in World War I, the world's first air force, the Royal Air Force, comes into being on the 1st of April 1918. In a former life, I was actually in the RAF and I spent a period of time in photographic intelligence. And we used to have this quote up in our darkroom that said, I hope none of you gentlemen are foolish enough to think that aircraft can be used for reconnaissance purposes. There's only one good way to get reconnaissance and that's by the use of cavalry. I can't remember what general it was, but it was one of the first

world war generals. So there was this idea that that's the only way to get reconnaissance, but then they're embraced as a way to try to figure out what's going on. Pigeons, they also attempt to use pigeons in the First World War, try to get a sense of what's going on. The actual first use of an aircraft for aerial reconnaissance was in 1911 in a war that almost nobody has heard of called the Italo-Turkish War. Then it's used in World War I. And of course, in World War II, it's more sophisticated. So we see all of these ingenious ways to try to break out of the limitations. So gravity's holding us down.

How do we break out of that? Technology helps us break out of that. And then, of course, the next question is, how can this be used for seeing what other people are up to and the photography thing's interesting right because then as you were developing photos in that darkroom in the 1890s they tried to attach these cameras to kites i think didn't they and then after that they try to attach cameras to pigeons they really really did we have a model pigeon with one of the cameras

that would have been used attached to it. So again, it's what can go up in the air. In one sense, the French Revolutionary War, the Civil War, it's seeing what you can see with your own eyes. Cameras come along, and then of course, that's great, but the exposure time,

so the amount of time the lens would have to stay open, would be quite long initially so you would need a stable platform and a balloon or a pigeon are not particularly stable and of course the technology develops and advances and and it allows you to do different things so in one sense one variable is the height or the platform another variable is well what can you do from that platform how sophisticated is the camera what can you capture and of course in the modern era you can capture things from outer space or from 60 or 70 000 feet so the available technology in terms of photography is another conditioning factor in the history of all of this, which

I think is really, really fascinating. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking about spy balloons. More after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. I've heard amazing stories from the First World War where you'd have observers in blue because of course then these things become targets in their own right don't they you realize that they have a intelligence gathering purpose and they become targets so you try and shoot them down and and these First World War balloons would get shot down and the crews in there would sort of bail out with parachutes on wouldn't they and then go up the same afternoon and do it again I mean it's unbelievable yeah it's pretty incredible it reminds me of this one story that I read of a fighter pilot and the Battle of Britain and he came down on a field in southern England he came across a couple that were having a picnic in the

English countryside they invited him over they had a picnic together and then he went back to his base and later on that day he was back up in the sky so I think it's pretty incredible when you think of this what people just like you and I done in the past so one of the things that I love about history Dan is it's just it's very humbling to me just to think about there for the grace of God go I no one came along and asked us what era we wanted to be born into, what family, what country. We're just dropped into the world. We try to make sense of it. And there were people that came before us that just done really incredible things and were incredibly

brave. And to me, it's very, very humbling. We are very lucky that we were not aviators in the First World War and many other things besides. It was an incredibly dangerous thing. But it's worth remembering, isn't it, that again, all of those early aviators, the job of those aircraft was reconnaissance. It was only when they started taking it upon themselves to fire with their sidearm, their pistol, take a rifle up, that that introduced aerial combat. They were initially just there to spot the enemy's intentions and did so very effectively outside Paris. In the beginning of the war in 1914, perhaps arguably, aircraft made decisive intervention in the First Battle of Marne before Paris,

helping to stop the German juggernaut at the gates of the French capital. Yeah, absolutely. And the example I gave earlier of the drones, I think, is another way to think about this. So initially it's for imagery intelligence, then it's signals intelligence, then it's as an offensive platform. And I think you see something similar with aircraft. Initially, well, we can go up in the sky, we can see what the other side are up to. So as you say, initially for for intelligence gathering but then it evolves and of course by the time we get to world war ii there's a pretty settled pattern where you have fighters bombers you have transport aircraft it begins to differentiate but you're right if you trace it all

back these are some of the purposes that it was used for and when you mentioned paris there it reminds me of this great quote from winston churchill in his history of the purposes that it was used for. And when you mentioned Paris there, it reminds me of this great quote from Winston Churchill in his history of the First World War. And he says something like, four times in a hundred years, the towers of Notre Dame have seen the flash of the Prussian guns and heard the thunder of our cannonhead. Yeah, that's just something that comes to mind,

but you're right. It all can be traced back to imagery intelligence if you've done photo reconnaissance for the RAF you'll know about the ability of the Brits to take three-dimensional photographs in the second world war and the huge advantage that gave the Brits in analyzing German defenses and military installation that industrial installations and everything I mean we've been on this mad journey haven't we from those earliest days of photography through to the present, where goodness knows what information they're able to track. Take me through some of those other stages into the Second World

War, the Cold War. What have you been able to do from these aerial vehicles? So we get to the end of the Second World War, as you say, aerial reconnaissance, it gets worked out it gets refined during this period then we come up to the cold war we have the invention of jet engines which changes the game means that aircraft can go faster eventually they can start going higher but let's just walk forward into the cold war so the berlin airlift this is a great use of transportation aircraft but then if we're just thinking about intelligence eyes in the sky we have the invention of the jet engine

then in the 1950s one of the problems with trying to do intelligence against the Soviet Union was it was a totalitarian state it was a police state so if you're an intelligence officer there under diplomatic cover, you're going to have KGB counter surveillance officers following you

everywhere. Again, it's a police state. It's a very difficult place to do human intelligence operations. So one of the things that you can do is to try to circumvent some of those disadvantages by using technical intelligence. Well, what if we can send a plane so high up in the sky, it can capture intelligence and it can't be shot down? So this is where the U-2 aircraft comes from. So just to put it in context, your average aircraft, when you jump on British Airways or American Airlines, that's going to around 35,000 feet. The U-2 is double that, it's around 70,000 feet. So the U-2 comes about through the necessity of the Cold War. It goes up there, the assumption on which it's based that it can't be shot down, as we know, turned out to be false.

Francis Gary Powers is shot down, we know turned out to be false. Francis Gary Powers is shot down. There's later a spy exchange. So we have the U2, then the successor to the U2, the SR-71. So this can go faster and higher than the U2. It's more commonly known as the Blackbird. So we're doing incredible things with this technology we're sending it higher we're making it go faster we're putting it over denied areas and then of course if we go up to the next level and this comes through even in the james bond movies satellites so outer space we have things up there that can see down and planet earth what's going on and the satellites it can depend on the type of satellite some of them rotate around the earth in a particular way

some of them rotate around the earth in a different way that can affect what they collect how durable they stay over a particular era etc so satellites are a really fascinating part of this story and just to go back to your early point about human ingenuity just think about that in the space of a couple of hundred years we go from balloons we go from these very old school ways of getting up in the sky to things that are literally in outer space looking down on earth so to me it's just incredible and it's a testament to the ingenuity and inventiveness of our species but of course the other side of that is that all of this gets used for the subsequent wars that have taken place since then really really fascinating history and it's not just the ingenuity of the satellites themselves

in the early days didn't they used to how do you get the film down from the satellites it's extraordinary in the 1960s the corona satellite program basically the film would be jettisoned from the sky and an aircraft would come along and scoop it up take it down to earth so that it could be developed. I believe that they never missed a single film. So it's pretty incredible how they managed to do this stuff. And you also bring up a good point. Until quite recently, for film, it was a particular type of technology. You would have to get the film. You'd have to develop it.

You'd have to print it out on the other side. And of course now now with digital photography that changes the game completely that is something that's another revolution so we always see all of these changes not just in what platforms can go in the air but what can they do while they're in their air how can they gather intelligence another thing developed during the cold war dragonfly drones they They're so amazing, those little dragonfly drones. So quite a lot of the technology that we use came from research and development from the Cold War. Sometimes that was straight up military, sometimes that was

intelligence. So in the 1970s we have the development of a dragonfly drone so dragonflies because of the way that they're built are almost the best approximation of what you can do to try to get a tiny little thing in the air and to have it fly around when compared to say a bird or a mosquito so dragonflies were seen as a sweet spot in nature that could be replicated by intelligence agencies. So the United States comes up with one, the dragonfly drone. The Soviet Union copy it

in something called the insecticopter. And we see this play out for the rest of the Cold War. We see it up until the present day. Recreational drones, how large are they? How small are they? Who did they get used by? And then, of course, they have crossover uses because the current war in Ukraine, I believe there was a small boy with his father,

and they sent a recreational drone up over a Russian armor column, fed the latitude and longitude back to the Ukrainian military, and they then used their offensive weaponry to take out a lot of this Russian column. So this is just a kid wanting to play with a drone, going back to things like the Dragonfly drone. It's something you put up in the sky.

You can move around in different ways. You can gather intelligence, or you can have some fun with it or you can do a little bit of both or you can go back to we've gathered intelligence using a recreational drone to have an effect on this war in ukraine that's taking place so i think it's just like so fascinating we could speak for another 10 hours about it but i don't think there's any 10 hour podcasts out there not yet buddy not yet and i guess that brings us back to good old balloons i mean it's the balloons what started

it and now it looks like the latest technology is again the balloons that's the extraordinary cyclical nature of these things can you come up with any ideas as to why we're reaching again for these balloons my guess would be that for all of these platforms that I've been speaking about, balloons, kites, pigeons, aircraft, satellites, drones, there's pros and cons for every one of them. Sometimes the pros outweigh the cons, and sometimes vice versa. So if you think about the pigeon, the cons outweigh the pros, vice versa. So if we think about the pigeon, the cons outweigh the pros because the pigeon banks, it changes direction, it's very difficult to make sense of all the imagery afterwards. If we think about say an aircraft, well they can go pretty fast, they can go overhead but some of

the cons are well you need a lot of fuel to get them to where they need to be and they have to keep going. You know it's like that notion of a shark having to keep swimming it's not like they can stop it's not a helicopter with the satellites they can get a lot up there but there's certain things that they can't get or I believe that the satellites don't provide continual coverage of every part of the United States constantly just because of the way that they rotate around the Earth. So if you think about it, balloons can help to fill in some of those gaps. That would be my assumption, just based on the history of this stuff. I think another thing to think about is the balloon.

It gives you what's called an intelligence, a degree of plausible deniability. So if you've got a Chinese military aircraft up there with a Chinese pilot in it, that's completely different. If that's up there or if that gets shot down, then that's your crossing a Rubicon in many respects. But if it's a balloon, it allows you to play a game that is quite common in the history

of intelligence and espionage which is that there's one thing that one side says is something and the other side says it's something else so with a balloon you can continue to do that we see this with this example the Chinese said it's a civilian weather balloon what's the problem and the Secretary of State here in the United States Secretary Blinken he said we know it's a spy balloon we know what it's doing but the balloon allows enough grey for there to be a well what is it is it A or is it B but if it's a Chinese military aircraft then there's no debate it just does a Chinese military aircraft and of course each of them being shot down have very different consequences and what is one of the world's most important bilateral relationships what America and China

do and how they relate to each other has effects on all of us just because of the type of world we live in it's true enough Andrew it's their world we're just living in it Andrew people listening to this will have a sense of the kind of world we live in. It's true enough, Andrew. It's their world. We're just living in it. Andrew, people listening to this will have a sense of the kind of stories you cover in your podcast, The Great Spycast, which is where we first stumble across you. But tell everyone what they can expect from listening to your pod.

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for asking. So we try to do what you do just in a slightly different way. We try to educate, inform, and occasionally entertain people all about the history, the past, the present, and the future of intelligence and espionage. But the vast majority of what we've done is historical.

So one thing I love about history, and about spy history particularly, is that there's just humdingers of stories. There's just amazing stories. So the history of espionage has tons of them. So we have episodes on the Rosenbergs, on the Cambridge spy ring, on the spies during the Revolutionary War in the United States, on all kinds of things you can possibly think about.

So all things that people that listen to AstroHit, I think would be interested in. Well, thank you so much. That was great, Andrew. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you. you