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Mambo to Moscow. When everything clicks just right, when due allowance is made for speed and altitude, and no excessive vibration gets through to the cameras, the pictures show incredible detail In stereoscopic shots, everything seems to take on new clarity in three dimensions—boltheads, men's faces, footprints in the dirt. Said one photo expert, "You can't quite see the pencils in the guys' shirt pockets. The airborne cameras are usually long gone before anything at the target can be hidden away. The plane flies faster than the sound of its own approach and it is too low to be spotted by radar' Men on the scene do not know that their pictures have been taken until the plane is gone and its trailing shock wave has hit them.
While airborne cameras are crisscrossing Cuba, more dignified electronic snooper planes circle the island. Some, with their bulky radar antennas, look like a fish that has just swallowed a turtle but their sensitive radar pictures sometimes reveal things that photographs miss. Other snoopers are loaded with electronic black boxes" that can record every electronic signal emanating from Cuba—from mambo music to messages for Moscow. No ground-based radar can search the sky without being recorded. Even hand-carried walkie-talkies can be heard by the bug ears in the sky.
Taking pictures of Cuba today is a relatively leisurely business, butunder actual war conditions, information about the enemy is needed as quickly as possible. To meet this need, some low-flying photo planes develop their own films using a processing system that works wholly automatically, keeps itself at the right temperature, and is not bothered by the plane's wildest gyrations. When the plane lands, the film can be examined at once for news of the enemy's doings.
Even faster is a system that develops the films, scans them with a fine-definition TV camera and transmits the pictures to home base while the plane is still in the air. Some of these systems are fitted into small, fast, unmanned airplanes that can be sent under radio control into a hurricane of enemy fire or through a radioactive cloud.
Pictures taken at night are sometimes more revealing than those taken in daytime. In some cases, long exposures with sensitive film and light-intensifying devices can take satisfactory shots in moonlight or even starlight. But it is more common to illuminate the target, usually by a powerful flash bomb dropped by parachute and exploded far below the plane. A shield keeps the brilliant light from reaching the camera directly, but the first light reflected from the ground triggers a photocell to open the camera's shutter. If there are no lights on the ground to fog the film, the shutter can be opened before the flash bomb explodes.