When the news broke on Oct. 4, 1957, that the Soviet Union had sent the world's first man-made satellite into space, the American public was shocked. The CIA, it now appears, much less so.
The agency has just declassified 59 memos, reports and summaries to mark the 60th anniversary of the day the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 went into orbit.
The documents -- which include information about Soviet missile capabilities and several Sputnik satellites -- suggest that in the years leading up to the first Sputnik's success, U.S. intelligence agents and government officials were growing more and more certain that a launch was imminent.
"U.S. intelligence, the military and the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower not only were fully informed of Soviet planning to launch an earth satellite but also knew a Soviet satellite would probably achieve orbit no later than the end of 1957," the CIA said in a report released Wednesday.
The declassified documents do not say that the agency knew Sputnik's precise launch date, and the report takes pains to explain that CIA warnings about the launch were "strategic" rather than "tactical."
Still, the report suggests that the criticism endured at the time by top U.S. officials -- including Eisenhower himself -- for apparently failing to predict the Soviets' accomplishment might have been a little off the mark.
When Sputnik launched, the Cold War was about a decade old. So was the CIA. Both the Soviets and the Americans had been working on satellite technology for years. But Eisenhower, concerned about the Soviet Union's work on intercontinental ballistic missiles, was reluctant to invest military resources in a space race.
The Soviets, on the other hand, had a much better grasp of the power of propaganda, said Michael Khodarkovsky, a history professor at Loyola University Chicago who specializes in Russia and the 20th century. He described "complete euphoria" in the Soviet Union after Sputnik launched.
"As a propaganda tool, it was just extraordinary," he said.
Sputnik was an aluminum sphere about the size of a beach ball -- it was jammed full of communications equipment and weighed more than 180 pounds -- with four spindly legs. It careened through space for three months, circling Earth about every 100 minutes and emitting a regular pattern of beeps.
When TASS, the official Russian news agency, first broke the news about Sputnik -- it was a Friday night in Washington -- the Soviet Embassy in Washington was hosting a reception for rocket and satellite specialists.
The New York Times reported from the event that Lloyd Berkner, an American who was the president of the International Council of Scientific Unions, "beat on a glass" to get everyone's attention.
"I wish to make an announcement," he said. "I am informed by The New York Times that a satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 kilometers. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement."
The Soviet scientists in the room were beaming.
The launch surprised and worried many Americans, including politicians who criticized Eisenhower for failing to take the space race seriously.
"Eisenhower's reaction to the Sputnik's launch contrasted sharply with the reaction of the American public," the CIA said in the report that was released Wednesday. "He remained calm, and his much-quoted claim on 9 October that Sputnik 'does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota' -- although borne out by the record -- was met with skepticism."
That calm was a result of the president's being well forewarned, the CIA report continued, detailing a number of agency correspondences and memos that suggested a launch was expected by the fall of 1957. (It even cited one CIA officer, Eloise Page, who narrowed it down to a span of two weeks.)
Khodarkovsky, whose op-ed about Sputnik appeared in the Times the day before the CIA declassified its 59 documents, said he was surprised by the agency's new revelations.
"It shows then how incredibly naive the American administration was, not realizing the value of the whole thing," he said of the Soviets' propaganda victory. "And that's worth emphasizing because I find the same naivete, to say the least, now."
He said the United States invested more in education and space exploration back then and gained the upper hand in space exploration -- something the country could do today in fields like cybersecurity.
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