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It`s Okay To Be Smart, How the CIA Secretly Spied On Climate Change

How the CIA Secretly Spied On Climate Change

- Hey, Smart People! Joe here.

In the late 1950s,

just about every geopolitical decision on Earth

revolved around one question:

Would Western democracy or communism

become the dominant force across the globe?

Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union

and the United States were getting increasingly hot.

Ideological conflict

threatened to spill over onto the actual battlefield,

which meant the world lived under the terrifying specter

of nuclear war.

And in the late 1950s, the US wasn't exactly winning.

The Soviets had already developed their own hydrogen bomb

up to 1,000 times stronger

than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan

during World War II.

And by 1956, the Soviets were flying long-range bombers

that could reach the continental US

Even worse, in 1957, the USSR launched

the first intercontinental ballistic missile.

And the following year,

the ICBM would change the world forever

when it launched Sputnik 1,

the world's first human-made satellite,

into orbit around the Earth.

- The Soviet launching of Earth satellites

is an achievement of the first importance.

There is real military significance to these launches.

- This scared the crap out of the US government

and the American public.

I mean, after all,

if the Soviets could put a satellite into orbit,

then they could definitely nuke an American city.

The US was terrified of falling behind in the Cold War.

So US and NATO intelligence

needed to know what the Soviets were up to

behind the Iron Curtain.

The high-altitude U-2 spy plane

had proven to be a powerful intelligence-gathering platform,

but missions into Soviet territory had become too risky,

especially after a U-2 was shot down over the USSR.

- Gromyko and his hour-long speech

continued the campaign of denunciation

that began with the shooting down

of the American reconnaissance plane over Russia.

- So the CIA and Air Force decided to do

what no one had ever done before:

put cameras in space.

- Only eight weeks after Sputnik 1,

the president decided to proceed with a joint CIA Air Force

interim photo reconnaissance satellite program

to answer the critical intelligence questions

about Soviet missiles.

- That is how a first-of-its-kind spy satellite program

named CORONA was born.

And the only reason we even know

about this top secret program today

is because it's helping us save the world

in a completely different way.

Not by fighting The Red Menace,

but by studying climate change.

This is a story of how former enemies

became scientific allies.

How science and top-secret spycraft worked together

to unlock the secrets of how our planet is changing.

This is the unbelievable but totally true tale

of a Cold War and a warming planet,

and how satellites that prevented nuclear war

helped us spy on Earth's climate.

(pensive music)

So this is one of my absolute favorite things to do

on Google Earth.

There's this super cool feature

that lets you see how a place changes over time.

It can be pretty shocking

to watch a lake dry up before your eyes.

I mean, you can just watch a city emerge from the sea,

or you can watch a glacier recede before your very eyes.

Comparing data points from the past to data from today

is a really powerful way

to understand how our planet is changing.

And it's something we totally take for granted,

thanks to satellite technology.

As of 2023, at least 2,600 active satellites

are orbiting the Earth.

They give us GPS directions,

help us stream our favorite shows, and they take pictures.

Lots of pictures.

But in the late 1950s,

taking photos from space was basically science fiction.

Back then, the US space program was still in its infancy.

Like, not even that.

It was basically embryonic.

- But now, we have come to a new day.

NACA is to become part of a new agency,

the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

- NASA opened in October 1958,

almost one year after Sputnik's launch.

By that time, the Soviets had already sent a dog into orbit.

By every measure, the U.S was behind in the Space Race.

And to rub salt in the wound,

the US had experienced some pretty catastrophic,

and public, failures

trying to get their own rocket into space.

For example, the Vanguard rocket,

which was supposed to send the US's first satellite

into orbit,

it exploded.

(Vanguard rocket rumbling)

Repeatedly.

- [Reporter 1] Control system breaks down

and defense department cameras record a pinwheel of fire,

another disaster for Project Vanguard.

- The press even called it a flopnik.

Ouch.

- There are some instances where you may be ahead of us.

- Look, there's no sugarcoating it,

the US was getting totally embarrassed in the Space Race.

So they did what governments do when they're struggling,

they go into full hype mode,

talking up the US's

currently-nonexistent-but-definitely-coming-any-day-now

space capabilities.

- The Exploration of space will go ahead,

whether we join in it or not.

And it is one of the great adventures of all time.

And no nation,

which expects to be the leader of other nations,

can expect to stay behind in this race for space.

- And that message calls for new frontiers, new visions.

It calls for us taking the steps now

that will make us no longer second in space and science.

- And to turn these hopes and dreams into reality,

the US government started pumping piles of money

into US space programs.

Like this one:

code name CORONA.

The first spy satellite.

Now, CORONA was the definition of a moonshot program.

Or, I guess the US

hadn't actually put anything in space yet,

so more of an orbit-shot program?

Setting aside the tiny problem

that the US could barely launch satellites

without blowing them up,

CORONA project scientists also had to figure out

how to make a camera work in space.

No one had ever done this!

High-altitude spy cameras are usually panoramic cameras.

They work by swinging side-to-side

to take a larger, higher-resolution image.

But every action has an equal and opposite reaction,

so in zero-G,

scientists had to figure out some way

to counterbalance this rotating camera

so that it wouldn't also rotate the satellite

straight out of orbit.

And of course, this was before digital photography.

Kodak had to develop an entirely new, polyester film

that wouldn't disintegrate in space.

And they had to figure out

how to get that film back to Earth.

They couldn't just let it fall wherever Farmer Joe

or Farmer Yuri could find it, right?

So obviously, they'd catch it out of midair with planes.

When a film container was used up,

the CORONA satellite would shoot it back to Earth.

A parachute would deploy,

and then the film would get snagged by a plane

using essentially a giant fishing hook.

Shockingly, this actually worked.

In 1960, the US became the first to recover an object

that had come back from orbit,

beating the Soviets to that accomplishment by five days.

But, hey, a win's a win!

And all of this is being done in complete secrecy

from the public.

The US government invented this whole cover story

for these spy satellite rocket launches,

saying that CORONA

was actually a harmless scientific research program

named Discoverer,

that these capsules returning to Earth

contained biological samples,

early tests for eventually sending humans to space.

- [Reporter 2] A Thor-Able satellite vehicles soars aloft.

Sister ship and precursor of the rocket

that will carry into orbit the first Earth-born life

intended to return alive.

The passengers of Discoverer III, four black mice.

- But the real mission was getting cameras into space

to spy on the Soviet Union.

Despite dozens of failed launches,

and the time that one of the top secret film canisters

was found by some farmers in Venezuela,

the CORONA spy satellite program worked.

It was wildly successful

in the eyes of the intelligence agencies.

- By the mid 1960s,

we knew with great confidence

the exact number of weapons of all types

that were deployed in the Soviet Union.

- All in all during CORONA,

the US recovered 167 film canisters,

with photos covering 500 million square nautical miles

of Earth's surface.

CORONA helped the US

eventually take the lead in the space race,

but after the last CORONA satellite launched

on May 25th, 1972,

the program became a footnote in history books,

a classified one.

But fast forward to the 1990s,

and something big was about to happen

that would change CORONA's story forever.

- Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev

has been removed from power

and there are tanks now in the streets of Moscow.

- [Reporter 3] Tonight, the red flag flying over the Kremlin

has been lowered for good.

- As President Gorbachev resigned

and brought to an end seven decades

of communist rule in the Soviet Union.

- In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.

And suddenly, the Cold War was just over.

The US spy satellite fleet, and all the images they'd taken,

they kind of were out of a job.

So this young senator from Tennessee

wrote a letter to the CIA

asking if US spy satellites could do some side work

looking at environmental change.

- And that is why when I was still serving in the Senate

that I began those conversations with Bob Gates

to explore how these assets could be applied

to the task of improving our understanding

of the Earth's environment.

- Yep, that Senator was Al Gore.

- This activity really had its origin

back in the late 1980s, I think,

when then Senator Gore,

who was obviously very much interested in climate issues,

wrote a letter, Senator Gore, to the head of the CIA.

He asked the question:

Is it possible that there might be a way

in which we could, in fact,

have studies that used classified information

that would provide scientists

with their understanding of the environment?

- Gore knew this satellite imagery would be a gold mine

for civilian environmental scientists.

After all, while CORONA satellites

were spying on the Soviet Union,

they were also taking photos

of areas where climate change hits the hardest,

like the polar regions.

But there was one small problem,

all those photos were top secret.

- And most of us thought that would go no further

than just a letter from Gore to the CIA,

and then there would be turned down.

And so Bob Gates, who was the CIA director at that point,

had an interest in looking at new ways to do things.

Gore wrote to Gates and Gates responded,

and we set up the environmental task force.

- So in October 1992, the CIA put Dr. Linda Zall,

a satellite imagery expert,

in charge of figuring out if the government

might be able to actually share these old spy photos.

- Linda was absolutely critical to the process

because she was an expert analyst on the one hand,

but she really believed that it's important for the CIA

to use its assets to monitor the environment.

She is what people would say a force of nature.

- Dr. Zall had to figure out what images the government had

and how much could be safely shared.

She couldn't just hand over

tons of national security secrets to a bunch of nerds.

- They weren't going to give us

the real high-resolution stuff, so they had to degrade it.

They have very, very sharp images,

let's say they can resolve better than a license plate.

And what they wanted to release

was something like a one-meter resolution,

so it's fuzzy up to that resolutions.

- And once the images were safe for non-spy eyes,

Zall recruited scientists

to create an environmental task force

that would review classified satellite data and images

to study Earth science and climate change.

- Vice President Gore is here today

to announce the signing of an executive order

declassifying imagery

from our early intelligence satellite systems.

- The release of this imagery

will mark the first declassification

of classified satellite imagery, ever.

- Thanks to this Senator from Tennessee,

who was now Vice President,

the government took hundreds of thousands

of formerly classified images from the CORONA satellites

and turned them over

to this carefully chosen team of scientists,

who started digging into the CORONA archives.

- There's a thousand times as much information

about the Earth's processes

and the environment collected in that effort,

as there is in the programs that are specifically dedicated

to collecting information about the environment.

And so it obviously makes sense

to figure out ways to make use of it

without compromising our national security.

- It was called the MEDEA Program.

Basically, this was the "Justice League"

of environmental scientists.

- There were oceanographers, geologists, energy experts,

meteorologists, climate experts,

all further now began to talk to each other

and forming new ideas about things that you could do.

- I mean, a totally improbable team:

scientists and spies

analyzing photos that weren't even supposed to exist.

And this data painted a picture

that scientists had never seen before.

To figure how the environment is changing,

you have to compare Earth today to Earth in the past.

And suddenly,

scientists had been given a literal time capsule,

hundreds of thousands of pictures

of what the Earth looked like

all the way back to the '50s and '60s.

It expanded our window into the past

so we could better understand

how changes to the environment were speeding up.

MEDEA helped scientists discover all kinds of things,

that the Arctic Sea became saltier as sea ice melted.

CORONA photos proved the Aral Sea

had shrunk by 50% in 50 years.

And MEDEA scientists also recruited a very unlikely ally:

Russia.

Russia had been sending submarines

under Arctic ice for decades,

so they knew just how thick the ice was at any given time.

And that mattered for climate research.

- And so the spy agency started talking to each other.

If you've got a submarine going underneath the ice,

you can look upwards

and it can tell you what the thickness of the ice is,

because you can't do that from looking from above.

- But cooperation with the Russians

ended up being a bit tricky.

- I had a scientist who was working for me at NOAA

who had, earlier, gone to the Arctic

and collected some Russian data,

but then when he was leaving,

the KGB stopped him and confiscated his laptop.

And so I asked Al Gore, "How can we arrange this

since you're talking to Chernomyrdin,

who's the vice premier?"

And he said, "Well, at one point,

I'll make sure that I'm talking to Chernomyrdin

in a quiet spot.

You come up and interrupt me

and say, 'Oh, we've got this problem with a laptop.

Is there something you could do?'"

And he said, "I'm sure the Russians will say,

'Oh, we can fix that.'"

I saw Gore, he kind of maneuvered Chernomyrdin over,

and I walked over quickly and I said that,

and Chernomyrdin said,

"Oh, yeah, we can do that. No problem."

He waved an aide over to do it and we got the laptop back.

So we got a lot of data from the Russians.

In fact, 80% of the Arctic Ocean data at that point

had been collected by the Russians,

and they were willing to put that into a common database.

- These spy images,

this team of top secret scientists recruited by the CIA,

changed the way we understand the planet.

Like, just for the ocean,

declassified CORONA imagery doubled the information

in our existing databases.

And thanks to the Russian data exchange,

we learned that the average ice thickness in the Arctic

declined by almost half in 28 years.

The MEDEA Program continued until it was shut down in 2001.

It was briefly revived under President Barack Obama in 2010

before closing its doors once and for all in 2015.

But even though MEDEA isn't around today,

the program and CORONA's declassified images

continue to be used by scientists

to increase our understanding of the world.

Images taken by CORONA and provided by the MEDEA Project

have helped epidemiologists track cholera outbreaks,

Archaeologists understand ancient civilizations,

and even political scientists understand

how satellite surveillance influences how we act.

And this cooperation between the intelligence community

and civilian scientists has evolved

into the Global Fiducials Program,

where the CIA uses classified technology

to provide important data for Earth scientists today.

We always hear this reminder,

that we have to work together to tackle climate change.

And this is one of the craziest stories

of people you'd never expect to come together,

spies and scientists, East and West,

cooperating for the most important mission of all,

saving the planet.

- There's a tendency for science to be siloed,

but I think that we need to have a broader perspective

on how important problems are

and how we're going to deal with them.

- This is one of the wildest chapters

in the history of science that I've ever learned about.

And it shows us the incredible things that are possible

when unexpected ideas come together,

thanks to the work of a handful of passionate people.

These satellites that were originally designed

to help prevent a nuclear apocalypse,

found another life,

to help us avert a totally different sort of crisis:

climate change and environmental loss.

These men and women in black, and men and women in science,

came together to spy on planet Earth

because all of the machinations of international politics

and military might,

well, none of that stuff really matters

without the planet itself.

Stay curious.

This was an incredible story to research.

And as you can imagine,

this was not an easy story to put together.

I wanna thank everyone who supports this show on Patreon

because you help make episodes like this one possible.

Telling stories like this requires weeks of research.

Digging into archives, finding images,

interviewing people that were involved in projects like this

is a lot of work.

Thanks to the support of our patrons,

we're able to create videos like this.

We're able to tell these stories

in the way that we know you love them.

If you would like to join our community of supporters,

you can click on the link down on description.

You can help us at any level,

and that will help us keep doing more of this.

We'll see you in the next video.

(fingers snapping)

Bing, bing, bada, boom.

I don't like how this is going.

I'm gonna spin around.

We're gonna do this again.

I'm a whole new person, okay.

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How the CIA Secretly Spied On Climate Change ||CIA||||| ||ЦРУ||шпигувала||| Wie die CIA heimlich den Klimawandel ausspionierte Cómo la CIA espió en secreto el cambio climático Comment la CIA a secrètement espionné le changement climatique Come la CIA spiava segretamente il cambiamento climatico CIAはいかにして気候変動を秘密裏にスパイしたか CIA가 기후 변화를 비밀리에 감시한 방법 Hoe de CIA in het geheim klimaatverandering bespioneerde Jak CIA potajemnie szpiegowała zmiany klimatu Como a CIA espiava secretamente as alterações climáticas Как ЦРУ тайно шпионило за изменением климата Hur CIA i hemlighet spionerade på klimatförändringar CIA İklim Değişikliği Konusunda Nasıl Gizlice Casusluk Yaptı? Як ЦРУ таємно шпигувало за зміною клімату 中央情报局如何秘密监视气候变化 中央情報局如何秘密監視氣候變遷

- Hey, Smart People! Joe here.

In the late 1950s,

just about every geopolitical decision on Earth |||геополітичний|||

revolved around one question: оберталася навкол|||

Would Western democracy or communism ||демократія За||

become the dominant force across the globe?

Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union

and the United States were getting increasingly hot.

Ideological conflict ідеологічний|

threatened to spill over onto the actual battlefield,

which meant the world lived under the terrifying specter ||||||||привид

of nuclear war.

And in the late 1950s, the US wasn't exactly winning.

The Soviets had already developed their own hydrogen bomb |совєти|||||||

up to 1,000 times stronger

than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan

during World War II.

And by 1956, the Soviets were flying long-range bombers ||||||||бомбардировщики

that could reach the continental US

Even worse, in 1957, the USSR launched ||||СРСР|

the first intercontinental ballistic missile. ||міжконтинент||місія

And the following year,

the ICBM would change the world forever |ICBM||||| |МБР|||||

when it launched Sputnik 1, |||Супутник

the world's first human-made satellite,

into orbit around the Earth.

- The Soviet launching of Earth satellites

is an achievement of the first importance.

There is real military significance to these launches.

- This scared the crap out of the US government - Esto asustó mucho al gobierno de EE.UU.

and the American public.

I mean, after all,

if the Soviets could put a satellite into orbit,

then they could definitely nuke an American city. ||||знищити я|||

The US was terrified of falling behind in the Cold War. |||перелякана|||||||

So US and NATO intelligence |||НАТО|

needed to know what the Soviets were up to

behind the Iron Curtain.

The high-altitude U-2 spy plane

had proven to be a powerful intelligence-gathering platform,

but missions into Soviet territory had become too risky,

especially after a U-2 was shot down over the USSR.

- Gromyko and his hour-long speech Громико|||||

continued the campaign of denunciation ||||denuncia ||кампанія||дискредитації

that began with the shooting down

of the American reconnaissance plane over Russia. |||розвідувальний||| del avión de reconocimiento americano sobre Rusia.

- So the CIA and Air Force decided to do

what no one had ever done before:

put cameras in space.

- Only eight weeks after Sputnik 1,

the president decided to proceed with a joint CIA Air Force

interim photo reconnaissance satellite program проміжна||||

to answer the critical intelligence questions

about Soviet missiles. ||ракети

- That is how a first-of-its-kind spy satellite program

named CORONA was born. |Корона||

And the only reason we even know

about this top secret program today

is because it's helping us save the world

in a completely different way.

Not by fighting The Red Menace, |||||червона загр

but by studying climate change.

This is a story of how former enemies

became scientific allies.

How science and top-secret spycraft worked together |||||шпигунська||

to unlock the secrets of how our planet is changing.

This is the unbelievable but totally true tale

of a Cold War and a warming planet,

and how satellites that prevented nuclear war ||||запобігли||

helped us spy on Earth's climate.

(pensive music) задумлива|

So this is one of my absolute favorite things to do

on Google Earth.

There's this super cool feature

that lets you see how a place changes over time. que te permite ver cómo cambia un lugar a lo largo del tiempo.

It can be pretty shocking

to watch a lake dry up before your eyes.

I mean, you can just watch a city emerge from the sea,

or you can watch a glacier recede before your very eyes.

Comparing data points from the past to data from today

is a really powerful way

to understand how our planet is changing.

And it's something we totally take for granted,

thanks to satellite technology.

As of 2023, at least 2,600 active satellites

are orbiting the Earth.

They give us GPS directions,

help us stream our favorite shows, and they take pictures.

Lots of pictures.

But in the late 1950s,

taking photos from space was basically science fiction.

Back then, the US space program was still in its infancy.

Like, not even that.

It was basically embryonic.

- But now, we have come to a new day.

NACA is to become part of a new agency,

the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

- NASA opened in October 1958,

almost one year after Sputnik's launch.

By that time, the Soviets had already sent a dog into orbit.

By every measure, the U.S was behind in the Space Race.

And to rub salt in the wound, Y para echar sal en la herida,

the US had experienced some pretty catastrophic,

and public, failures

trying to get their own rocket into space.

For example, the Vanguard rocket,

which was supposed to send the US's first satellite

into orbit,

it exploded.

(Vanguard rocket rumbling)

Repeatedly.

- [Reporter 1] Control system breaks down

and defense department cameras record a pinwheel of fire,

another disaster for Project Vanguard.

- The press even called it a flopnik. ||||||failure - La prensa incluso lo calificó de flopnik.

Ouch.

- There are some instances where you may be ahead of us.

- Look, there's no sugarcoating it, |||sugarcoating|

the US was getting totally embarrassed in the Space Race.

So they did what governments do when they're struggling,

they go into full hype mode,

talking up the US's

currently-nonexistent-but-definitely-coming-any-day-now |неіснуючий||||||

space capabilities.

- The Exploration of space will go ahead,

whether we join in it or not.

And it is one of the great adventures of all time.

And no nation,

which expects to be the leader of other nations, |очікує|||||||

can expect to stay behind in this race for space.

- And that message calls for new frontiers, new visions. ||||||нові горизонти||

It calls for us taking the steps now

that will make us no longer second in space and science. que hará que dejemos de ser los segundos en el espacio y la ciencia.

- And to turn these hopes and dreams into reality,

the US government started pumping piles of money

into US space programs.

Like this one:

code name CORONA.

The first spy satellite.

Now, CORONA was the definition of a moonshot program. |||||||амбіційна прог|

Or, I guess the US

hadn't actually put anything in space yet,

so more of an orbit-shot program? ¿así que más bien un programa de lanzamiento en órbita?

Setting aside the tiny problem

that the US could barely launch satellites

without blowing them up,

CORONA project scientists also had to figure out

how to make a camera work in space.

No one had ever done this!

High-altitude spy cameras are usually panoramic cameras. ||||||панорамні|

They work by swinging side-to-side

to take a larger, higher-resolution image.

But every action has an equal and opposite reaction,

so in zero-G,

scientists had to figure out some way

to counterbalance this rotating camera |противажити|||

so that it wouldn't also rotate the satellite para que no rote también el satélite

straight out of orbit.

And of course, this was before digital photography. |||||||фотографії

Kodak had to develop an entirely new, polyester film Kodak|||||||поліестер|

that wouldn't disintegrate in space. ||розпадатися||

And they had to figure out

how to get that film back to Earth.

They couldn't just let it fall wherever Farmer Joe

or Farmer Yuri could find it, right? ||Юрій||||

So obviously, they'd catch it out of midair with planes. |||||||під час польоту||

When a film container was used up,

the CORONA satellite would shoot it back to Earth.

A parachute would deploy, |парашут||

and then the film would get snagged by a plane ||||||зацепился||| ||||||зачеплена||| y luego la película sería enganchada por un avión

using essentially a giant fishing hook.

Shockingly, this actually worked.

In 1960, the US became the first to recover an object

that had come back from orbit,

beating the Soviets to that accomplishment by five days.

But, hey, a win's a win! |||перемога||перемога

And all of this is being done in complete secrecy |||||||||таємниці

from the public.

The US government invented this whole cover story

for these spy satellite rocket launches,

saying that CORONA

was actually a harmless scientific research program

named Discoverer, |дослідник

that these capsules returning to Earth

contained biological samples,

early tests for eventually sending humans to space.

- [Reporter 2] A Thor-Able satellite vehicles soars aloft. ||Тор||||піднімається|високо в пов

Sister ship and precursor of the rocket

that will carry into orbit the first Earth-born life

intended to return alive.

The passengers of Discoverer III, four black mice. |пасажири|||третій|||

- But the real mission was getting cameras into space

to spy on the Soviet Union.

Despite dozens of failed launches,

and the time that one of the top secret film canisters ||||||||||контейнери

was found by some farmers in Venezuela, ||||||у Венесуелі

the CORONA spy satellite program worked.

It was wildly successful

in the eyes of the intelligence agencies. ||||||агентства

- By the mid 1960s,

we knew with great confidence

the exact number of weapons of all types

that were deployed in the Soviet Union.

- All in all during CORONA,

the US recovered 167 film canisters,

with photos covering 500 million square nautical miles |||||морських миль|

of Earth's surface.

CORONA helped the US

eventually take the lead in the space race,

but after the last CORONA satellite launched

on May 25th, 1972,

the program became a footnote in history books, ||||підніжка|||

a classified one.

But fast forward to the 1990s,

and something big was about to happen

that would change CORONA's story forever. |||історії CORONA||

- Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev ||Михайло|Горбачов

has been removed from power

and there are tanks now in the streets of Moscow. |||танки||||||Москва

- [Reporter 3] Tonight, the red flag flying over the Kremlin ||||||||Кремль

has been lowered for good.

- As President Gorbachev resigned |||пішов у від

and brought to an end seven decades

of communist rule in the Soviet Union.

- In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.

And suddenly, the Cold War was just over.

The US spy satellite fleet, and all the images they'd taken,

they kind of were out of a job.

So this young senator from Tennessee |||сенатор||Теннесі

wrote a letter to the CIA

asking if US spy satellites could do some side work

looking at environmental change.

- And that is why when I was still serving in the Senate |||||||||||Сенаті

that I began those conversations with Bob Gates

to explore how these assets could be applied

to the task of improving our understanding

of the Earth's environment.

- Yep, that Senator was Al Gore. |||||Аль Гор

- This activity really had its origin

back in the late 1980s, I think,

when then Senator Gore,

who was obviously very much interested in climate issues,

wrote a letter, Senator Gore, to the head of the CIA.

He asked the question:

Is it possible that there might be a way

in which we could, in fact,

have studies that used classified information

that would provide scientists

with their understanding of the environment?

- Gore knew this satellite imagery would be a gold mine

for civilian environmental scientists. |цивільних||

After all, while CORONA satellites

were spying on the Soviet Union, |шпигували||||

they were also taking photos

of areas where climate change hits the hardest,

like the polar regions.

But there was one small problem,

all those photos were top secret.

- And most of us thought that would go no further

than just a letter from Gore to the CIA,

and then there would be turned down.

And so Bob Gates, who was the CIA director at that point,

had an interest in looking at new ways to do things.

Gore wrote to Gates and Gates responded,

and we set up the environmental task force.

- So in October 1992, the CIA put Dr. Linda Zall, |||||||Лінда|Лінда Залл

a satellite imagery expert,

in charge of figuring out if the government

might be able to actually share these old spy photos.

- Linda was absolutely critical to the process

because she was an expert analyst on the one hand,

but she really believed that it's important for the CIA

to use its assets to monitor the environment.

She is what people would say a force of nature.

- Dr. Zall had to figure out what images the government had

and how much could be safely shared.

She couldn't just hand over

tons of national security secrets to a bunch of nerds.

- They weren't going to give us

the real high-resolution stuff, so they had to degrade it. |||||||||знизити якість|

They have very, very sharp images,

let's say they can resolve better than a license plate.

And what they wanted to release

was something like a one-meter resolution,

so it's fuzzy up to that resolutions.

- And once the images were safe for non-spy eyes,

Zall recruited scientists |залучив|

to create an environmental task force

that would review classified satellite data and images

to study Earth science and climate change.

- Vice President Gore is here today

to announce the signing of an executive order |оголосити||||||

declassifying imagery рассекречивание| розсекречення|

from our early intelligence satellite systems.

- The release of this imagery

will mark the first declassification ||||деклассификация ||||декласиф

of classified satellite imagery, ever.

- Thanks to this Senator from Tennessee,

who was now Vice President,

the government took hundreds of thousands

of formerly classified images from the CORONA satellites |раніше||||||

and turned them over

to this carefully chosen team of scientists,

who started digging into the CORONA archives.

- There's a thousand times as much information

about the Earth's processes

and the environment collected in that effort,

as there is in the programs that are specifically dedicated

to collecting information about the environment.

And so it obviously makes sense

to figure out ways to make use of it

without compromising our national security.

- It was called the MEDEA Program. ||||програма МЕД|

Basically, this was the "Justice League" в основному||||Ліга справедлив|Ліга справедлив

of environmental scientists. ||екологи

- There were oceanographers, geologists, energy experts, ||океанографи|||

meteorologists, climate experts, метеорологи||

all further now began to talk to each other

and forming new ideas about things that you could do.

- I mean, a totally improbable team:

scientists and spies ||шпигуни

analyzing photos that weren't even supposed to exist.

And this data painted a picture

that scientists had never seen before.

To figure how the environment is changing,

you have to compare Earth today to Earth in the past.

And suddenly,

scientists had been given a literal time capsule,

hundreds of thousands of pictures

of what the Earth looked like

all the way back to the '50s and '60s.

It expanded our window into the past

so we could better understand

how changes to the environment were speeding up.

MEDEA helped scientists discover all kinds of things,

that the Arctic Sea became saltier as sea ice melted. |||||солонішим||||

CORONA photos proved the Aral Sea ||||Аральське море|

had shrunk by 50% in 50 years.

And MEDEA scientists also recruited a very unlikely ally: А||||||||союзник

Russia.

Russia had been sending submarines Росія||||

under Arctic ice for decades, ||||десятилітт

so they knew just how thick the ice was at any given time. щоб||||||||||||час

And that mattered for climate research. |||||дослідження

- And so the spy agency started talking to each other.

If you've got a submarine going underneath the ice,

you can look upwards

and it can tell you what the thickness of the ice is, |||||||товщина||||

because you can't do that from looking from above.

- But cooperation with the Russians ||||росіянами

ended up being a bit tricky. |||||складним

- I had a scientist who was working for me at NOAA |я мав|||||||мені||Національне управ

who had, earlier, gone to the Arctic

and collected some Russian data, ||||дані

but then when he was leaving, |||||коли він йш

the KGB stopped him and confiscated his laptop. |КДБ||||конфіскували||ноутбук

And so I asked Al Gore, "How can we arrange this |||||Аль Гор|||||

since you're talking to Chernomyrdin, ||||Чорномирд

who's the vice premier?" |||прем'єр

And he said, "Well, at one point, |||ну|||

I'll make sure that I'm talking to Chernomyrdin ||переконаюся|||||Чорномирд

in a quiet spot.

You come up and interrupt me ||||перебиваєш|

and say, 'Oh, we've got this problem with a laptop. ||О|||||||

Is there something you could do?'" |||||зробити

And he said, "I'm sure the Russians will say, |||я впевнений|||||

'Oh, we can fix that.'" ||||це

I saw Gore, he kind of maneuvered Chernomyrdin over, ||||||підштовх||

and I walked over quickly and I said that,

and Chernomyrdin said,

"Oh, yeah, we can do that. No problem."

He waved an aide over to do it and we got the laptop back. |покликав||помічника||||||||||

So we got a lot of data from the Russians.

In fact, 80% of the Arctic Ocean data at that point

had been collected by the Russians,

and they were willing to put that into a common database.

- These spy images,

this team of top secret scientists recruited by the CIA,

changed the way we understand the planet.

Like, just for the ocean,

declassified CORONA imagery doubled the information декласиф|||||

in our existing databases.

And thanks to the Russian data exchange,

we learned that the average ice thickness in the Arctic ||||||товщина льоду|||Арктиці

declined by almost half in 28 years. |||||років

The MEDEA Program continued until it was shut down in 2001.

It was briefly revived under President Barack Obama in 2010 |||відновлено|||Барака Обами|Обама|

before closing its doors once and for all in 2015.

But even though MEDEA isn't around today,

the program and CORONA's declassified images

continue to be used by scientists

to increase our understanding of the world.

Images taken by CORONA and provided by the MEDEA Project

have helped epidemiologists track cholera outbreaks, ||епідеміологи||холера|

Archaeologists understand ancient civilizations,

and even political scientists understand

how satellite surveillance influences how we act.

And this cooperation between the intelligence community

and civilian scientists has evolved

into the Global Fiducials Program, |||fiducials| |||фідучіали|

where the CIA uses classified technology

to provide important data for Earth scientists today.

We always hear this reminder,

that we have to work together to tackle climate change. |||||||tackle||

And this is one of the craziest stories

of people you'd never expect to come together,

spies and scientists, East and West,

cooperating for the most important mission of all,

saving the planet.

- There's a tendency for science to be siloed, |||||||isolated

but I think that we need to have a broader perspective

on how important problems are

and how we're going to deal with them.

- This is one of the wildest chapters |||||найбожевіль|глави

in the history of science that I've ever learned about.

And it shows us the incredible things that are possible

when unexpected ideas come together,

thanks to the work of a handful of passionate people.

These satellites that were originally designed

to help prevent a nuclear apocalypse,

found another life,

to help us avert a totally different sort of crisis: |||запобігти||||||

climate change and environmental loss.

These men and women in black, and men and women in science,

came together to spy on planet Earth

because all of the machinations of international politics ||||інтриги|||

and military might,

well, none of that stuff really matters

without the planet itself.

Stay curious.

This was an incredible story to research.

And as you can imagine,

this was not an easy story to put together.

I wanna thank everyone who supports this show on Patreon

because you help make episodes like this one possible.

Telling stories like this requires weeks of research.

Digging into archives, finding images,

interviewing people that were involved in projects like this

is a lot of work.

Thanks to the support of our patrons,

we're able to create videos like this.

We're able to tell these stories

in the way that we know you love them.

If you would like to join our community of supporters,

you can click on the link down on description.

You can help us at any level,

and that will help us keep doing more of this.

We'll see you in the next video.

(fingers snapping)

Bing, bing, bada, boom. ||бум|

I don't like how this is going.

I'm gonna spin around.

We're gonna do this again.

I'm a whole new person, okay.