Approved for Release: 2013/06/25
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Secret NOFORN
Chapter 1
18
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defense known as Project LINCOLN, then under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the end of the year, these experts had assembled in Boston to begin their research. Their headquarters was located over a secretarial school on Beacon Hill, which soon became the codename for the reconnaissance project. The consultants were called the BEACON HILL Study Group.
The study group’s chairman was Kodak physicist Carl F. P. Overhage, and its members included James G. Baker and Edward M. Purcell from Harvard; Saville Davis from the *Christian Science Monitor*; Allen F. Donovan from the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory; Peter C. Goldmark from Columbia Broadcasting System Laboratories; Edwin H. Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation; Stewart E. Miller of Bell Laboratories; Richard S. Perkin of the Perkin-Elmer Company; and Louis N. Ridenour of Ridenour Associates, Inc. The Wright Air Development Command sent Lt. Col. Richard Leghorn to serve as its liaison officer.³⁰
During January and February 1952, the BEACON HILL Study Group traveled every weekend to various airbases, laboratories, and firms for briefings on the latest technology and projects. The panel members were particularly interested in new approaches to aerial reconnaissance, such as photography from high-flying aircraft and camera-carrying balloons. One of the more unusual (albeit unsuccessful) proposals examined by the panel was an “invisible” dirigible. This was to be a giant, almost flat-shaped airship with a blue-tinted, nonreflective coating; it would cruise at an altitude of 90,000 feet along the borders of the Soviet Union at very slow speeds while using a large lens to photograph targets of interest.³¹
After completing these briefings at the end of February 1952, the BEACON HILL Study Group returned to MIT, where the panel members spent the next three months writing a report detailing their recommendations for ways to improve the amount and quality of intelligence being gathered on the Soviet Bloc. Published as a classified
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³⁰ USAF, Project LINCOLN, *BEACON HILL Report: Problems of Air Force Intelligence and Reconnaissance*, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 15 June 1952, pp. v, xi; app. A (S, downgraded to C).
³¹ Allen F. Donovan, telephone conversation with Donald E. Welzenbach, 21 June 1985 (U); James G. Baker, interview by Donald E. Welzenbach, tape recording, Washington, DC, 24 April 1985 (S).
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Secret
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Approved for Release: 2013/06/25