Kept Top Secret for decades, a multi-volume history of signal interception masks the gaps of the 1960s and cuts off just before the domestic surveillance scandals broke wide open.
Crews suffered extreme physical exhaustion on 19.5-hour flights before one black budget aircraft hit a forty-foot cliff and became part of the Million Dollar Dump.
The U.S. government flew prized reconnaissance assets for five years with hardware frozen at the end of the Cold War, risking blindness to shifting frequencies and encryption.