A Kodak chapter in city's secret history

The plane arrived at the airport and taxied to a special location. Its top-secret cargo was offloaded and taken in an unmarked truck to the Eastman Kodak Co.'s Hawkeye plant.

The cargo — aerial reconnaissance film — was processed and developed, turned into photographic images.

These images were then sent to the "customer," the code word for the U.S. government's National Reconnaissance Center.

The film was analyzed at the center to see where the Russians — usually it was the Russians — might have had tanks, munitions factories, troops, planes, bombs.

It was a complex, exciting and clandestine Cold War program that ran here from 1955 to the late 1990s. For the longest while, it was part of Rochester's secret history, a significant contribution to life everywhere known to hundreds of Kodak workers, all of whom had been sworn to secrecy.

In 2011, the program known as Bridgehead was declassified and, finally, the world could know. Aspects of the program have been written about before, including an article in the Democrat and Chronicle by Jeff Blackwell just after the declassification.

But, understandably, most of the discussion of the project has focused on the difficulties of creating cameras that could withstand the rigors of a rocket launch and then take clear images from miles above the Earth.

Less attention has been paid to the film that went into the cameras.

This was before the digital age, before Google Earth, before any of us could sit at a Starbucks in Brooklyn and call up pictures of our back yards here.

Spying in the Cold War age was done on film, film that had to be parachuted back to Earth in capsules, picked out of the sky by retriever planes and spirited away to Rochester.

Once here, the film, thousands of feet on huge spools, was processed. The images were put onto paper and then the pictures, tons of pictures, were loaded on a secret plane again, flown to the Reconnaissance Center. Once there, the pictures could tell analysts about troop movements and munitions factories and, during one tense time, Russian ships loaded with nuclear missiles headed to Cuba.

Why Kodak? Why not? The company had worked on many projects with the government during wars hot and wars cold, including the training of aerial photographers during World War I. Beyond that, its workers were smart, ingenious and, boy, could they keep a secret.

"The government trusted Kodak," said Dick Sherwood of Webster, who was involved with the project for 21 years.

Sherwood and Dick Stowe, another former program manager on the Bridgehead project (the name was a nod to the Driving Park Bridge near the Hawkeye plant) spearheaded the writing of a detailed history of the program, a history that came out with the declassification.

The project began in the mid-1950s when representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency approached Albert Chapman, then Kodak's president.

They asked for the company's help in developing and processing film to be carried above by the U-2 spy plane. Later, satellites replaced the planes.

Employees cleared to work on the project could not tell their families or their friends what they were doing, even when they might have to be away for weeks.

"I would disappear for long periods of time," said Norm Karsten, who worked on Bridgehead. "All my family knew was that I was working on a classified project for Kodak."

The project wound down as film was replaced by digital technology, a technology that Kodak had invented, a technology that would eventually lead to the drastic downsizing of the company.

But Bridgehead remains as a significant, now public, Kodak moment, an example of what the company could achieve and of the secrets it kept.

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On Remarkable Rochester

Retired Senior Editor Jim Memmott reflects on what makes Rochester distinctively Rochester, its history, its habits, its people. Contact him at: (585) 278-8012 or jmemmott@DemocratandChronicle.com or Remarkable Rochester, Box 274, Geneseo, NY 14454.

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Remarkable Rochesterians

Speaking of Eastman Kodak Co., let's add the name of this leader in film science to the list of Remarkable Rochesterians found at RocRoots.com:

C.E. Kenneth Mees (1882-1960): A native of England who fell in love with science at an early age, he joined Eastman Kodak Co. in 1912 and became the founding director of the company's research laboratories. He brought in a number of top scientists in various fields, and their work led to numerous advancements, including those in color photography. Named Kodak's vice president in charge of research and development in 1934, he was the author of numerous scientific articles and the recipient of many honors.