JMEMMOTT

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 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 backyards 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.”