And some of the engineers who worked on US government programs didn't even know for sure they were helping the U.

S spy.

They were sworn to secrecy, and they had suspicions that their work was internationally important.

The project was declassified in 2011 so now they could talk about it.

Program was conducted with strict need to know basis over the life of the program.

About 100 miles of film was exposed, providing almost a half a million images of the Soviet Union.

It was a masterful performance.

Then E.

Right now way couldn't tell anybody what we worked on.

Friends, family, even our wives.

She was always fighting off somebody asking, What heck does your husband do?

He's never here.

It was kind of tough in the early years, particularly parties and stuff.

When people would ask you, What do you do?

Well, I'm an engineer.

That's about all you could say, and I could remember quite well the feeling that we were contributing to something that we thought was important to the country and fortunately were successful because I think it led Teoh a more peaceful world.

I'm John Schaefer worked at Eastman Kodak for 35 years.

We worked in the area that we couldn't talk about what we worked there, and we used to call it research and engineering.

It was the government side of the business where we worked on Spy in the Sky satellites.

We didn't have a need to know what the government was doing, and we was drummed into us.

We knew they weren't taking the pictures of amusement parks in the United States.

We knew that was foreign territory that they were looking at.

Gambit was able to at its best, imagery identify objects that were smaller than 1 ft in size.

It's one thing to know that an object is there.

It's another thing to know how quickly it's advancing.

So say we're interested in the development of intercontinental ballistic missile began but allowed us to not only identify its location, but we could identify whether or not it was becoming a more sophisticated weapon.

So it was an effort, really, to safely observe what the Soviets in the Chinese and others were up to.

Even to this day, we continue to classify the best resolution capability of the campus system.

This is a building that was owned by the Navy.

But Kodak had done a lot of work here.

This is where it all started.

My role was in the systems group image motion.

Compensation was a very, very significant contributor.

Two Emmys resolution Because the satellite is moving fast over the surface of the Earth, you're taking high resolution photography with very long focal length lenses.

You've got to either move the camera or move the film to avoid smear.

We chose to move the film because you can't really pan the camera.

We firmly believe that we helped the U.

S.

Government and the U.

S.

Air Force understand what the threat to the United States waas.

I feel that most of us were very proud of the work we did.

It would save lives.

So to the extent that we could contribute to this program, I felt good.

There was a feeling of patriotism because what we were doing was over and above anything anyone could hope toe work on a lot of the people that graduated from school the same time I did were drafted and went into the service and we're in areas.

We had deferments because of what we were doing.

You knew there were people out there.

They're making bigger sacrifices.

And if there's anything we could do to stop that, it was well worth working on mhm.