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Look up, Mr Kim: Japan's spy in the sky
By Axel Berkofsky
Japan is
shooting spy satellites into orbit to get ready to keep
a high-tech eye on axis of evil member North Korea.
The Japanese government recently announced it
will launch two "information gathering" satellites in
March on a mainstay H-2A rocket. The spy satellites will
be able to fly at an altitude of more than 20
kilometers, thereby not violating other countries'
territorial airspace and making it impossible for
ground-to-air missiles to shoot them down.
Initially, two satellites manufactured by
Mitsubishi Electric Corp will be launched from the
National Space Development Agency at Japan's Space
Center on Tanegashima Island. The systems are referred
to as "multi-purpose information-gathering satellites"
able to monitor weather, illegal immigration and
intrusion by North Korean spy ships, while checking on
Pyongyang's missile bases and plutonium-production
sites.
Areas subject to surveillance are not
only North Korea but also China, Russia and other
"suspicious" states, according to the Japanese
government. China, as usual, suspects this is yet
another step toward Japanese militarism and is not
exactly keen on Japan counting the growing number of
Chinese missiles aimed at Taiwan. "Just checking on the
weather" goes the official line coming from Tokyo
assuring Beijing that China is not on Japan's list of
regional evil-doers.
Japanese Defense Agency
officials fear that their country's spy satellites are
significantly inferior to US commercial satellites.
Despite the 250 billion yen (US$2.1 billion) that has
been invested in developing the satellites so far, their
ability to focus on objects on the ground is described
as "very poor".
"We don't see much on the ground
and still very much rely on the US telling us whether we
are seeing something suspicious," says a Defense Agency
official.
In fact, Japanese satellites are
believed to be inferior even to Cold War-era US
satellites, and compared with the United States'
state-of-the art Lockheed Martin-manufactured IKONOS
satellites, Japanese satellite technology still has a
way to go before shooting high-resolution pictures,
analysts believe.
Until now, US spy satellites
have been feeding Japan with intelligence, with the
Americans selling overpriced commercial satellite photos
for $8,500 each. It should have stayed that way, an
American analyst points out.
"I am not sure if
the Japanese space program is smart long-term policy or
foolish national pride, but presumably the US, France,
Russia and China all see it as the latter," he suspects,
indicating that Japan opted for shooting anything at all
into space in its eagerness to catch up with the spies
from the United States, Russia and Europe.
If
things go well and the satellites enable Tokyo's
policy-makers to see what Pyongyang is up to, two more
of them will be launched in August, the Cabinet
Satellite Intelligence Center (CSICE) promised recently.
Officials from the CSICE are confident that the
satellites, each of which comprises an optical and a
radar satellite unit, will remain in the orbit for five
years, circling the Earth up to 20 times a day at an
altitude of 400-600km.
However, if things go
less well and North Korea sends another missile over
East Asia without Tokyo seeing a thing, the government
has decided not to provide any information on
malfunctions and intelligence flaws in order to avoid
"told you so" lectures from the United States, as a
CSICE official put it.
In the 1990s, the United
States initiated a bilateral US-Japan intelligence
center analyzing satellite images, but Tokyo for a
change did not cave in to US requests, going for its own
satellite program instead. A waste of money, say some.
"There are better ways for Japan to spend its
limited defense funds. It would have been smarter to
invest in training several thousand satellite-image
analysts capable of working with US analysts in a joint
intelligence center," says Peter Ennis of the Oriental
Economist & Weekly Toyo Keizai in Tokyo.
Fearing that Japan would go ahead with the
satellite program with or without Uncle Sam's blessing,
the US later changed its rhetoric, calling Japanese
surveillance satellites "beneficial to both countries".
Now, however, the US is not sure anymore whether it is
at all interested in Japanese satellite pictures. "Who
needs Japanese photos [already] shot by US commercial
satellites earlier and much sharper?" a military analyst
asks.
The decision to introduce Japanese-made
information-gathering satellites goes back to 1998 when
North Korea "test-fired" a Taepodong ballistic rogue
missile over Japanese territory in August 1998. Back
then it was suspected that the Americans had withheld
intelligence on the North Korean launch and only
released details after the Korean missile went down in
the Pacific. The official version, however, is somewhat
different.
Thanks to its spy satellites and U-2
reconnaissance flights, the official version goes, the
United States gave the Defense Agency plenty of warning
before North Korea launched the missile. The Defense
Agency was also given time to divert an Aegis destroyer
to the Sea of Japan so that its sophisticated radar
could be used to track the missile's flight path,
Japan's navy remembers now.
On June 30 last
year, just before the final match of the soccer World
Cup in Yokohama, the United States reportedly provided
flawed information about a Chinese missile that did not
land in its territory, putting the Japanese government
in a state of panic. Even the US does not always get it
right, as it turned out, and Japan's Defense Agency
urged its government to shoot Japanese satellites into
orbit as soon as possible, suspecting that Japan's
friends in Washington might stick with their tactics of
keeping their secrets to themselves.
"We don't
know to what extent the US is ready to share information
with us at all," a high-ranking Defense Agency
complained back then.
The United States for its
part does not really seem to trust its increasingly
assertive junior alliance partner too much either. The
US National Intelligence Council, which reports to the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), warned last year that
Tokyo might be planning to change the framework of
US-Japan defense arrangements with its own spy
satellites in orbit.
"Spy satellites do not
alter the US-Japan security agreement in any way,"
counters James Clay Moltz, research professor at the
Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey
Institute of International Studies in California.
"American commercial concerns, however, do
exist. US companies are certainly not pleased that Japan
is developing an independent reconnaissance capability,
since it will eventually cause them to lose market
share. But it will still take a number of years before
Japan will be able to match even US commercial
products," he adds.
Japan seems eager to make
some money in space before that. After two straight
failures to launch satellites in 1998 and 1999, it shot
an H-2A rocket carrying four commercial satellites into
space last month to compete with US, European and
Russian satellites.
Japan's National Space
Development Agency (NASDA) could do with some extra cash
after its budget was cut by 12 percent to $1.4 billion
last year. What's worse, NASDA will be forced to merge
with two other state-run space programs this year and is
notoriously short of staff. While the United States has
about 7,000 well-trained image analysts, Japan employs
only 300 of them and not even the threat from Pyongyang
has yet led to a round of recruiting new analysts.
Yukio Sato, a former ambassador to the United
Nations and one of Japan's most influential commentators
on Japan's security, however, still thinks big, claiming
that Japan's own independent intelligence-gathering
activities should even go beyond East Asia and as far as
the Persian Gulf, securing Japan's sea traffic.
"Having a reasonable insight on the
situation in Gulf countries is essential for working out
prospects for a continued stable supply of oil. As a
country that limits its use of military force, Japan
needs to obtain information more quickly than other
nations," Sato maintains.
Low-quality photos and low funding or
not, Japan seems ready to check on North Korea in case
Kim Jong-il should get bored with French oysters,
Russian caviar or his 15,000-video-film collection and
turns to testing a rogue missile over East Asia instead.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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