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Why did it take seven years from the time the CORONA imagery was declassified in 1995 to the KH-7 and KH-9 mapping imagery declassification?

April 26, 2017Corona declassified Imagery kh-7 kh-9 Mapping seven time

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Why did it take seven years from the time the CORONA imagery was declassified in 1995 to the KH-7 and KH-9 mapping imagery declassification?

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NIMA required time to coordinate the recommendation for declassification throughout the Intelligence Community, the Department of Defense, and the civil community. Following this coordination, NIMA recommended declassification in 1998 and paperwork was forwarded to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George J.Tenet for approval. Mr. Tenet approved the recommendation in October 2000 after concurrence by both the Secretaries of Defense and State. NIMA wanted to have a CORONA-like implementation and it took additional months to acquire and reformat the KH-7 and KH-9 mapping imagery metadata, create browse (thumbnail) imagery from these systems, make a set of duplicate positives (for NARA) and a set of duplicate negative (for EROS Data Center). The actual implementation took about 12 months, vice 18 months for the CORONA imagery.