n the months after World War II, American military and political leaders grew increasingly alarmed at the disposition of Soviet forces. They had few clues as to how many submarines, bombers and rockets it had, where they were and whether the Russians were planning to launch them. In Washington, where fresh memories of Pearl Harbor were still rattling through the power corridors ó much like today, 18 months after Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and the Pentagon ó the lack of good intelligence on Soviet forces was unnerving.

In late 1946, spy flights were sent over Russia's Pacific and Baltic coasts. The lumbering, modified World War II bombers, replaced by low-flying jets a few years later, were quickly spotted and often shot down, accompanied by emphatic protests from Moscow. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, who assumed the presidency in 1953, rightly imagined the domestic outcry here if Soviet bombers were regularly caught flying over the United States. He feared Russian leaders might have to take stronger measures.

So girded by the ideas of a handful of visionary scientists and engineers, men like Richard S. Leghorn of Eastman Kodak, Edwin H. Land of Polaroid, and the legendary aviation designer Kelly Johnson of Lockheed, Eisenhower embarked on a crash program to build an untouchable eye in the sky. Luckily the program was put in the hands of an intense, rumpled Connecticut Yankee at the Central Intelligence Agency, Richard M. Bissell Jr.

This is their story, or at least it could have been ó a kind of "Right Stuff" for the colorful crowd that put the U-2 spy plane and the Corona reconnaissance satellite in the sky, much like Tom Wolfe's immortalizing of the Mercury astronauts. With their quirks, idealism, genius and cowboylike enthusiasms, they are in fact an engaging cast. Eisenhower himself does a nice turn in the tale as a kind of Father Knows Best.

But Philip Taubman, a former correspondent for The New York Times and now the paper's deputy editorial page editor, has evidently set out to accomplish something else. Instead of paring his story down to a tightly focused, dramatic narrative on the drive to put spies in the sky, he has attempted the complete history, with seemingly every nut and bolt and bureaucratic dead end laid down on the page. As such, "Secret Empire" may not be for everybody, but it should find a prominent place on the shelf of important cold war reference works.

In July 1956, the first glider-like U-2 flights soared 70,000 feet over the Soviet Union, bringing back clear pictures of airstrips and missile sites. The Russians couldn't touch it. But four years and 24 flights later, when the C.I.A. pilot Francis Gary Powers was punched out of the sky by a Soviet missile, the program was brought to an ignominious end, with Eisenhower caught by the Soviet Prime Minister, Nikita S. Khrushchev in a series of excruciatingly bald-faced lies. "It set a shocking new standard for deceit at the time," Mr. Taubman observes, "and left many Americans wondering whether they could trust their leaders."

The overflights didn't deserve such a tawdry ending, considering what they had accomplished. The myth of an American "missile gap" with the Soviet Union was embraced by warmongering extremists in the Air Force, but the U-2, an astonishing technical accomplishment, can fairly be said to have prevented World War III by undercutting that idea where it counted, in the Oval Office.

The U-2 (the "U" was a standard designation for a military utility aircraft, and thus a handy cover name) was a marvel of engineering. Of course, few among the Pentagon brass thought a plane could be designed to fly above 70,000 feet, where fuel evaporated, jet engines flamed out, wings had little purchase and a pilot's body could explode. By handing management of the program to the C.I.A. and the freewheeling Bissell, however, it benefited from a collection of Air Force renegades, visionary scientists and geniuses like Johnson at Lockheed, who made temporary fixes to engineering problems with insecticides, diapers and sanitary napkins. "This thing is made out of toilet paper," a pilot exclaimed after his first experience with the remarkably delicate, long-winged craft.

From 1950 to 1970, at least 252 crew members crashed on spy flights of all kinds, most directed against the Soviet Union, Mr. Taubman reports. Only 90 of them survived, while 138 were reported missing, with at least some of them surviving for years in captivity. Although Mr. Taubman doesn't say so, the men's families must have been told they died in some other way.

All of which gave impetus to building a bird that couldn't be shot down. When Eisenhower stopped overflights of the Soviet Union in May 1960 after several humiliating misfires, the program to put a spy satellite in orbit and bring back usable photographs was still months from success.

To tell that story, Mr. Taubman makes deep forays into troubled American rocket programs, part of which were put in the hands of Nazi scientists smuggled from the ruins of the Third Reich and plunked down at the Army missile center at Huntsville, Ala. Throughout his tale, moreover, Mr. Taubman strives to revisit the astounding efforts of Land at Polaroid and many others to create cameras and film that would not only survive violent vibrations and extreme cold but also deliver photos of Russian license plates from 50 miles in space.

It's a noble effort. "Secret Empire" is a collection of extraordinary stories, but maybe too many for one book.

Jeff Stein is the editor of Homeland Security, a subscription Web site of Congressional Quarterly, and the co-author, with Khidhir Hamza, of "Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda."