The idea that led to John Hoffman's breakthrough came from an unlikely place: a government bureaucrat. Hoffman had been thinking of ways to incorporate high-quality satellite data-the kind that intelligence agencies use-into his fledgling aerial photography business. The problem was that the sort of data the United States has is mostly on places like Siberian oil fields. Not much commercial potential there. But the government official's remark turned the whole thing around. "He said to me," Hoffman recalls, "You know son, what you ought to do is to go up to the blankety-blank Russians, because by God they've been taking pictures of us for 20 years.'"

That advice led Hoffman to experiences reminiscent of a Tom Clancy novel. With the aid of Mike Laserson, who had helped broker U.S.-Soviet grain deals in the 1970s and 1980s, Hoffman finagled a meeting with the Russian Ministry of Defense in late 1994 to promote his idea of putting spy-quality satellite images on the commercial market. Things didn't start off too well, Hoffman recollects: "Here were a couple of Americans walking into the Russian intelligence community and saying, Hey, you have all these neat photographs. We want you to declassify them so we can sell them to people.'"