That's completely wrong. There was no serious consideration of stealing Soviet satellites. Everyone knew that we'd never be able to get away with that.
The driving requirement was to act as a successor to the SR-71. Launch, make a single reconnaissance pass over the Soviet Union, and then utilize the cross-range capability to land immediately so that the film could be developed. But by the time the Shuttle was actually built, spy satellites equipped with digital cameras had improved so much that it became moot.
You don't need something a tenth the size of the Shuttle to be an effective manned camera platform, even an effective manned camera platform with extreme cross-range.
We had effective unmanned film camera platforms in space long before we had CCDs, long before the Shuttle was contemplated.
> During the 1950s, a Soviet hoax had led to American fears of a bomber gap. In 1968, after gaining satellite photography, the United States' intelligence agencies were able to state with certainty that "No new ICBM complexes have been established in the USSR during the past year."[10] President Lyndon B. Johnson told a gathering in 1967:
>> I wouldn't want to be quoted on this ... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor.[10]
Yes a manned camera platform could have been much smaller than the shuttle. And the USAF had been designing just such a vehicle until they were forced to consolidate their program with NASA's Shuttle in order to "save money". So we ended up with a compromised vehicle that was too expensive and couldn't do anything very well.
If the Russian satellite is a secret, and the Americans steal it secretly, then of course they would get away with it. It's like a thief stealing from another thief.
The driving requirement was to act as a successor to the SR-71. Launch, make a single reconnaissance pass over the Soviet Union, and then utilize the cross-range capability to land immediately so that the film could be developed. But by the time the Shuttle was actually built, spy satellites equipped with digital cameras had improved so much that it became moot.