@ Anonymous Coward
'So the real gig is to slide up next to it and covertly disable it somehow. You could spray stuff on its solar cells, you could bend or snip antennas, etc. and hopefully make it look like standard random failures and debris impacts.'
The Soviet Union tried something like this from 1967 with a series of tests by Kosmos satellites which sidled up close to other satellites and then - ummm - exploded - so 9 out of 10 for effort, 2 out fo 10 for covertness.
The program was declared a success and was said to be operational from 1971 until 1987 when it was going to be replaced by a mysterious program called Polyus. Only one Polyus launch was attempted but rather than reach orbit it ended up in the South Pacific - that had lasers, presumably it now has sharks AND lasers.
And it was huge: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htm
(Is it just me being of a certain age, but doesn't that erector look like something Gerry Anderson would have come up with?)