The Espionage Assignment
In August 1945 and the afterglow of the Grand Alliance, Dwight Eisenhower and Marshal Georgi Zhukov boarded the General of the Army’s personal plane, the Sunflower, for the journey from Berlin to Moscow. Over the drone of the engines, the two generals traded stories about the war they had just won together—Zhukov unhooking the stiff collar of his tunic plastered with decorations, Eisenhower laughing and slapping his knees.
As viceroys over Germany since VE-Day, they had passed many hours comparing their countries’ political philosophies, reliving the war, thinking aloud about their families and hopes for the future. At a banquet, Eisenhower had declared that what he and Zhukov wanted was peace, and they wanted it so badly that “we are going to have peace if we have to fight for it.”
Soon after the Sunflower landed in Moscow, Eisenhower was taken to see the leader of the Soviet Union, resplendent in white uniform. Stalin noted that the American was not coarse and brusque like most generals he knew and pronounced him “a very great man—not only because of his military accomplishments, but because of his human, friendly and frank nature.”
The Generalissimo gave him the signal honor of standing at his side atop the Lenin Tomb as a hundred thousand Mongols, Russians, Georgians and other national groups observed victory by marching through Red Square performing chants, dances, stunts and acrobatics. When the crowd saw Eisenhower, arms crossed, wearing his famous green waist-length jacket, it roared. Before the parade was over, Stalin introduced the guest of honor to the leader of the Ukraine, whose eldest son had been killed in the war. For the first time, Eisenhower shook hands with Nikita Khrushchev.
The rest of the five days was a triumph of Soviet-American amity. Eisenhower toured collective farms and factories; at a soccer game, when his presence was announced, he slipped an arm around Zhukov’s brawny shoulders and tens of thousands of Russians raised the skies with applause. Zhukov kept joking with John Eisenhower that he intended to marry him off to one of the girls from the parade—“a terrifying prospect,” thought John, “since any one of those powerful women could have broken me in half with no effort.”
At the end of the trip, Eisenhower invited Zhukov to America and offered John as his escort. He told American reporters, “I see nothing in the future that would prevent Russia and the United States from being the closest possible friends.”
For his first fifty-one years, the Soviet Union had seldom crossed Eisenhower’s mind, with the exception of the anti-Communist pronunciamentos he heard from his superior Douglas MacArthur in Washington and Manila, and of which he generally approved. Throughout the war, he had, like Franklin Roosevelt, concentrated on victory and postponed detailed thinking about the postwar world. Not until May 1945 did the Soviet Union move to the cynosure of Eisenhower’s concerns, where it remained for the rest of his life.
General George Patton and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery were independently pondering how the Wehrmacht might be rearmed for war between the Soviet Union and the West. Such notions did not pass Eisenhower’s lips. He angrily dismissed a reporter’s question about war against Russia and told the U.S. House Military Affairs Committee that “Russia has not the slightest thing to gain by a struggle with the United States. There is no thing, I believe, that guides the policy of Russia more today than to keep friendship with the United States.”
Churchill, de Gaulle and other Old World statesmen feigned no such roseate expectations about what might emerge from the ashes of war: the theme of the final volume of Churchill’s war memoirs was “How the Great Democracies Triumphed, and So Were Able to Resume the Follies Which Had So Nearly Cost Them Their Life.”
But as a representative man of the country Woodrow Wilson called the only idealistic nation in the world, Eisenhower believed that the tens of thousands who had died by his orders had to have perished for something nobler than the resumption of the ancient power politics that Americans had always scorned. If East and West showed patience, restraint, flexibility, they might shape a fresh world without hostile alliances or arms races, in which nuclear weapons were controlled by a vigorous United Nations. Building mutual trust was the first step: this was one of the reasons he thought the Soviets deserved the honor of capturing Prague and Berlin.
That soldiers hate war because they know its cost is scarcely a universal truth (consider George Patton). But Eisenhower’s well-informed disgust at war’s irrationality and waste and his experience in Europe and North Africa disposed him more emotionally than the average Western political leader against solving problems on the battlefield. He had “seen bodies rotting on the ground and smelled the stench of decaying human flesh.” As he wrote Mamie during the war, he had formed “a veneer of callousness” but could not forget “how many youngsters are gone forever.” When the atom bomb was detonated at Los Alamos, unlike other American leaders exhilarated at the prospect of ending the Pacific war, Eisenhower had only “a feeling of depression.”
Having seen the U.S. Army almost starved to death during the isolationist 1920s and 1930s, he wondered how long the American people—especially fellow Kansans and other Midwesterners—would tolerate the expense of huge peacetime armies and weapons. As a fiscal conservative, he feared that bankrupting the country to build a military leviathan would destroy the society it was meant to defend. With his skeptical mind and thirty years of strategic training, Eisenhower was not quick on the trigger. At a White House meeting in 1946 to gauge the chances of a Soviet attack on Western Europe, he said, “I don’t believe the Reds want a war. What can they gain now by armed conflict? They’ve gained about all they can assimilate.”
But by 1947, the freedoms for which the West had fought were being extinguished in Eastern Europe. The avatar of Soviet-American friendship, Marshal Zhukov, was banished by Stalin to Odessa. Eisenhower deplored Soviet “political pressure and subversive tactics” in Greece, Iran, Turkey, but still resisted what he called “the smouldering doubts and fears that are plaguing this country.” He reminded American leaders that the Russians were not supermen: when Army intelligence estimated that the Red Army could seize Western Europe within two weeks, he said, “My God! We needed two months just to overrun Sicily.” But in September 1947, he sadly concluded in his diary that “Russia is definitely out to communize the world.… We face a battle to extinction between the two systems.”
By 1952, Eisenhower was a thoroughgoing Cold Warrior. From SHAPE in Paris, his warnings against the Soviet threat were almost indistinguishable from those of the Truman State Department. Still, unlike many other Cold Warriors, he kept alive the hope that the cycle of hostilities could one day be broken.
During the Presidential primary campaign, militant Republicans acidly recalled Eisenhower’s friendship with Zhukov, his failure to take Berlin, his glowing postwar talk about the Russians. When John Wayne saw an ex-GI waving an Eisenhower banner, he bellowed, “Why don’t you get a red flag?”
Eisenhower tried to recast history by stressing his warnings to Western politicians during and after the war about the danger from Moscow. He tried to outbid the Democrats by declaring that if he became President, the United States would never recognize Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Still he put a damper on the most robust anti-Communists in his party by affirming that the Iron Curtain would be rolled back only by peaceful means.
On March 4, 1953, shortly after midnight, the CIA’s all-night monitors roused Allen Dulles from bed: Stalin had suffered a stroke and was thought to be dying. At 7:40 A.M., the President walked into his office, looked at Dulles, Jim Hagerty and other aides, and tartly said, “Well, what do we do about this?”
A day later, Radio Moscow announced that the heart of the “inspired continuer of Lenin’s will” had ceased to beat. Secret police sealed off the center of the Soviet capital. Loudspeakers warned against “panic and disarray,” but people were trampled to death. In the Hall of Columns, the old Noblemen’s Club where the Czar’s court had performed quadrilles and Stalin thrown old Bolsheviks on show trial, stunned workers filed past the Great Father’s remains, an old woman sobbing here and there.
On March 9, as the Red Army band played Chopin, the coffin was carried into Lenin’s mausoleum by the new leaders of Russia—Georgi Malenkov, the heir apparent; Vyacheslav Molotov, the Foreign Minister; Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police. Nikita Khrushchev, chairman of the funeral commission, could not forget the words of the dead leader: “You’ll see! When I’m gone, the imperialist powers will wring your necks like chickens!” They set down the casket near the chalk-white body of Lenin. Factory bells and whistles sounded. Then there was silence all over the Soviet Union.
The hallmarks of American-Soviet relations in 1953 were the truculent accusations cabled back and forth between Washington and Moscow and the armies at war in Korea. The New York Times said on Stalin’s death, “Our children’s children will still be paying the price for the evil which he brought into the world.”
What would happen now? Some optimists in Washington allowed themselves to hope that Russia’s revolutionary traditions might incite the people to throw off the bonds of the Soviet state. Pessimists feared a Kremlin power struggle that might encourage the new leaders to try something reckless like a surprise nuclear attack against the West. At the White House, Eisenhower considered a CIA warning that the new regime might not enjoy Stalin’s skill in avoiding world war: “A struggle for power could develop within the Soviet hierarchy at any time.”
But to almost everyone’s surprise, Malenkov called for warmer relations with the United States: “There is not one disputed or undecided question that cannot be decided by peaceful means.”
John Foster Dulles warned the President against the Russians’ “phony peace campaign.” Eisenhower did not question this judgment, but he worried about the enthusiastic world reaction to Malenkov’s speech and wondered whether this might be a time to begin rebuilding mutual trust: “Look, I am tired—and I think everyone is tired—of just plain indictments of the Soviet regime. I think it would be wrong—in fact, asinine—for me to get up before the world now to make another one of those indictments.”
Dulles opposed a Presidential speech: relaxation of tensions now might harm American efforts to bargain on Korea and coax Western Europeans into a supranational army. But in no mood to antagonize a President he had scarcely known before January, he contented himself with hardening the speech with demands including the “full independence” of Eastern Europe.
On April 16, before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Eisenhower gave the best speech of his life. He recalled that after World War Two, while America disarmed, the Soviet Union had maintained a war footing. Despite Soviet provocations, the United States was still ready to seek peace. He welcomed Malenkov’s offer and said that when it was backed by deeds, he would be willing to join the Soviets to limit arms and place atomic energy under international control. But what gave the address its power was Eisenhower’s evocation of the price of an eternal arms race:
“Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.… We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
The Cross of Iron speech confided Eisenhower’s second greatest anxiety about the arms race. It did not confide his worst—that some American or Soviet leader, confronted with the paralyzing cost of an endless arms race, might try to destroy the source of the threat with a surprise nuclear attack. To Eisenhower, this was the most urgent reason for disarmament. In his diary, he wrote, “As of now, the world is racing toward catastrophe.”
In December 1953, he went to the United Nations and proposed Atoms for Peace: “Today, the United States stockpile of atomic weapons, which, of course, increases daily, exceeds by many times the explosive equivalent of the total of all bombs and all shells that came from every plane and every gun in every theater of war in all the years of World War Two.” Unless the arms race was curbed, the “two atomic colossi” would be doomed to “eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world.” He suggested joint American-Soviet-British contributions from their nuclear stockpiles to a UN atomic agency for peaceful uses.
This would curb the arms race at an early stage without requiring the on-site inspections that the Soviets had always refused. Eisenhower knew that the United States could afford to reduce its stockpile by several times the Soviet rate and still remain ahead: in his speech, he allowed that the ratio of American to Soviet contributions could be five to one or more. Privately he believed that all one superpower needed to deter the other was a few hundred bombs: the Russians wanted nothing badly enough to risk losing the Kremlin.
But the Soviets feared permitting an eternal American lead; they did not even issue a prompt response to Eisenhower’s offer. The frustration of Atoms for Peace made the President more sensitive to the problem of protecting the United States against surprise attack.
Several levels down from what Lenin would have called the “commanding heights” of the American government was a blunt, decisive, impatient, profane Welshman named Trevor Gardner, assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force for research and development. Born in Cardiff in 1915, trained as an engineer, he worked on the Manhattan Project at the California Institute of Technology, became vice president of General Tire and Rubber by age thirty and started his own R-and-D firm, Hycon, before Eisenhower personally invited him to join the new administration.
Pearl Harbor had burned the danger of surprise attack into the national soul. Gardner joined a national security establishment that had been newly alarmed. Albert Wohlstetter and other strategic thinkers at the Rand Corporation in California had lately issued a top-secret warning that a Soviet strike might destroy as much as eighty-five percent of the Strategic Air Command’s bomber force. After a disturbing visit with General Curtis LeMay at SAC headquarters in Omaha, Gardner flew to Pasadena, where he saw Lee DuBridge, president of Cal Tech and chairman of the Science Advisory Committee established under Harry Truman to advise Presidents on scientific aspects of national security.
Cocktail in hand, as an aide recalled, Gardner told DuBridge that his panel wasn’t worth “a good goddamn.… You’re abnegating your responsibility to science and the country, sitting on your dead asses in fancy offices in Washington, wasting your time and the taxpayers’ money going through a lot of goddamn motions on a lot of low-level, shitty exercises—all in the name of science.” The Committee should do a study on surprise attack and American “ability, or inability, to meet it. The true story, not that shit Washington is feeding the American people.”
Gardner made his appeal to the Committee, which went to see the President on Saturday, March 27, 1954. Eisenhower told them that he too was “haunted” by the problem of surprise attack. Among those present was James Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On the recommendation of DuBridge, the President had him to breakfast at the White House and asked him to chair a secret commission on potential new military and intelligence weapons to protect the nation against surprise attack.
Born in 1904 in North Carolina, Killian had spent his entire adult life at MIT—as an undergraduate in business and engineering, editor of the Technology Review and then while climbing the bureaucratic ladder until he became president in 1949. A skillful manager of scientists with their egos and idiosyncrasies, he believed that universities like MIT should muster “the democratic ranks of American scientists into invincible battalions” in the Cold War.
Killian had voted for Eisenhower in 1952 and twice attended the President’s intimate stag dinners at the White House, but this had not prevented him from opposing some aspects of Eisenhower’s defense program on Capitol Hill or sharing the outrage of many American scientists at the excommunication of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He accepted the President’s offer and won a leave of absence from the MIT Corporation.
Killian was concerned that it might not be easy to attract scientists angry at Oppenheimer’s treatment to work for the President who had done the deed, but he found that most “could not fail to respond to a call for help.” By September 1954, he had assembled forty-six experts and staff in the gray nineteenth-century splendor of the Executive Office Building next to the White House.
The Technological Capabilities Panel (or Killian Commission, as members soon called themselves) worked fast and hard, for the President wanted a report on his desk by February. Except for field trips to the CIA, Pentagon, SAC and elsewhere, members worked behind locked doors manned by Air Force guards. During coffee breaks, like children told to look and not touch, secretaries gazed out the windows at the distant figure of the President greeting foreign leaders and knocking out golf balls on the South Lawn.
The most secret unit of Killian’s group was the intelligence panel chaired by Edwin Land. The world knew Din Land best as inventor of the Polaroid Land camera, but he had long been working on classified government projects, including guided missiles, infrared searchlights, anti-aircraft training devices and 3-D film for aerial photography. Dark, reclusive, sensitive, abrupt, Land had always exalted “the art of the fresh, clean look at the old, old knowledge.”
Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1909, he dropped out of Harvard as a freshman to work on a filter to cut glare in cameras, sunglasses, telescopes. He founded the Polaroid Corporation to sell the filters, hoping that it would prosper enough to support his scientific curiosity. On a wartime trip to the Southwest, Land’s three-year-old daughter Jennifer asked him why snapshots could not be produced right away. He went for a stroll and worked out the basic design of an instant camera in his head. In 1948, his first cameras went on sale at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. Twenty-five years later, Land’s interest in Polaroid was worth half a billion dollars.
But money remained only a means. By 1954, working in his nondescript office and laboratory near Polaroid headquarters in Cambridge, he held 164 patents, including detection devices for atomic exposure and cancer and a process for 3-D movies: theatergoers donned Polaroid glasses for the illusion of watching tribesmen in Bwana Devil hurling spears, or so it seemed, into the audience. Land was an MIT lecturer and Cambridge friend of Killian, who thought him “an authentic genius.”
His panel knew that the first line of defense against surprise attack was intelligence on the enemy’s military capabilities and intentions. The Soviets held a clear advantage. In any five-and-dime, they could buy maps of American bridges, factories, highways, ports, air bases, missile sites, atomic testing grounds. Soviet agents and diplomats gathered all sorts of American secrets. Some of this espionage was sophisticated, such as the Americans paid to steal classified papers; some was crude, such as the aerial photographer paid seven hundred dollars by a Soviet air attaché to fly over military sites around New York City. The FBI was on the trail, but how much could be concealed in a free society?
In the Soviet Union, even the Moscow telephone book was classified. If American generals did not know the location of vital Soviet installations, how establish bombing targets if war broke out? If they did not know the shape and rate of Soviet military development, the Russians could trick the United States into building the wrong kinds of weapons and bleeding itself white on defense. If they had no early warning of a Soviet strike, the West would continue to be vulnerable to surprise attack.
The brightest possibility was to gather such intelligence from the air. At the MIT Beacon Hill Summer Study on aerial reconnaissance in 1951, Land had listened to the air ace General James Doolittle lecture on the “importance and near-impossibility” of flying cameras and electronic equipment deep into the Soviet Union. By Land’s recollection, self-confident Air Force men declared that such planes and equipment could not be perfected in much less than ten years. Land did not believe it. He exhorted his panel to take a fresh, clean look at the old, old knowledge.
The earliest recorded aerial reconnaissance mission was staged in 1794 by a French army captain, J. M. J. Coutrelle, who flew tethered manned balloons above enemy positions during the Battle of Fleuries. American aerial intelligence-gathering began with the Civil War. In 1861, Thaddeus Lowe, balloonist and magician, went to the White House and offered President Abraham Lincoln his balloon, the Enterprise, to provide Union commanders with battlefield reports. Lincoln accepted and later formed the Army Aeronautic Corps, but the swaying of the balloons, the cameras’ slow speed and Rebel fire made clear photography difficult.
In 1911, an Italian captain flew his monoplane over Ottoman positions near Tripoli, the first time an airplane was used for wartime reconnaissance. During the First World War, all of the major rivals used reconnaissance planes: the Royal Flying Corps considered them “routine insurance against surprise.” By the end of the war, at least one fourth of all aircraft involved were used for photography.
During the late 1930s, pilots of British and French commercial airliners used hidden cameras to photograph Hitler’s military buildup, the first known instance of covert aerial reconnaissance. After Pearl Harbor, aerial intelligence-gathering came of age, providing the Allies with over ninety percent of their intelligence.
Then the Cold War began. American and British intelligence needed hard information on the Soviet order of battle; atomic weapons developments; movement of tanks, ships, planes and men; installations such as military bases, communications centers, factories, highways, airfields. The CIA, MI-6 and military intelligence used secret agents and other old intelligence methods to pierce Soviet secrecy, but the take was fragmentary and ambiguous.
Western pilots were ordered to fly along the Iron Curtain for photographic and electronic reconnaissance. Occasionally they dashed across the border to test radar, radio traffic and air defenses on the other side. Some of this espionage was done by the U.S. Air Force’s new snub-nosed jet fighter, the F-86 Sabre. Strapped to the belly of a B-29, the plane was flown to a predetermined point along the frontier from which it streaked to its target and then darted back to safety.
Findings of the border flights were augmented by human intelligence. In September 1949, shortly after the West learned that the Russians had detonated their first atomic explosion, an unmarked American plane flew southeast over the Ukraine. By parachute, it dropped two Ukrainians trained to spy and send information back to the West.
To photograph the Soviet Union’s innermost territory, the Navy and Air Force tried balloons. With the CIA’s help, beginning in the late 1940s, an estimated hundred balloons per year were floated from Western Europe over Russia bearing high-altitude cameras. With luck, when they reached Japan, a ground radio signal caused the instrument packages to detach and float safely by parachute to earth. But too often they dropped into the hands of the Russians, who gleefully displayed them in Moscow. Before hundreds of journalists, Soviet Foreign Ministry officials ridiculed stories handed out in Washington that the balloons were merely collecting weather information. Something had to be done.
In the fall of 1950, General Nathan Twining, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff, sat down at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs, filling in for his boss, General Hoyt Vandenberg. As Twining later told the story, the chairman, General Omar Bradley, told him he was “elected” to “tell Harry Truman about our overflight plan.” The plan: make deeper penetrations of Russian airspace than anything tried before. Twining took the papers and maps to the Oval Office, where Truman studied them: “Chiefs all buy this?”
“Yes, sir. We’re very anxious to start on this program right away. We realize the seriousness of it, but we feel this is the only way we’re going to get this information.”
By Twining’s account, the President signed the authorization and said, “Listen, when you get back there, you tell General Vandenberg from me: Why in the devil hasn’t he been doing this before?”
Like bees buzzing about the head of a frustrated giant, Western airmen flew into the outer reaches of the Soviet Union. As Twining later said, “One day, I had forty-seven airplanes flying all over Russia and we never heard a word out of them. Nobody complained.”
But these planes were not invulnerable. In November 1951, a Navy bomber flown by ten crewmen disappeared off Siberia in a burst of Russian fire. In June 1952, an Air Force B-29 with thirteen crewmen aboard perished in the Sea of Japan. October 1952: eight airmen on a B-29 crashed near Japan. The State Department conceded that the plane “may have glided into Soviet territory.” July 1953: a B-50 with sixteen men aboard fell over the Sea of Japan.
Before his death, Stalin was said to be irate that Soviet airspace could be violated at all. According to the Soviet historian Roy Medvedev, Soviet military experts told the Great Leader that the best way to stop the invasions was to build special ground-to-air missiles that could knock the pirate planes out of the sky.
For the British and Americans, these shallow penetrations were not enough: much of the Soviet land mass remained unseen by Western eyes. In 1953, Robert Amory, chief of the CIA directorate that gathered and weighed intelligence, was alarmed by reports of Soviet missile testing at Kapustin Yar, said to be seventy-five miles east of Stalingrad. He told colleagues, “We just can’t ignore it. This is going to be a major new thing, this whole missile development, and we’ve got to get on top of it in the beginning and judge it.”
But Kapustin Yar was out of easy reach by the shallow overflights. Twining said it couldn’t be photographed. General Philip Strong, a retired Marine advising Amory on the intelligence applications of science, persuaded British intelligence in London to do the job. The Royal Air Force took a B-57 (fittingly called the Night Intruder), stripped off all but vital equipment and installed cameras and extra fuel tanks. From West Germany, the pilot flew down over southwestern Russia and took pictures of the site, but the Soviets nearly downed him. The plane reached Iran full of holes.
Someone had evidently tipped off the Soviets that the spy plane was coming. Perhaps it was Kim Philby, the MI-6 man not yet unmasked as a Soviet agent. As Amory later recalled, “The whole of Russia had been alerted to this thing and it damn near created a major international incident. But it never made the papers.” The British told the Americans, “Never, never, never again.”
Amory: “Then we went to Twining and said, ‘You’ve just got to devise a plane that will do this, that will be high enough so it will go over their radar.’ And the damned Air Force insisted that every plane be an all-purpose plane. It had to have some fighter ability, it had to have some maneuverability and so on.”
Undeterred, Philip Strong told Amory, “We’ve just got to get upstairs.” On his own hook, he flew out to California and saw his friend Kelly Johnson, the legendary Lockheed designer who, during the war, had put America’s first tactical jet fighter in the air in just 141 days: “Kelly, what could you do if all you were trying to do was get as high as you could—get moderate speed but not too great speed and just sit above their air defense?”
“Jesus, I’ve got just the thing for you,” said Johnson. “I’d take the Lockheed F-104. I’d give it wings like a tent. It’s a cinch!”
Johnson worked with four Lockheed engineers on a plan for a new spy plane that would fly over seventy thousand feet for as much as four thousand miles. In April 1954, he took his plan and a construction timetable for thirty planes to Washington, where he briefed a Pentagon group including Trevor Gardner. Nine months before, the Air Force had let study contracts to Bell, Martin and Fairchild Aircraft for work on a high-flying plane. Johnson’s design was examined, but some of the Air Force men doubted that it would work. They gave a tentative go-ahead to Bell.
Johnson told his men to keep on working while he tried other avenues in Washington, including the CIA. Allen Dulles warmed to the notion of allowing Lockheed to build a high-flying spy plane for the Agency while the Air Force’s Bell project diverted attention from it. Trevor Gardner showed Johnson’s proposal to Edwin Land and invited the designer back to Washington “to see whether I could make any sense,” as Johnson later recalled. Land and his colleagues thought Johnson made a mountain of sense. They resolved to recommend the plane’s development for deep flights into Russia using new precision cameras and other intelligence equipment.
Land and Killian thought the project so vital that it must not wait until the full Commission made its formal recommendations in February. They made an appointment to see the President.
November 1954 was a crowded month for Eisenhower. He dedicated the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene, met with the Indian Vice President, and threw stag luncheons for the Austrian Chancellor and Prime Ministers of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France. For the benefit of photographers in the Oval Office, he purchased the season’s first sheet of Christmas Seals and accepted a copy of America’s Spiritual Recovery from the author, Reverend Edward Elson. By letter, he thanked the Japanese Prime Minister for a cloisonné vase and a congressman for fireplace tongs, and wished Senator John Kennedy a swift recovery from back surgery.
Pierre Mendès-France, the French Prime Minister, had sent advance word that he wished a few minutes alone with the President. Eisenhower saw no harm: he would “stick pretty much to generalities.” He grumbled to Foster Dulles that everybody in the State Department was “obviously so afraid” to leave him alone with Mendès-France.
That month, the President also held one of his celebrated stag dinners. While Mamie saw a movie or retired early, ten or twenty men would dine and then go upstairs for cordials and cigars. The next morning, Eisenhower usually did a post-mortem with Ann Whitman, who recorded it in her diary: “Harry Bullis was pompous. President liked Jim Copley who has 29 papers. General Donovan gave a talk on Thailand.… A. D. Welch big man, completely bald.” Another evening: “President said stag dinner was the most interesting he had had. Thinks partially due to reducing number to sixteen.”
In the fall of 1954, Dwight Eisenhower did not plunge into the midterm Congressional campaign: Harry Truman’s barnstorming while President had “shocked” his sense of “the fitting and the appropriate.” But now he may have wished he had. He could not think of anything worse than working with a Democratic Congress.
“I really think a man can be classed as a politician only after he has spent his life in a political arena,” he told Merriman Smith of UPI that November. “But I can say this and, I think, without egotism: in many, many ways, I will make smarter political decisions than a lot of guys who are pros because they have gotten too used to, the narrow, quick advantage rather than taking a look at the longer range.”
The President was more blunt in a letter to his brother Edgar: “The voteseeker rarely hesitates to appeal to all that is selfish in mankind.” Politics? “A combination of gossip, innuendo, sly character assassination and outright lies” in which “the demagogue tries to develop a saleable list of items to hold before the public.”
Before noon on Sunday, November 7, eleven Air Force men in a B-29 were taking pictures along a zigzag course which brought them close to a big Soviet air base near Japan. Two Soviet fighters appeared and someone cried, “They’re firing!” Ten of the airmen bailed out safely; the eleventh was enmeshed in his parachute lines and drowned.
Foster Dulles called the President: “Whenever the boys go over there, it is a deliberate risk. We think the plane was over Japan, but the Soviets probably think it was over their territory.”
In the wake of the Democratic victory, a bipartisan group of congressmen was coming to the White House to discuss foreign policy. Eisenhower told Dulles that he was “sure” the congressmen would ask about the plane incident. He assumed “we would not want to admit too much.” He was “certainly” not going to admit that the United States made deliberate flights over the Soviet Union.
Soon thereafter, Killian and Land came to the Oval Office to recommend deep flights into Russia. As Killian recalled, Eisenhower asked “many tough questions.” How much chance was there that the intelligence would be worth the provocations?
Land and Killian thought that even if the take was marginal, the flights might cause the Kremlin to shift precious rubles from offensive to defensive weapons. They might also demonstrate the futility of Moscow’s obsessive secrecy: maybe then the Russians would sign disarmament agreements with adequate inspections.
The President himself had used the pictures taken by reconnaissance fliers during World War Two, especially on D-Day. He thought American intelligence overrelied on human sources and was impatient with the balloons and shallow penetrations.
Killian and Land had expected the President to say he would study their plan. But as Killian recalled, he gave tentative approval on the spot—with one proviso: the Air Force must not fly the missions. Eisenhower did not want the provocation of sending uniformed soldiers into Soviet airspace. He was also concerned that the project would be eviscerated by interservice rivalries. The Air Force should help, but the missions must be flown by the CIA.
“And essentially, the Air Force’s eye was wiped in you-know-what,” Robert Amory later said.
On Friday, November 19, Land’s panel brought Kelly Johnson back to Washington. “They wanted to be reassured that our proposal was technically feasible,” Johnson wrote in his diary. After “a grilling as I had not had since college exams,” he lunched with Allen Dulles, Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott and General Donald Putt, Director of Air Force Research and Development. Someone said, “Let’s stop talking about it and build the damn plane.”
Monday, November 22: Allen Dulles ironed out details with the President in the Oval Office. In her diary, Ann Whitman wrote, “Discussion of advisability of going ahead with new photographic reconnaissance plane at some considerable cost.”
At 8:15 on Wednesday morning, November 24, 1954, the key players filed into the Oval Office—Charles Wilson of Defense; Harold Talbott; Generals Twining and Putt; Allen Dulles and his deputy, General Pearre Cabell, who had been Air Force intelligence chief before joining the CIA. Foster Dulles took his customary place to the left of the President’s desk chair.
It was the day before Thanksgiving. The Eisenhowers were scheduled that afternoon to drive to National Airport, where the First Lady was to smash a bottle of water from one of the President’s favorite trout steams against the nose of the new Presidential plane, Columbine III, a Lockheed Superconstellation (also serviceable for aerial reconnaissance). Then they would take off for a long weekend of bridge and golf with friends at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. Field Marshal—now Viscount—Montgomery, was coming along for the ride. The President privately groused that Monty had “invited himself.”
The men formally asked the President to sanction development of thirty planes for about $35 million. Allen Dulles noted that the CIA could not bear the whole sum without drawing attention to it. Wilson agreed to have the Pentagon foot a “substantial part” of the bill.
Twining did not say it aloud, but he was disturbed that the CIA was getting this choice project. He was surprised that the Agency had been able to talk the President into it; earlier, when Land and Killian had raised the prospect of deep flights into Russia, Curtis LeMay had said, “You’ll never get a President to agree to that sort of thing.” Twining privately thought the CIA men were getting “too big for their britches. They did not know how to handle this kind of an operation.” He knew that this meeting with the President was not the time or place to voice his objections, but neither he nor LeMay intended to roll over and play dead.
Eisenhower told the group, “Go ahead and get the equipment, but before initiating operations, come in to let me have one last look at the plans.”
It was all over in fifteen minutes. Before the meeting adjourned, Foster Dulles said, “Of course, difficulties might arise out of these operations. But we can live through them.”
Two hours later, William Knowland, Republican leader of the Senate, was shown into the President’s office. For two years, Knowland had made the President’s life miserable by promulgating his own hard-shell foreign policy from the Senate floor. Eisenhower once wrote in his diary that in Knowland’s case, there seemed to be no final answer to the question, “How stupid can you get?”
After the Russians downed the American plane in early November, Knowland had publicly demanded that the President break diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union: other “innocent” planes would be attacked if Eisenhower did “nothing more than merely send notes to Moscow.” Foster Dulles warned the President that reporters would press him “on the Knowland foolishness.” If the President wanted to “slap Knowland’s ears back,” that would be fine with him.
But Eisenhower had to coexist with his Senate leader, so he asked Knowland to the White House for today’s heart-to-heart talk. As the Californian entered the room, the President threw the switch activating a secret tape recorder concealed in a large, ugly piece of furniture in the next room. (He once told his Cabinet, “It’s a good thing when you’re talking to someone you don’t trust to get a record made of it. There are some guys I just don’t trust in Washington and I want to have myself protected so they can’t later report that I said something else.”)
Eisenhower brought up the plane incident. He said he knew there were arguments for breaking relations with the Soviet Union. But that was a step toward war: “If you do that, then the next question is, ‘Are you ready to attack?’ Well, I am not ready to attack.”
The President hinted that the plane downed in the Far East might not have been innocent: “In the conduct of foreign affairs, we do so many things we can’t explain that, once in a while, something happens.… There is a very great aggressiveness on our side that you have not known about, and I guess this is on the theory of: why put burdens on people that they don’t need to worry about and therefore make them fearful that they might give away something? I know so many things that I am almost afraid to speak to my wife.
“Now in the way of reconnaissance and a great many things, we are very active and there are a great many risky decisions on my part constantly so that, once in a while, something happens. And I just don’t dare let it lead to a question in the United Nations. You apparently think we are just sitting supinely.… Here’s the thing to remember: suppose one day, we get into a war. If too many people knew we had done something provocative—
“I just want to say that we might have to answer to charges of being too provocative rather than being too sweet.”
At the CIA, Allen Dulles summoned Richard Bissell: “I have just come back from a meeting in the White House. There is a project for a high-flying reconnaissance aircraft. I want you in a meeting at four o’clock this afternoon at the Pentagon.… The President has approved this and it has a very high priority.”
Through streets clogged with Thanksgiving traffic, Bissell was driven in a black Agency pool car over Memorial Bridge and past Arlington National Cemetery. At the Pentagon, in Room 4E964 overlooking the Potomac, he greeted Trevor Gardner and Air Force officers. Their voices rose in exhilaration: these were the men who would open secrets of the Soviet military complex to Western view for the first time.
More than anyone else, Trevor Gardner had championed the project and bulled it past nay-sayers in the Air Force and elsewhere. All agreed that he should have the honor of placing the long-distance call to California. He lifted the black receiver from its black cradle, muttered a few words to the operator and waited. Then he gave his triumphant command: “Kelly, begin cleaning out that hangar this afternoon!”