Building a Covert Operation
After he left the Pentagon, Richard Bissell marveled that “nobody had really worked out how anything was to be done.” The decision to build a plane to fly deep into Russia had been made at such a high level that “nobody knew where the money was coming from. Nobody knew how much it would cost. Nobody knew where it would develop, where flight testing could be done, where people could be trained or by whom, who could fly it or anything.” Now these were his problems.
Bissell was a New Deal Democrat and prewar isolationist, urbane, lucid, informal, perfectionist, “a very naturally spookish guy,” as Robert Amory said. In his CIA office, he always seemed in motion, tossing a ball into the air, twisting paper clips, brushing lint from his trousers, wiping his horn-rimmed glasses and springing from his chair to lope down the corridor. Sometimes he threw pencils at filibustering subordinates. When Cord Meyer sent a document for Bissell’s last-minute consent once too often, he was called and told, “I’m going to tear it up! I’m going to tear it up!” And Meyer heard the sound of pages being shredded at the other end of the line.
The ferocious commitment with which Bissell attacked his job was leavened with throwaway humor. He once presented himself to a table of high government officials by saying, “I’m your man-eating shark.” Toward covert means of international behavior he was more than open-minded. “There are many times when my friends think that I am not devoted to democracy as a principle of government,” he said years later. “And I will go this far in that direction: there are an awful lot of things that are much better done in private. You accomplish nothing by making them public, except to inflame people.”
The man-eating shark was born in 1909 to the Connecticut patriciate that adored Theodore Roosevelt, ran insurance companies and banks in Hartford and sometimes worked in Washington, usually for Republican Presidents. His father was president of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company; the family lived in the eccentric gingerbread house designed by Mark Twain in which Twain spent the happiest years of his life.
At Yale, Bissell led what a classmate called “a brilliant coterie of iconoclasts, candid in speech, brutal in analysis, entirely uninhibited in their attack on the old tribal gods.” Bissell’s iconoclasm was probably less ideological than it was intolerance of orthodox thinking. As a professor of economics at Yale and MIT, he was said to irritate colleagues with his openness to innovation.
During World War Two, Bissell handled problems of American shipping. As Amory recalled, “He knew just where they could pick up one vessel in the South Atlantic, two in the Red Sea and so on. His mind could just tick off their names and do the mental arithmetic: at 11½ knots, you could be in Tunis and Carthage at such-and-such.” After the war, Bissell served as deputy chief of the Marshall Plan, helping to persuade congressmen to spend billions of dollars and colliding with the civil service mind: once he became so “thoroughly fed up” with the French bureaucracy that he half-seriously threatened to “cut off all aid to France.”
Bissell was disheartened by Eisenhower’s election in 1952. He would almost certainly have been in line for a high post under President Adlai Stevenson. Like his friend and fellow economist John Kenneth Galbraith, he felt somewhat as if Washington had become a forbidden city: there was an incivility, “a real meanness” in the transition that offended him. At the close of the Truman Administration, he and Paul Nitze had worked on a long list of national security proposals signed by Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett, Secretaries of State and Defense. The paper was rebuffed by the new President. When Allen Dulles asked Bissell to join the Eisenhower government as his special assistant, Bissell at first demurred.
Later controversy has sometimes obscured the fact that in 1953, the CIA was far from a haven for fanatics of the Right. Dulles believed in recruiting anti-Communist progressives like William Sloane Coffin, Thomas Braden, Tracey Barnes and Lyman Kirkpatrick. At the same time, he believed in the old-boy network. By the 1950s, with Wristonization, other reforms and more intense public interest in foreign policy, the homogeneous elite operating without close public scrutiny was no longer the State Department but the CIA. Men who would have been pillars of State a generation earlier now joined the Agency.
Bissell qualified on both counts. He knew the CIA as “a place where there was still intellectual ferment and challenge and things going on.” In February 1954, he swallowed any doubts he may have had. His first assignment was to explore ways the Agency might stir up serious trouble in Eastern Europe and thereby help to implement Eisenhower’s campaign pledge to liberate the captive nations by nonmilitary means.
Since the Second World War, American intelligence had recruited exiles, ex-Nazis and assorted anti-Communists and dropped them with supplies and weapons into Albania, Yugoslavia, Poland, Georgia, the Ukraine. Polish freedom-fighters sent back some of the most promising reports. What the Americans evidently did not know was how many of these agents were dropping into the hands of Soviet-bloc agents, who infiltrated the network and sent its members to prison, torture and death. In 1952, the Russians presumably feared that Eisenhower might actually believe his campaign rhetoric about liberating Eastern Europe: it was revealed that they had been secretly managing resistance agents of the Polish Home Army all along.
The new President phased down the project. But exiles approached the CIA all the time with information and contacts behind the Iron Curtain. Dulles hoped that the Agency might build a scaled-down network from which a resistance movement could be built when and if war began. Bissell looked at the secret records and found a plan for expanding Albanian guerrilla operations to the point where they could support an invasion. He found this a mild hallucination: How could you wage a secret assault on a country from halfway around the world? Soon he essentially agreed with Dean Acheson that liberation was “a check we cannot cash.”
In May 1954, the White House and the CIA were preoccupied with Guatemala. President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman had lately expropriated 225,000 acres owned by the United Fruit Company and worked closely with the Communist party. By now, with few illusions about rolling back Communism in Europe, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers were doubly determined to head off new Communist regimes, especially in the Western Hemisphere and near the Panama Canal. They earmarked $20 million to throw Arbenz out.
Bissell planned the propaganda broadcasts, leaflet drops and strafing missions by CIA-trained rebels to panic the Guatemalan people and government. When two planes were lost and Allen Dulles asked for replacements, Eisenhower asked what were the chances for success if the rebels got the new planes. “About twenty percent,” said Dulles. The President smiled: Dulles’s conservative estimate showed that he had “thought this matter through carefully. If you had told me that the chances would be ninety percent, I would have had a more difficult decision.”
Bissell “negotiated” the “sale” of more U.S. Air Force planes to the rebels. After more sorties, Arbenz fled to Switzerland and the hand-picked new leader arrived grandly in Guatemala City aboard the American Ambassador’s plane. “Our job was simply to get rid of Arbenz,” Bissell said much later. “It was a success at one point in history, but this does not assure a happy ultimate outcome.”
In Latin America, the Guatemalan coup injected a new, long-lasting dose of antipathy toward Uncle Sam. Achieved just months after the Shah’s restoration to power in Iran, the coup instilled a buoyant sense among high ranks of the American foreign policy government that the CIA could do almost anything. Bissell himself was exhilarated by the effectiveness of covert action, the “very direct kind of intervention,” using power “just to get things done.” He liked the elegance of the clandestine operation, the high proportion of results to effort, the freedom from scrutiny by press, bureaucracy and Congress, the flexibility and independence he had known during the war.
Bissell had never been a textbook organization man. Like Allen Dulles, he did not see himself as a bureaucrat, and Dulles had not hired him to be one. Richard Helms and other CIA men thought Bissell’s methods somewhat “harum-scarum” but this did not bother him: “I’ve heard that label put on other Washington figures, and they’ve usually been the men who were so concerned with substance that they didn’t spend all their time on organization charts and budgets.”
Many years later, the intelligence historian Thomas Powers wrote that “a lot of CIA people distrusted Richard Bissell, thinking—especially in light of what happened later—that his extraordinary mind was fatally flawed, that his confident enthusiasm for ambitious projects crossed the threshold of recklessness.” But this was in distant retrospect. In December 1954, Bissell was a rising star at CIA: many senior colleagues would have given their right arms for the chance to run the new spy flights into Russia.
The project seemed tailor-made for Bissell and his gift for improvisation, secrecy, bullheadedness, daring and genial cooperation with other creative, unconventional men like Land, Trevor Gardner and Kelly Johnson. The war, the Marshall Plan and Guatemala had taught him how to supervise logistics. His grandfather was a railroad president; captivated by trains since boyhood, Bissell was said to be able to cite the hours and miles between almost any two major cities and the railroad gauges of countries in Africa and Latin America. While walking, he often devised ways that other countries’ train systems might be rebuilt.
Since his work on Eastern Europe, Bissell had complained that the CIA relied too much on the James Bonds and Mata Haris: human spies cost too much time, money and organizational energy for the result. Now he had the chance to guide the innovation of revolutionary pieces of technology and unite them in a way that would change the craft of intelligence forever. Years later, when it was all over, he said that he had never done anything more satisfying in his life.
Problem Number One was money. At the original Pentagon meeting with Trevor Gardner and the Air Force, someone brought up the “ugly question” of who would finance the program. Bissell looked expectantly across the table and the Air Force men looked expectantly back. He looked some more and they looked some more. Finally Bissell said, “All right, I get the point.”
He persuaded Allen Dulles to channel money for the project through the CIA Director’s Reserve Fund. Heeding Secretary Wilson’s promise, the Air Force evidently transferred $22 million into the account. Air Force men declared that “with some clever footwork,” they could shift about thirty Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines from other projects to this one without discovery. General Osmond Ritland made himself responsible for “stealing engines and stealing spare parts.”
On December 14, 1954, Kelly Johnson returned to Washington to see Gardner, Bissell and other members of the “special agency,” as Johnson discreetly called the CIA in his diary: “We discussed at length problems of security and method of dealing with each other. Large amount of time taken on the optimum cover story for the project.” Bissell told Johnson that, unlike the Air Force, he didn’t much care what the plane looked like, as long as it was built quickly. He simply wanted a plane that would fly a given height and distance and run large cameras and equipment smoothly over the surface of the earth.
Johnson said, “Good. That will save you a good deal of money. On the other hand, I’m going to put my top force on it, and that’s going to cost you money.” They settled on a price of roughly $22 million for twenty planes; Lockheed could return for more money if needed. Bissell hammered out an interim truce with the Air Force, which was “a moderately bloody affair.” The Air Force was not used to having the CIA build planes.
Bissell set up shop near CIA headquarters in a rickety building said to be a house of ill fame during the First World War. Floors were so weak that he was told to bring no new furniture heavier than a typewriter. He appointed a steering group including Gardner, Pearre Cabell and Donald Putt. Finance and other officers were hired to help supervise the people from the CIA, Air Force, Lockheed and other contractors who would build cameras and other elements of the system.
Throughout the project, Bissell considered it his “private duchy”: “It was completely compartmentalized in the interest of security and walled off. Allen Dulles knew less of what went on in that component of the Agency than he did about any of them. There were an awful lot of details that never came to anybody else’s attention.” The President had told Dulles that secrecy was essential: if there were any leaks about this project, he was perfectly ready to kill the whole thing.
In January 1955, the scene shifted to California. Lockheed Aircraft Corporation was quartered in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank, a land of ranch houses, filling stations, palm trees, used car dealers and hamburger stands. The first McDonald’s restaurant in the nation had opened nearby the previous year. When Bissell flew out to keep an eye on progress, as he often did that winter, he looked vaguely like a puritan in Babylon.
Lockheed was a city within a city enjoying the fruits of the postwar aircraft building boom. Hundreds of hangars, warehouses, office buildings—beige and gray boxes of every size—rose amid thousands of De Sotos, Fords, Packards, Plymouths, on a vast slab of asphalt under skies often gray with smog. In the middle of the complex, behind barbed wire fences and guardhouses, was the Skunk Works.
This high-security workshop for “black programs” was inspired by the spot in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner where Hairless Joe brewed his Kickapoo Joy Juice. To Kelly Johnson, the Skunk Works was what Menlo Park was to Edison. From this cavernous edifice with its blacked-out windows rolled one engineering triumph after another—the first American tactical jet fighter (the F-80, 1943), the world’s fastest plane (the F-104, 1953) and dozens of other aircraft that constituted a history of modern aviation. Years later Johnson was considered “probably the most brilliant aircraft designer alive,” but he remained almost unknown to the general public.
He looked like a taller, sober version of W. C. Fields. Born in the mining town of Ishpeming, Michigan, in 1910, he was the seventh of nine children of a Swedish immigrant bricklayer. He watched pilots take off at the local airfield, read Tom Swift and books on aviation in the Carnegie Library and at twelve, vowed to become an aircraft designer. After five years working his way through the University of Michigan, he bought an old Chevrolet and drove to Burbank.
Kelly and Althea Johnson were childless, to their chagrin, and it took little insight to notice that he looked on his planes with the affectionate concern of a father. Driving a tractor on his ranch near Santa Barbara, he sometimes stopped to sketch new designs with a twig in the dirt. His irascibility earned him the nickname of “the Old Goat”: his men were willing to endure the screaming and table-pounding because he also turned his temper on Lockheed and Air Force men who tried to interfere with their work.
Before Thanksgiving, as soon as Johnson received the telephone call from Trevor Gardner, “we went right to work because we promised to design and fly the plane in eight months,” as he recalled. He put twenty-four engineers on hundred-hour weeks. “Talked to each man on the project to impress them with the need for speed and secrecy,” he wrote in his diary. “Extremely difficult to pull these engineers from other projects at this time, particularly in that I cannot tell anyone why.” The project was code-named AQUATONE. Secrecy was so strict that when Johnson submitted his first two vouchers to Washington for payment, two checks for $1,256,000 arrived in the mailbox of his Encino home.
Lockheed janitors had no security clearance for the Skunk Works, so Johnson’s team worked among trash and cigarette butts on the problem that some had branded insoluble. In the thin air over seventy thousand feet, jet engines scarcely ran. Since the new plane could hardly touch down at Leningrad or Minsk for a friendly refueling, it had to be able to stay in the air for up to ten hours. The Catch-22 was that at such altitude and distance, the engine would probably burn so much fuel that no standard fuel tank would be large enough. Any tank large enough would weigh the plane down so badly that it could not stay so high in the air.
They solved the puzzle with a design that was less a jet airplane than a glider with a Pratt & Whitney turbojet engine attached. To conserve fuel, the engine would turn on and off: the plane would alternately fly and glide through the stratosphere for almost eleven hours and 4,750 miles on little more than a thousand gallons of fuel. The men pared every conceivable ounce from their design and built a craft of spectacular grace, which they named the Angel.
The Angel was made of titanium and other lightweight materials. Wingspan was roughly twice the length of the fuselage. The razorlike tail was joined to the rest of the plane by just three bolts. The aircraft was slung so low that on the runway, its nose was only the height of a man. It was so light that later, at first glimpse, pilots wondered whether this was intended to be the world’s first disposable plane, built for only one flight.
Other components were perfected. James Baker of Land’s intelligence panel worked on a new telescopic lens. Eastman Kodak devised a new Mylar film thin enough to be carried aloft in large quantities. Under Land’s oversight, Trevor Gardner’s old firm Hycon built the massive cameras that swung from horizon to horizon, covering a swath of land literally 750 miles wide—about one tenth of this in three dimensions. With 12,000 feet of film, the cameras were considered able to photograph a path from Washington to Phoenix in one flight.
Some in the CIA and Air Force still doubted that “Dulles’s Folly” or “Bissell’s Bird” would ever fly, but in February 1955, eighty-eight days after the program’s inception, Kelly Johnson called Bissell in Washington to say that the experimental model was ready. Final cost: $19 million.
The plane still needed a name. The Angel would not do (nor would Dulles’s Folly, for that matter). Bissell and Johnson might have given the plane the prefix “X,” which was used for other experimental aircraft like Chuck Yeager’s fabled X-1, but that would draw too much attention: people might wonder just what barrier this plane was designed to smash, and why. Reconnaissance planes often had the prefix “R,” but that would also give away the secret. So Johnson’s plane was assigned to the catch-all category of “U”—utility planes—and named the U-2.
This choice was not as clever as it may have seemed. The name U-2 had already been taken by the Soviets, who had used it on a single-engine biplane before the Second World War.
Where could the new plane be tested in absolute secrecy? Edwards Air Force Base, where Yeager had broken the sound barrier, would net do: too many people there. Johnson wanted “a salt lake someplace with a nice hard, flat surface, and very remote.” One of his best test pilots, Tony LeVier, spent two weeks flying over and photographing possible desert sites in California, Nevada and Arizona. First choice was a dry lake bed called Groom Lake, about a hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas. Johnson and Bissell flew out with him to investigate.
Near Groom Lake was a deserted Second World War airstrip. They decided not to land on the strip—wisely, it turned out, for it had reverted to deep sand. Bissell said, “If we had chosen to land on that strip, I think we probably would have been killed. That would have been the end of the program.” Once on the ground, they found the lake bed “as flat as a billiard table.” At Bissell’s instance, Allen Dulles persuaded the President to bar unauthorized pilots from the land by annexing it to the federal government’s vast atomic testing ground.
Construction crews volunteered by the Atomic Energy Commission worked around the clock in hundred-degree heat among tumble-weed and tarantulas. Soon there were roads, an airstrip, wells, two large hangars and a mess hall. By July 1955, Watertown Strip, as the new base was called, had a population of roughly 150 employees of the CIA, Air Force, Lockheed and other contractors. James Killian thought the speed with which Bissell and Johnson had worked “almost a miracle.”
During the spring, aided by British and West German intelligence, the CIA had been secretly tunneling into East Berlin to eavesdrop on sensitive conversations between Moscow and the East German military command. With his air of whimsical self-confidence, Allen Dulles went to the Oval Office and reported on the U-2 and the Berlin Tunnel: “I’ve come to tell you about two acquisition projects—one very high and one very low.” But that July the President was preoccupied with Geneva.
The last time an American President had sat in the same room as his Soviet counterpart had been Harry Truman’s encounter with Stalin at Potsdam ten years earlier. Since 1953, Eisenhower and his Secretary of State had resisted Winston Churchill and other pleaders for an East-West meeting. Amiable talks might dissipate Western anxiety that was useful in building NATO. In the United States, Joseph McCarthy and the Right opposed another conference like Munich or Yalta at which Western leaders might practice appeasement behind closed doors; Eisenhower publicly forswore a summit until the Russians showed “sincere intentions” by accepting strict American demands such as those he had set down in his Cross of Iron speech.
But by November 1954, he changed his mind. The British and French wanted a summit. The post-Stalin leadership struggle in Moscow seemed to be ending. In the absence of progress on disarmament, the President was willing to meet with the Russians. At a press conference, he suggested that they meet only one demand as evidence of sincerity: one way was to sign a treaty removing occupation troops from Austria. Details of the arrangement had long been worked out.
The Soviets agreed. In May 1955, the treaty was signed in Vienna. When a jubilant throng called them onto a balcony of Belvedere Palace, Molotov joined his hands over his head and Foster Dulles waved his handkerchief.
Dulles had long viewed an East-West summit mainly in terms of its potential to throw the West off guard; he noted that the Russians were spending roughly one fifth of their Gross National Product to catch up in nuclear bomber and long-range missile development. The President later said, somewhat disingenuously, “I didn’t think any more of them than he did, except I thought once in a while they couldn’t hurt, and they might do something useful—particularly as far as public opinion was concerned.” Ann Whitman wrote “Geneva” across Eisenhower’s schedule for the third week of July.
On June 22, the Soviets shot down a U.S. Navy patrol plane over the Bering Strait. For the first time, the Kremlin sent regrets and offered to pay half the damages. This was especially magnanimous because the plane was evidently flying a reconnaissance mission into Soviet airspace. Publicly the President blamed the affair on “misunderstanding,” bad weather and a trigger-happy Soviet pilot. To make sure that it did not happen again, he told his Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arthur Radford, to keep all planes and vessels “well outside the fifteen-mile limit during the period between now and the summit conference.”
John Foster Dulles was troubled about Geneva. “What I am most worried about is the President,” he told his friend C. D. Jackson, who had left the White House staff to return to Time-Life in New York. “He and I have a relationship—both personal and operating—that has rarely existed between a Secretary of State and his President. As you know, I have nothing but admiration and respect for him, both as a person and as a man aware of foreign policy and conference pitfalls.
“Yet he is so inclined to be humanly generous, to accept a superficial tactical smile as evidence of inner warmth, that he might in a personal visit with the Russians accept a promise or a proposition at face value and upset the apple cart.… The President likes things to be right and pleasant between people.… You know, I may have to be the Devil at Geneva, and I dread the prospect.…
“This is something that I have never breathed to a soul or even intimated.… I am afraid that something will go wrong in Geneva, some slip of the Allies, some slip of the President’s, which will put me in the position of having to go along with a kind of foreign policy for the U.S. which could be described as appeasement—no, appeasement is too strong a word, but you know what I mean. On the other hand, I may have to behave in such a way at Geneva that my usefulness as Secretary of State, both domestically and abroad, will come to an end.”
Despite his unremitting deference, Dulles sometimes could not keep himself from treating Eisenhower like an amiable innocent being tutored by a diplomatic virtuoso. He once told the President that it was Eisenhower’s world stature combined with his own diplomatic experience that made them such a strong team. The President agreed, but John Eisenhower later joked that what Dulles had really meant was “With your contacts and my brains, we can’t miss!”
Dulles gave off a sense of melancholy weightiness which reminded the President of an Old Testament prophet. He had a tic in one of his deep-welled eyes which strangers sometimes mistook for a wink. Once in a foreign hotel, with a twitch of the eye, he was said to have asked a room service waiter for some bottled water. The waiter returned with a tray of liquor. “No,” said Dulles (another twitch), “I said I would like some bottled water.” More minutes passed. A call girl arrived. The Secretary of State’s response was not recorded for history.
Born in 1888, son of a Presbyterian minister of Watertown, New York, the young man went on sundry diplomatic missions with his grandfather and uncle, John W. Foster and Robert Lansing, Secretaries of State under Benjamin Harrison and Woodrow Wilson. As a partner at Sullivan and Cromwell in New York, he became known as the world’s best-paid international lawyer. During the Second World War and the Truman years, Dulles functioned essentially as the shadow Secretary of State.
After Eisenhower’s election, Dulles’s appointment to the State Department was almost inevitable, but Milton Eisenhower recalled that his older brother “was not tremendously enthusiastic.” The new President had only known Dulles since April 1952, when they met in Paris. He valued his internationalism but regretted his sometimes bellicose rhetoric. As his deputy Eisenhower appointed his wartime chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith—“Beetle” Smith—who had been serving as Truman’s Director of Central Intelligence. Smith later told a friend that Eisenhower had told him that he did not feel he knew Dulles “well enough” and would “feel much better” with him at the State Department.
Dulles recalled how Wilson had fired his uncle and how Roosevelt had bypassed Cordell Hull: no one must disturb his relationship with the President. Early on, when Sherman Adams, White House chief of staff, tried to act as middleman, Dulles told Eisenhower that there could be only one Secretary of State, and it worked. The two men spoke incessantly in person and on the telephone. In the fading afternoon, the President often invited Dulles for a drink upstairs in the Mansion, where they ruminated about the motives of the men in the Kremlin, the final outcome of the Cold War.
“Foster’s a bit sticky at times, but he has a heart of gold when you know him,” Eisenhower once told Harold Macmillan (who was unconvinced). The President told his son that Dulles had an “ego problem”: “Old Foster takes such a beating that I have to keep bolstering him all the time with these lavish statements—‘the greatest Secretary of State in history’ and that sort of thing.” Dulles’s penchant for public attention did not annoy Eisenhower—quite the contrary, for it allowed him to shift blame for unpopular policies. Behind the scenes, there was never any question who was in charge.
Dulles did not share Eisenhower’s optimism that the cycle of Soviet-American distrust might be broken. As Goodpaster recalled, “The whole set of his mind was that the Soviets were inescapably hostile to our values and that no real improvement was likely.” This did not disturb the President, who exploited the difference to play good cop and bad cop, but it did others in the inner circle. “Dulles was so anti-Communist, it was almost pitiful,” said Milton Eisenhower. “His mind exaggerated the danger and neglected the positive things we might do to improve the situation.”
Dulles was ever anxious that bureaucratic duties might divert him from dominating the foreign policy process. He periodically spoke with Eisenhower about leaving State to become a sort of First Secretary for Foreign Affairs. This never happened, but the activism of Presidential aides in foreign policy alarmed him. Like a dowager whose husband was spending time with a pretty, young vamp, he worried about the extent to which the President was listening to Nelson Rockefeller.
With his broad shoulders, granite profile and Big Man on Campus personality, Rockefeller did not much resemble the Secretary of State. His enthusiasms ran from Jackson Pollock to Venezuelan development; he had what Henry Kissinger called “the most absolute, almost touching faith in the power of ideas.” Rockefeller was the only member of the Eisenhower Administration whose birth (in 1908) was reported on the front page of the New York Times.
His activism in foreign affairs began in 1940, when Franklin Roosevelt hired him as a dollar-a-year man on Latin America. After Eisenhower’s election, he worked on a study on streamlining the federal government and then served as Undersecretary of Health, Education and Welfare. In December 1954, he landed with both feet in foreign policy, succeeding C. D. Jackson in a post the Founders could never have dreamed of—Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Strategy.
“Being less than fully restrained in my approach to life,” as he once confessed, Rockefeller was a Presidential aide with no passion for anonymity. In his White House office, at dinners and on the tennis court of his twenty-seven acres on Foxhall Road, he used his formidable charm to bulldoze opposition to pet projects. One of these was Geneva. Dulles thought the President should use the conference mainly to establish a genial climate for later talks at the foreign ministers’ level; Rockefeller thought Eisenhower should not spend five days in the global spotlight with nothing new to offer. In June 1955, with Presidential approval, he sequestered eleven experts at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia to draft a set of proposals.
“He seems to be building up a large staff,” Foster Dulles grumbled to Sherman Adams. “He’s got them down at Quantico and nobody knows what they’re doing.”
The stumbling block to an arms control treaty was verification. In May 1955, the Russians conceded for the first time that any arms treaty must be monitored by on-site inspections. What this might have meant was international inspection teams at crossroads and other key points to watch movement of military units and hardware. Western experts were unimpressed: in Korea, the Chinese had foiled such teams by simply rerouting their forces away from the monitors.
Why not verification from the air? Western defense intellectuals had discussed the idea for years, but in the arctic freeze of the early 1950s, few were optimistic that the Soviets would accept. Perhaps things would be different at Geneva. At Quantico, Max Millikan of MIT, a sometime CIA officer, suggested that Eisenhower call on America and Russia to grant each other the right to fly over and photograph each other’s military sites. The plan was soon tagged “Open Skies.” Hans Speier of Rand worried that it was dangerously akin to the U-2 and might draw publicity to the program. Open Skies was included in the Quantico Group’s final proposal to the President, but it languished for weeks.
Meanwhile, the CIA got into the act. Given the choice, many in the Agency preferred legal overflights to violating Soviet airspace. That way, they could gain the information they needed without provoking the Russians or risking an international incident that might embarrass the U.S. government or the Agency. The United States was so open that the Russians would have relatively little to gain from the plan, but for the Americans, Open Skies would be an intelligence bonanza. Allen Dulles noted that the U-2 was “ideally suited” to make such flights.
General Lucian Truscott, an old Eisenhower friend and former CIA station chief in Germany, apparently commended the plan to the President and stirred up support elsewhere. He went to the CIA’s Dino Brugioni, whose job it was to establish bombing targets in Soviet industry: “What information might you want besides photographs?”
“Hell, I’d want the blueprints.” Brugioni showed him a boxful of industrial plans. Many Soviet factories had been built by the West. In the 1930s, when Ford phased out the Model A, it sold old tools and dies to the Russians. Walter Reuther and other auto workers had gone to the Soviet Union to show the Russians how to operate the machinery. Valuable factory blueprints and other information had made their way back to Western intelligence, but much of this was outdated. Brugioni and colleagues conferred with Nelson Rockefeller and put their needs on paper. As the CIA man recalled, “We had learned to put a memo into ‘Ikolese.’ Eisenhower liked his memos in military fashion: Conclusion, Fact One, Fact Two, Fact Three.”
In early July, Rockefeller implored the President to make Open Skies a focal point at Geneva. By Rockefeller’s account, Eisenhower called Foster Dulles: “Nelson is here and he has got a tremendous idea.” At the other end of the wire, Dulles’s heart sank. He said that State had already thrown out that idea. The President shouldn’t consider it.
Eisenhower brought Dulles and Rockefeller to the Oval Office like quarreling schoolboys. As Rockefeller recalled, Dulles advised the President to use Geneva merely to “identify the problem areas” for referral to foreign ministers. “You can’t do that,” said Rockefeller. “Nobody is going to take seriously that General Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, comes all the way to Geneva to a summit meeting and says, ‘I am going to identify the problems.’”
“Nelson, you have heard Foster. This is not acceptable and this is the way it is going to be.” Rockefeller later recalled that he persisted until the President exploded: “Goddamit, I have told you we are not going to do that. Now stop talking about it.”
Divorced from intramural politics between Dulles and Rockefeller, Open Skies appealed to Eisenhower. It would burnish America’s peaceful reputation without risking vital concessions to the Soviets and it might speed the way to arms control. If the Russians accepted, the plan would spare him from ordering U-2 planes to violate Soviet air frontiers. If they refused, illegal overflights would be more justifiable. Perhaps to calm the nerves of his Secretary of State, the President tabled the issue for now. But before leaving for Geneva, he asked Rockefeller to stand by in Paris.
On Friday, July 14, as the Columbine III sailed into the blue night over the North Atlantic, John Eisenhower played Scrabble with his mother to distract her from her dread of flying. In the pre-jet era, Presidential travel abroad was an event: this was Eisenhower’s first trip beyond North America since taking office. Before departure, he had assured Congressional leaders that Geneva would not be another Yalta. Foster Dulles groaned when he heard the President tell Americans on television that he hoped to “change the spirit” of American-Soviet relations and groaned again when he asked them to go to church to pray for peace.
“Eleven years ago, I came to Europe with an army, a navy and an air force,” Eisenhower declared on landing at Geneva Airport. “This time, I come with something more powerful … the aspirations of Americans for peace.” Helicopters hovered overhead. Secret Service men trotted alongside as the 1942 Cadillac that Eisenhower had used during the war bore him to his headquarters for the week, an eighteenth-century villa on Lake Geneva lent by a perfume magnate.
Newsmen, diplomats and international socialites roamed the city. Security men were everywhere—Americans in bright ties and tropical suits, Russians in dark suits with theatrically well-padded shoulders. “Reporters are interviewing the reporters,” complained the columnist Drew Pearson. The President and John relaxed from their eighteen-hour flight by hitting out golf balls in the garden of what aides called the Geneva White House.
On Sunday, the Soviets arrived. Nikita Khrushchev wore a shapeless, shiny suit with flapping trousers, Nikolai Bulganin a summer overcoat that reached the ground; the Premier’s goatee and courtly manner gave him the aspect of a Czarist governor. As Khrushchev later said, he and his colleagues considered Geneva, their first prolonged encounter with the West, a “crucial test” of whether they could “keep the other side from intimidating us.” Khrushchev saw that the British, French and American planes at the airport were “more impressive than ours.” The comparison was “embarrassing.”
By July 1955, Soviet leadership had devolved upon Bulganin and Khrushchev—“B and K,” as Eisenhower and Goodpaster called them. The journalist John Gunther thought they looked as “cozy as twin peanuts in the shell.” Bulganin was head of government, Khrushchev head of party, a distinction made clear when a Swiss guard shoved Khrushchev aside at their airport welcoming ceremony. The best Western estimate was that Khrushchev had the upper hand, but the President was not certain. By week’s end, he hoped to find out for himself.
Bikini-clad women ran up from Lake Geneva to wave at Eisenhower as he rode to the Monday opening session in the Palais des Nations. When Bulganin and Khrushchev entered the large, crowded chamber, they brought Marshal Zhukov, now rehabilitated as Soviet Defense Minister, who greeted the President with a bear hug.
At a break in the session, Khrushchev told Eisenhower, “I must let you in on a Zhukov family secret. His daughter is being married this week, and he would have been in Moscow for the wedding, but he wanted to see you so much that he came here.” The President sent for a radio and desk set as wedding presents. That evening, before dinner with Russians at his villa, he asked John to stay close to Zhukov: memories of their time together in Moscow after VE-Day might prod the Marshal to some confidence that he might not offer the other Americans.
At dinner, the President ignored Dulles’s counsel to keep an “austere countenance” when the Soviets were around. Khrushchev sat next to the Secretary of State, whom he elsewhere called the “chained cur of capitalism.” Later Khrushchev said, “Just imagine! We not only greeted each other, but I was seated next to him.… I think we spent more time talking about the food than anything else.”
Impatient with banalities, Eisenhower told the Russians over dessert that it was “essential” to “find some way of controlling the threat of the thermonuclear bomb. You know, we both have enough weapons to wipe out the entire northern hemisphere from fallout alone.” Khrushchev agreed: “We get your dust, you get our dust, the winds blow and nobody’s safe.”
John Eisenhower sadly noted that Zhukov was no longer “the cocky little rooster we had known in Germany at the end of the war.” The Marshal seemed “alive but broken.” John concluded that Zhukov had been brought to Geneva only to help cultivate his father. Before the evening ended, Zhukov told the President, “Things are not as they seem.”
Monday and Tuesday were a disappointment. Eisenhower opened by challenging the Russians on the most intractable issues—free elections in a unified Germany, Eastern Europe, Communist expansionism. Khrushchev declared that the German people “have not yet had time to be educated to the great advantage of Communism.” Bulganin said that Soviet “internal affairs” like Eastern Europe were not open for discussion.
The President raised the danger of surprise attack. As a first step toward arms control, perhaps they should seek “dependable ways to supervise and inspect military establishments so that there can be no frightful surprises.” The Russians did not respond. Determined to avoid a stalemate, Eisenhower decided to get specific. He called Nelson Rockefeller to Geneva.
Wednesday evening: Foster Dulles, Admiral Radford, General Alfred Gruenther of NATO gathered with Rockefeller by the hearth in the President’s villa. When Eisenhower brought up Open Skies, Radford and Gruenther endorsed the plan. Evidently overwhelmed by the military men, Dulles reversed himself. The next morning, Rockefeller found John Eisenhower: “You have got to be in the conference this afternoon. Your dad is going to throw a bombshell.”
Between sessions, the President introduced Khrushchev to Rockefeller. For Khrushchev, this was like the puppet introducing his puppeteer. “So this is Mr. Rockefeller himself!” he said, punching the puppeteer in the ribs. Khrushchev was startled to find the “biggest capitalist in the world” dressed “fairly democratically”—no giant diamond stickpin, gold pistol or other such props as in Bolshevik cartoons of Morgans and Rockefellers.
Thursday afternoon, with a breathtaking view of Lake Geneva through the tall window behind him, Eisenhower picked up his typed pages. He looked at the British delegation led by Prime Minister Anthony Eden, the French led by Premier Edgar Faure, and then read aloud from a statement on disarmament. Rockefeller turned around and whispered to John Eisenhower, “Now listen, here it comes.”
The President took off his glasses, looked Bulganin and Khrushchev in the eye and issued his plea for Open Skies: “I have been searching my heart and mind for something that I could say here that could convince everyone of the great sincerity of the United States—” Rockefeller grinned and slapped John Eisenhower on the knee. A crack of thunder knocked out the lights and sound system. Some of the Russians reputedly wondered how the Americans had arranged such a dramatic coda.
Caught unprepared, Bulganin said that the President’s plan had “real merit” and was worth “further study.” But during the cocktail hour, Khrushchev told Eisenhower, “I disagree with our chairman. The trouble is, this is just espionage. We do not question your motives in making this proposal, but who are you trying to fool?… This kind of plan would be fine for you because it would give your strategic forces the chance to gather target information and zero in on us.”
Zhukov joined the group. Eisenhower said he was sure that during the war, Marshal Zhukov would have given “a great many rubles to have had good photography of the enemy’s positions.” Khrushchev and Zhukov replied that this may have been true, but that was wartime.
“Don’t kick the idea out the window,” said Eisenhower. What he was trying to do was to “outline one first concrete step” which would “dispel fear and suspicion and thus lighten international tension by reassuring people against the dangers of surprise attack.” This would confirm for the world their “joint intention not to fight against each other.”
But Khrushchev insisted that the plan would increase neither peace nor stability. It was nothing but a “bald espionage plot.” The boldness of Khrushchev’s response left no doubt in Eisenhower’s mind who ruled Russia.
The rest of the week was anticlimax. “Khrushchev is a mystery,” wrote Harold Macmillan in his diary. “How can this fat, vulgar man with his pig eyes and ceaseless flow of talk, really be the head—the aspirant Tsar—of all those millions of people of this vast country?” Antoine Pinay, the French Foreign Minister, was equally appalled at the “coarseness” of “this little man with his fat paws.” Eisenhower found Khrushchev “rotund and amiable, but with a will of iron only slightly concealed.”
Khrushchev later professed to be astonished by the sight of “Dulles making notes with a pencil, tearing them out of a pad, folding them up and sliding them under President Eisenhower’s hand. Eisenhower would then pick up these sheets of paper, unfold them and read them … like a dutiful schoolboy taking his lead from his teacher.” Khrushchev could not fathom how a chief of state would permit himself to “lose face” that way. He thought the President sincere and good, “but that vicious cur Dulles was always prowling around Eisenhower, snapping at him if he got out of line.”
Years later Eisenhower said he “knew” that the Soviets would never accept Open Skies: “We were sure of that.” But Goodpaster’s later memory was that the President felt there was “at least a chance” that the Russians might accept the plan.
At the end of the week, Bulganin told Eisenhower, “Don’t worry. This will come out all right.” So strong was the President’s will to persuade the Russians on Open Skies that after the final session adjourned he swept up Charles Bohlen, Ambassador to Moscow, and rushed to the Soviet delegation’s office for one last try. But Khrushchev and Bulganin had already gone home.
It was raining when the Columbine III landed in Washington. Richard Nixon banned umbrellas at the airport to avoid glib comparisons with Neville Chamberlain and Munich. Despite irreverent newsmen who joked about Madison Avenue’s intercession in foreign affairs, Open Skies and Eisenhower’s performance drew glowing reviews in the West. “That man has an absolutely unique ability to convince people that he has no talent for duplicity,” wrote Richard Rovere in The New Yorker.
Geneva failed to halt or slow the Cold War. The size of the meeting room and the publicity impeded hard bargaining. But the conference made it possible for future American Presidents to meet Soviet leaders without condemnation as appeasers. The sight of Eisenhower and the Russians agreeing to disagree soothed world opinion. Macmillan told reporters in London, “There ain’t gonna be no war.”
At the White House, the President told Congressional leaders that the Russians genuinely wanted to make a fresh start. So did he. He told the congressmen a secret not to be “let out of this room”: Khrushchev and Bulganin had asked to come to America. “They would come fast. They want to be more in the public eye.” Eisenhower said that his first instinct had been to tell them, “Good, come on over.” But Foster Dulles “thought I had been impulsive enough,” so he had merely told Bulganin that he would study the matter.
During the Open Skies deliberations, Eisenhower said, “I’ll give it one shot. Then if they don’t accept it, we’ll fly the U-2.” Now Allen Dulles “redoubled” efforts to “get this plane quickly going.” The first U-2 was dismantled, loaded into a C-124, flown to Watertown Strip and reassembled.
On August 8, 1955, the sand-swept plain, the slender aircraft and cluster of spectators recalled the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. A few days earlier, Tony LeVier had taken the U-2 down the runway for a taxi test. The plane was so buoyant that it popped thirty-five feet into the air and the pilot could not bring it down. After four or five tries, Kelly Johnson cried into his radio, “Tony, cut the power and just put it on the ground!” He did; the plane slammed onto the runway. Excessive airworthiness was a problem they could handle. That night, the Lockheed men celebrated with traditional beer and arm-wrestling contests.
Now as Johnson and Bissell watched, the pilot took the U-2 into its elegant curve and quickly out of sight. As Johnson later said, “From then on, it was drive, drive, drive. Build the airplanes, get them in operation, train ground and flight crews, maintenance men, military pilots.”
Curtis LeMay still had his eye on the U-2. At the time Eisenhower originally asked CIA to develop the plane, the SAC General had reputedly said, “We’ll let those SOBs get in and then we’ll take it away from them.”
In the summer of 1955, Allen Dulles was relaxing in the mountain air of Colorado Springs, home of the Air Defense Command, when Bissell arrived for a briefing. As the two men left the room after a meeting, someone muttered into Dulles’s ear, “Don’t let LeMay get his cottonpicking fingers on the U-2!”
With his famous ever-present cigar and bulldog manner, LeMay had been the youngest major general in the Army during World War Two; he became a hero overseeing the bombing of Tokyo in 1945. After the war, operating from Omaha, he used the same pugnaciousness to win SAC funding from Presidents and congressmen. LeMay was unabashed about interservice conflict: once, when he set his sights on the Navy’s Polaris submarine, he was said to have adorned his office with a model of the sub painted with SAC’s insignia just to irk Navy visitors.
LeMay and other Air Force commanders looked at the CIA with the unease of an older brother watching a younger brother grow brawnier each day. Since collaboration on spy flights and other missions after the war, the Air Force and CIA had been much intertwined. CIA agents worked undercover as Air Force officers; Air Force men were “sheep-dipped” for tours with the CIA. Many left the CIA true believers, which helped the Agency when it needed men, bases, equipment and other support from the Air Force. By 1955, the CIA was a considerable rival with an enthusiastic patron in the White House.
At Colorado Springs, LeMay told Dulles and Bissell that it had been “unusual enough” for the CIA to develop the U-2. Once it was ready to fly, “of course” it would pass to SAC.
“No, it won’t,” said Bissell.
Dulles sided with Bissell but did not relish a fight with the Air Force. At lunch, Bissell found his boss “grumpy and quite silent” about the matter. As Bissell recalled, the question went back to the President, who said, “I want this whole thing to be a civilian operation. If uniformed personnel of the armed services of the United States fly over Russia, it is an act of war—legally—and I don’t want any part of that.”
LeMay was not used to being outgunned. As one CIA man observed, he had not reckoned with “the power of the Dulles brothers.” Nathan Twining was indignant about CIA’s victory: “They took it over lock, stock and barrel. We had nothing to say about it. Ike approved it too, which he shouldn’t have done.… CIA just kind of talked him into these things.”
At the President’s behest, Bissell negotiated a lasting armistice with the Air Force. Dulles and Twining agreed in writing that SAC would recruit U-2 pilots and train them. LeMay reputedly said, “If I can’t operate the aircraft, I goddamn well ought to have a lot to do with training the crews.” The Air Force would also lend help on communications, maintenance, aeromedicine and other logistics around the world. In exchange, the Air Force gained the right to appoint a deputy to Bissell.
Soon SAC officers began flying to Watertown Strip, where Tony LeVier and other Lockheed test pilots showed them how to train the fliers who would take the U-2 over Russia.
In August 1955, the President and First Lady went to Denver for a long vacation. Relaxing with customary vengeance, Eisenhower played bridge, cooked, painted, rode, played golf and fished for trout in a stream high in the Rockies. He spent the third week of September in the crisp altitudes of Byar’s Peak Ranch with his banker friend Aksel Nielsen and George Allen.
Early on Friday, September 23, he cooked eggs and bacon for his companions and was driven through gold-flecked forests down to the Summer White House at Lowry Air Force Base. Looking through mail, he handed Ann Whitman a letter from Milton—“See what a wonderful brother I have?”—and frowned at a dilatory message from Bulganin on Open Skies.
He changed into golf clothes and played eighteen holes at the Cherry Hills Country Club. After lunching on hamburger and raw onion, he played nine holes more, complaining of heartburn. Someone called him back to the clubhouse for a call from Foster Dulles, but by the time he picked up the telephone, he found that Dulles had gone somewhere else. Irritated, he returned to the course and was called back again. This time, something was wrong with the wire. On the third try, he finally spoke with Dulles and approved a State Department letter to Moscow on arms control.
Once he returned to his game, he was called back again: someone, unaware that Eisenhower and Dulles had already spoken, had placed the call again. The President’s friend and doctor General Howard Snyder later said he had never seen Eisenhower so irate.
Before dawn the next morning, the President writhed in his bed. Mamie asked, “What’s the matter, Ike? Are you having a nightmare?” Snyder pulled up to the house in an Air Force car, divined that Eisenhower had had a heart attack and gave him a shot of morphine, inducing eleven hours of sleep. Only later, after being rushed to Fitzsimons Army Hospital and zipped into an oxygen tent, was the President told the diagnosis. Snyder watched his patient’s eyes fill with tears.
At Lowry, Ann Whitman was weeping. At Fort Belvoir, Virginia, John Eisenhower got the news from a Secret Service man. At his home in the Spring Valley section of Washington, Richard Nixon was called by Jim Hagerty and said, “My God!” Two weeks later, Nixon went to Denver and saw the President, who said, “I never told Mamie how much it hurt.”
In the President’s absence, Foster Dulles told his brother that the Vice President must be fully briefed on current CIA methods and operations. Allen took Nixon on a tour of CIA headquarters and Camp Peary, Virginia, which career men called “the Farm.” Disguised as a Pentagon research site, the Farm had weapons ranges, jump towers and a simulated closed border of a mythical Communist land. Eisenhower had told Nixon that the CIA was planning deep flights into Russia, but not the details. Now the Vice President learned that U-2 pilots were being recruited at this very moment.
Some of the best fliers in the Strategic Air Command went to motels where they were asked to fly for the CIA. While his wife waited in their car outside the Radium Springs in Georgia, Sammy Snider had his encounter with “Bill Collins.” As the pilot later recalled, “We didn’t sleep at all that night. We did an awful lot of talking because it was a big decision. We had a five-month-old baby.” The next day, he returned to the motel and told Collins yes.
The CIA gave Snider, Frank Powers and other recruits aliases and false addresses, which they did their best to memorize so they would not draw a blank when asked. As instructed, they checked into the Du Pont Plaza in Washington and waited in their rooms for a call. The caller told them to gather in another room, where a CIA man searched under beds and dresser drawers for bugging devices. A radio blared music to mask conversation. Collins lamented the border flights’ failure to reach critical Russian targets and pulled a picture of the U-2 from his satchel.
“What do you call it?”
“No one calls it anything publicly yet. This project is so secret that, other than those involved in the operation, only top-level government people know about it. But for your information, it’s been dubbed the—” Someone snapped off the radio to hear better. Collins glared at the offender and did not speak until it was turned back up.
All fliers were evidently cleared for top secret, but since they considered themselves not spies but pilots they chuckled at the cloak-and-dagger methods. All were subjected to the lie detector, which some of the men resented. Each meeting with Collins in Washington was held at a different hotel. Travel was also scheduled to avoid routine: the men moved in groups of one to four, sometimes with Collins, sometimes without.
They flew to the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, which did aero-medical work for the Air Force. Lovelace was the clinic Tom Wolfe made notorious in The Right Stuff. For a week, doctors, nurses and orderlies strapped down, whirled, electroshocked, whirled, probed, inoculated and forced other indignities upon the men who would stray further from the surface of the earth than virtually anyone before. This was the forerunner of the regimen applied three years later to candidates for Project Mercury.
Once the pilots survived Lovelace and an FBI security check, they were in. Contracts tied them to the CIA for eighteen months—$1,500 a month while stateside, $2,500 a month abroad. Five hundred dollars a month would be kept in escrow until contracts were satisfactorily fulfilled. The CIA told the fliers that this was to ease the tax bite; some suspected that the real purpose was to keep them from defecting or selling secret information to the Russians. Pilots were promised reinstatement in the Air Force with no time lost toward promotion or retirement.
“All the pilots in this difficult enterprise were most carefully selected,” Allen Dulles said later. “They were highly trained, highly motivated and, as seemed right, well compensated financially. But no one in his right mind would have accepted these risks for money alone.”
In November 1955, the first newly-minted pilots landed at Watertown Strip. Kelly Johnson called the place Paradise Ranch to boost pilot morale: “It was kind of a dirty trick, since Paradise Ranch was a dry lake where quarter-inch rocks blew around every afternoon.” Life at the Ranch was the nightly tedium of the pool table and poker hand and the daily excitement of shattering the world’s known altitude record (65,889 feet) with flights to Canada, Texas, Wyoming, Tennessee, Baja California. “There was only one thing wrong with flying higher than any other man had ever flown,” recalled Frank Powers. “You couldn’t brag about it.”
The CIA took the pilots to a safe house in the East for escape and evasion training. “We got a chance to fire all the Russian weapons in case we went down somewhere,” Sammy Snider said years later. “We learned lock-picking and how to disarm a guard and kill him if you had to. You’ve evaded for quite a while, there’s a gate in the fence, on the other side is freedom and there’s a guard there.… To this day, I feel confident that if you were guarding me and you had a pistol stuck in my stomach, I could tell you, ‘I feel sorry for you because I’m going to take your gun away from you and I’m going to kill you with it.’”
As with most planes, the U-2’s shakedown period was not free of accident. One day, Richard Bissell was called at his Washington office: a U-2 over the Southwest had suffered a flameout. Bissell called the base commander in Albuquerque, who mustered his troops just in time to screen off the area. The pilot made a dead-stick landing. Bissell worked with Pratt & Whitney on a new engine to solve the problem. Without this change, he later said, “there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that we would have had a flameout and been shot down and what happened that ended the program would have happened right at the start.”
Another pilot taking off from Paradise Ranch found that one of the pogo sticks on wheels supporting the wings through takeoff would not drop off. He flew back over the airstrip but still could not shake it away. Heavy with fuel, his U-2 stalled, crashed and killed him. Another flier at night was blinded by lights at the end of the airstrip and died when he cracked into a telephone pole.
In early 1956, Bissell paid his call on Hugh Dryden, then head of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. Precursor to NASA (the name was changed in 1958), NACA was purely a domestic operation, furnishing information on air turbulence and other weather problems to military and commercial aircraft makers.
Bissell told Dryden about the U-2 and told him what he wanted. NACA would announce the existence of a plane called the U-2 to be used for a NACA weather program. The plane would indeed be used to gather weather information, and NACA would release progress reports to the public. Dryden would get weather information impossible to get from any other plane, but the main purpose would be to disguise Bissell’s intelligence missions.
The proposal made Dryden nervous. In 1956, Congress was by no means resolved to spend vast sums to send men into space. If something went wrong with the U-2 and NACA was exposed as the CIA’s servant, the space program might never get off the ground. Still he felt the “duty to cooperate with an agency that is getting information vital to our national defense.” In the spring of 1956, NACA announced that “a new type of airplane, the Lockheed U-2,” had been developed for use in a new “high-altitude meteorological program with U-2s borrowed from the Air Force.” NACA said that the pilots were civilians borrowed from Lockheed.
Meanwhile American intelligence decided to take another chance at gathering information over Russia from balloons. The take would not only be useful in itself but would help U-2 mission planners to find high-priority targets. In January 1956, the Air Force announced that hundreds of large plastic balloons were being sent to carry “weather instruments” all over the world. The Soviet Union was not excluded.
Late that month, the Soviet Ambassador, Georgi Zaroubin, asked for a meeting with Eisenhower. Foster Dulles feared that the Russians were about to issue “a very strong protest” against the balloons, denounce Open Skies and launch “a worldwide propaganda campaign against the United States, picking up the old charges of warmongering and all the rest.”
“I haven’t thought too much of this balloon thing and I don’t blame the Russians at all,” said the President. “I’ve always thought it was sort of a dirty trick. But that was the gamble we took when we made the decision.”
Zaroubin called on Eisenhower and Dulles in the Oval Office. Afterwards the President laughingly noted that the Russian had not even mentioned the balloons. “Maybe that’s what you get for having somewhat of a guilty conscience,” said Dulles. What the Ambassador wanted was a twenty-year friendship treaty with the United States, which Dulles thought “preposterous.”
The Americans’ luck did not hold. The Russians shot down many of the balloons. At a Moscow press conference, a Red Army colonel warned that the American government could use them to drop anything from Christmas presents to disease-bearing insects intended to start a Soviet epidemic. Reporters were invited to Molotov’s official residence, where they were led around a driveway lined with balloon baskets, gas bags, parachutes, cameras, radio receivers and placards in several languages: “THIS BOX CAME FROM THE SKY. IT IS HARMLESS. IT HAS WEATHER INFORMATION IN IT. NOTIFY THE AUTHORITIES. YOU WILL RECEIVE A VALUABLE REWARD WHEN YOU TURN IT IN AS IT IS.”
At the White House, Eisenhower reminded Dulles that he had been “rather allergic” to the balloon project and doubted that the results justified the risk. Dulles said, “I agree, but I think we should handle it so it would not look as though we had been caught with jam on our fingers.” The President told him not to apologize or concede that the balloons had been sent for espionage. He should simply tell the Soviets that no more would be sent.
Richard Bissell searched for an overseas base from which the U-2 could pierce the Iron Curtain. Given the intimate Anglo-American intelligence partnership, a base in Britain would be most secure. Anthony Eden gave permission to use Lakenheath, a SAC base northeast of London. Bissell flew there with an air attaché from the American Embassy and found it perfect.
In Washington, he walked into another roomful of CIA and Air Force men at the Pentagon. It had been eighteen months since their first conclave. As cigarette smoke curled toward the lights on the ceiling, the training supervisor from Watertown Strip declared that the first detachment of U-2 pilots had been graduated: “This outfit can go anywhere, and it’s all ready.”
NACA announced that it was extending its weather program to Europe, where the “First Provisional Weather Reconnaissance Squadron” would study conditions in the area of the Baltic Sea. A half-dozen U-2 pilots flew to Britain and lodged in an inconspicuous corner at Lakenheath. All they needed now was the word from their Commander-in-Chief.