“Every Blade of Grass”
On the Turkish base after dawn, a naked American stumbled from his trailer, used a baseball bat to beat an empty metal washtub hanging from a rope and cried, “I hate this goddammed place!” For some of the U-2 personnel, the scene became a wake-up ritual. When a rare female visitor saw this spectacle, she shrieked and fled her trailer.
The Second Provisional Weather Squadron was housed ten miles outside Adana, Turkey’s fourth largest city (population 231,548). Nearby was Tarsus, birthplace of St. Paul. Owned by the Turkish government, the Incirlik air base already housed a U.S. Air Force unit that serviced planes crossing the Mideast. NATO rules allowed one member country to ask another’s permission to use its territory for “defense planning.” Thus, as Bissell recalled, he had sent his assistant, James Cunningham, to win the consent of Premier Adnan Menderes to fly from Adana into the Soviet Union.
Menderes was evidently pleased by the prospect of an additional link to the United States and access to U-2 intelligence on Syria, Cyprus and other spots of interest to Turkey. When the U-2 squadron, Detachment 10–10, arrived in Adana, Turkish Air Force men noticed that the new American pilots were under awfully tight security for a weather operation.
Except for the onion domes and camels, the trailers, control tower, runways and desert looked much like Watertown Strip. Thirty miles south was the Mediterranean; sixty miles east was Syria. In the absence of women, “our appearances went to hell,” a U-2 technician recalled. Food was indigestible; the pilots became gaunt. Sometimes they drove into town for dinner at a restaurant, but the CIA warned them of throat-slashers cowering in the shadows.
Weeks passed with no order to fly into Russia. From the grapevine, the pilots knew that colleagues in West Germany had already done so. They did not know that the ban on flying now had been personally imposed by the President. They did not know for certain that Eisenhower was aware of the U-2 program. “I didn’t even know who Mr. Bissell was until the program was over,” Sammy Snider said later. “It was always Mr. B. And what Mr. B. said, happened.”
Pilots played poker and toured mosques, bazaars and Roman ruins. They flew some actual weather missions and soared east along the southern Soviet border to pick up radio and radar signals but wondered whether they would ever get to cross the frontier. Sparse news from the world outside reinforced the sense of restlessness and disconnection. Like most of the world, the fliers were uninformed about the war about to explode in the Mideast.
Britain, France and Israel were on the verge of attacking Egypt. In 1956, the last great French colony, Algeria, was in rebellion: the French government suspected that guerrillas were supported by Egyptian arms and money. Israel was eager to strike its chief Arab enemy. The British were indignant about Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal. To Anthony Eden, this was an obstruction of commerce and an affront to the dignity of the Empire: “The Egyptian has his thumb on our windpipe.”
Eden and French Premier Guy Mollet presumably suspected that Eisenhower would not sanction their cabal so they concealed plans from their ally. British and French intelligence transmissions to Washington dried up. American codebreakers could not decipher all of the radio traffic between London and Paris but noted that it was ominously heavy. Foster Dulles told his brother, “I’m quite worried about what may be going on in the Near East. I don’t think we have any clear picture as to what the British and French are up to there.” The President asked Allen Dulles to send U-2s over the Mideast to find out what was going on.
On September 27, 1956, Francis Gary Powers got his first order to fly over the Mediterranean and watch for concentrations of two ships or more. He and fellow fliers photographed Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Cyprus, where they looked for the gathering of an invasion fleet. As Bissell recalled, “We mapped most of the Middle East.”
By mid-October, the U-2s showed that Israel was mobilizing for war. In his diary, Eisenhower wrote, “Our high-flying reconnaissance planes have shown that Israel has obtained some sixty of the French Mystère pursuit planes, where there had been reported the transfer of only twenty-four.” The jets seemed to have “a rabbitlike capacity for multiplication.” This evidence suggested that despite the British-French-American Tripartite Pact of 1950 to preserve the Mideast status quo, the French were arming Israel and lying about it to Washington.
During the next three weeks, the U-2 was accounted the President’s most reliable source of information on the crisis. Eisenhower expected Israel to attack Jordan, after which Britain and France would exploit the confusion to seize the Canal. On October 26, Allen Dulles convened the CIA’s Watch Committee. Bissell displayed U-2 pictures of French arms being loaded on ships at Toulon and Marseilles and British convoys gathering at Malta and Cyprus: “It doesn’t look as if they’re holding a regatta.” The next day Robert Amory said, “I’m positive the Israelis will attack the Sinai shortly after midnight tomorrow.”
Early on October 29, Israeli paratroopers screened by French fighter planes dropped into the Sinai. Israeli tank forces prepared to move west and south into Egypt. Eisenhower wanted an instant ceasefire: “All right, Foster, you tell ’em that, goddammit, we’re going to do everything that there is so we can stop this thing.”
U-2 flights were stepped up. On October 30, over Egypt, Frank Powers looked down and saw black puffs of smoke, probably the first shots of the first daytime battle in the Sinai. In Washington, Eisenhower said, “I just don’t know what got into these people. It’s the damnedest business I ever saw supposedly intelligent governments getting themselves into.”
On Halloween, a U-2 pilot flew over the main Egyptian military field near Cairo, swung northwest and crossed the field again. This time, planes and hangars were burning fiercely. The CIA reputedly telephoned the incriminating pictures to the Royal Air Force in London, which suavely cabled a thank-you: “QUICKEST BOMB DAMAGE ASSESSMENT WE’VE EVER HAD.” The U-2 revealed that a two-hundred-ship British-French armada was sailing toward Egypt. At one point, Foster and Allen Dulles crawled around the floor of the elder brother’s office, looking at a mosaic of U-2 pictures of the Suez Canal.
These were the final, frantic days of the American Presidential campaign. Eisenhower had to make fast decisions not only on the Mideast but on Hungary’s rebellion against Soviet domination. Combined with uprisings in East Germany and Poland, the Kremlin’s worst nightmare seemed to be coming true. Eisenhower wondered whether the Russians might use “extreme measures” to keep their satellites—“even global war.” Hungarian rebels begged for Western aid. If the CIA was ever to mobilize its network in Eastern Europe, the time was probably now.
But the President would not challenge the Soviets so close to their borders. He denied permission to air-drop arms and supplies; as for troops, Eisenhower said that Hungary was “as inaccessible to us as Tibet.” Two hundred thousand Hungarians fled the country as Soviet tanks crushed bodies in the streets. “Sick at heart,” Robert and Mary Amory sponsored a Hungarian refugee “by way of expiation.”
On November 5, British and French paratroopers landed on the Suez Canal, followed by amphibious landings. From Moscow, Bulganin invited the United States to join the Soviets to stop the invasion and threatened to rain nuclear bombs on London and Paris. Eisenhower presumed that, fearing the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets were hoping to use the Suez crisis to shatter NATO: “Those boys are both furious and scared. Just as with Hitler, that makes for the most dangerous possible state of mind. And we better be damn sure that every intelligence point and every outpost of our armed forces is absolutely right on their toes.… If those fellows start something, we may have to hit ’em—and, if necessary, with everything in the bucket.”
November 6 was Election Day. At 8:37 A.M., Allen Dulles informed the President that the Kremlin had promised Nasser to “do something” in the Mideast: perhaps the Russians would send their air force into Syria. Eisenhower told Dulles to fly the U-2 over Syria and Israel, “avoiding however any flights into Russia.” If the Soviets attacked the British and French, “we would be in war.” Darkly Eisenhower asked whether American forces in the Mediterranean were equipped with atomic anti-submarine weapons.
At nine, the Eisenhowers went to Gettysburg to vote. By noon, they were back; Goodpaster reported that the U-2 had found no Soviet planes on Syrian airfields or moving into Egypt. World War Three was not imminent. That evening, Eisenhower paced the crowded Presidential Suite of the Sheraton Park Hotel, waiting for Adlai Stevenson to concede: “What in the name of God is that monkey waiting for? Polishing his prose?” Finally Stevenson appeared on television. The victor walked away and said, “I’m just looking for a drink.”
Suez ended in cease-fire. The United States became the momentary hero of Third World leaders who would never have believed that Eisenhower would turn his back on his European allies. But in the aftermath of Bulganin’s threat, American-Soviet relations were uneasy. At the White House, Dulles and Bissell asked the President to lift his ban against U-2 flights into Russia. “Why do we need to go in?” asked Eisenhower. “What good will it do?… Everyone in the world says that in the last six weeks, the U.S. has gained a place it hasn’t held since World War Two. To make trips now would cost more than we would gain in solid information.”
“If we lost a plane at this stage, it would be almost catastrophic,” said Herbert Hoover, Jr., of the State Department.
Bissell noted that the new Turkish base was “a better way to get at most of the targets in Russia.” He wished to send the U-2 over Soviet bomber fields, Kapustin Yar, the Ukraine and Caucasus, the cities on the Volga. Apprehensive about Russian moves after Hungary and Suez, the President approved only two shallow flights: “Stay as close to the border as possible and still cover the fields.”
In Turkey, the U-2 commander stopped one of his pilots and said, “You’re it, Powers.” In late November, Frank Powers took the spy plane for the first time from Adana into Soviet airspace. There were evidently also flights over Eastern Europe.
The Russians privately protested. On December 18, Eisenhower told Foster Dulles he was “going to order complete stoppage of the entire business.” Dulles agreed that “our relations with Russia are pretty tense at the moment.” This was no time to be provocative.
Flights resumed in 1957. By now the President and Allen Dulles had fashioned a process for making decisions about the U-2 which served the intelligence community’s need for flights and Eisenhower’s will to supervise. Assisted by an Ad Hoc Requirements Committee, Bissell consulted people in the CIA and other intelligence agencies about targets. Someone might say, “If you could go here, maybe you could just tip the plane a little this way. We just want a look at the next pasture without changing course.”
Then Bissell appealed to Pearre Cabell, a champion of the U-2, and Allen Dulles: “What do you think the chances are?” Either Dulles said there was no chance of approval or, “I’ll speak to my brother about it.” If Dulles came back and reported that “Foster is strongly opposed,” Bissell gave up: the President would never approve a mission without the Secretary of State’s consent. If Foster approved, Allen Dulles called Goodpaster and said, “We are going to recommend an activity on this project and we would like to have a meeting with the President.”
Then one version or another of the standard group assembled in the Oval Office—Eisenhower, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Allen Dulles, Cabell and Bissell. Goodpaster ordinarily stood over the President’s shoulder as Bissell laid out his maps on the desk, lecturing on expected risks and rewards. Eisenhower sometimes said, “I want you to leave out that leg and go straight that way. I want you to go from B to D, because it looks to me like you might be getting a little exposed over here.”
Bissell later explained: “I don’t think he intended to be profound. I think he thought, ‘Maybe they’re getting into a heavily inhabited area and they really don’t need that target. Let’s go from B to D and we’ll shorten it a little bit and we’ll avoid a rocket.’… Remember, the woods are always full of the stories of the unauthorized things that intelligence people do. And he never caught us, because we never did do anything unauthorized.” A few days after the meeting, if the President approved, Goodpaster called Bissell with the go-ahead. Then the coded message was sent overseas.
What happened in Turkey? On the night before a mission, after dinner with his backup, the chosen pilot usually took sleeping pills from an Air Force doctor. Like a best man, the understudy took him back to his trailer and, next morning, woke him up. The pilot showered, shaved, dressed, donned his flight suit and helmet and breathed oxygen through a hose to avoid getting the bends. He could smell nothing but the blast of oxygen mixed with sweat, see nothing but the view through his faceplate, hear nothing but the voices piped into his helmet by radio.
Then he was briefed by a navigator and weather officer. Approval to penetrate Russia was hard to get: if there were clouds over his primary targets, he must take an alternate route. Outside, the backup walked around the U-2 and looked inside the cockpit at switches, levers, knobs, gauges, dials. The pilot’s hose was yanked out and he was attached to a walk-around oxygen bottle. He was driven to the runway and helped into the cockpit. Through his headset he heard his backup reading aloud from a checklist.
The backup jumped into a truck and yelled into his radio, “Taxi into place!” Looking at his wristwatch, he began counting: “Five … four … three … two …” Inside the cockpit, the pilot heard the banshee cry of the engine and the pounding of his heart as the Turkish landscape fell beneath him like a trap door. Then the strange pogo sticks on wheels which supported the wings fell off—with the exception of the day one pogo stayed on and then dropped through the roof of a mosque. Worshippers thought it had fallen from paradise.
Once across the Soviet air frontier, the pilot knew that the Soviet military was more than likely tracking his plane and scrambling to shoot him down. There were other reasons for tension. Despite engine improvements, the U-2 was still vulnerable to flameouts. In the thin air around seventy thousand feet, the engine would go sometimes go WHUMP and all would be silent, the plane dropping and the pilot praying his engine would restart at lower altitude. Once one pilot fell to five hundred feet before his engine revived. Mercifully this was outside Soviet territory.
U-2 fliers rarely conceded the possibility of a fatal crash. This was the ethic of the fighter pilot: his plane would not go down, and if by some fluke it did, he would nonetheless survive. When he flew into Russia, Sammy Snider took pleasure in reminding himself that without the U-2 information, the U.S. Air Force would be groping in the dark if it came to a Third World War: “I could see someone pushing that red button and here go the B-36s driving across Russia to their target and the navigator looking at his maps and saying, ‘Okay, bombardier, we’re three minutes from target.’ And the bombardier looking out and saying, ‘Hey, there ain’t no target out there! Where in hell are we?’”
Other compensation was the experience of sailing through the midnight blue stratosphere; of looking down on mysterious regions like the Ukraine, the Urals, Siberia; discovering cities and airfields and missile sites that no American had known of before; photographing night launchings of Soviet rockets whose fire lit the black skies for hundreds of miles in all directions.
Once on the ground, the pilot limped from his plane, his head and inner ears splitting from hours on oxygen, his bladder and bowels distended. A tow bar was fastened to the tail wheel, the wings propped up, the plane towed into the hangar. Film, tape and other product were sent to America. Under glaring lights, the pilot answered dozens of questions: Did you get off course? How did the cameras work? Were the maps accurate? All over the U-2 section of the base, the waiting was over; life returned to normal.
Later when the Mercury astronauts were presented to the world, the U-2 pilots could not help but dwell on the comparisons. The astronauts were instant heroes before a single man had climbed a gantry at Cape Canaveral. If Project Mercury succeeded, they would be deluged with offers from business, politics and Hollywood and decorated by the President in the Rose Garden.
Like the spacemen, the U-2 pilots were soldiers in the American-Soviet competition. But they were to the astronauts as mistresses were to wives. If the program succeeded, they might return to the Air Force with more money than they had dreamed of. They might win medals from the CIA, but if so, they probably would be barred from showing them to anyone. Perhaps only on some distant day might they have the satisfaction of telling their grandchildren about the elation and perils of flying far into the Soviet Union during the bleak years of the Cold War.
On the day after a U-2 flight, Richard Bissell usually gave a report at Allen Dulles’s morning briefing. As Bissell recalled, the negatives were guarded “as a crown jewel.” CIA quickly searched the film for crucial targets. The National Security Agency and other agencies studied the tape and other material.
“From the time the film was recovered, the responsibility was all mine,” said Robert Amory. He recalled that in 1952, when he became Deputy Director for Intelligence, CIA photointerpretation consisted largely of “a guy named Brown, who’d come in half a week and look at old German photos.” Amory wished to build up his operation; he recruited Arthur Lundahl, a University of Chicago geology graduate whose photointerpretation skills were well regarded by his Navy superiors. “If you’re going to parachute me into Salerno or something, forget it,” Lundahl said. “I’m a scientist.” But Lundahl finally agreed and, as Amory recalled, “he mobilized a splendid team.”
In December 1954, Lundahl was called to the Director’s office. With Bissell standing nearby, Allen Dulles gave him the disconcerting news that he was being relieved of all of his duties. Then the two men showed him plans for the U-2 and told him that he must swiftly build an organization to analyze the expected photographs.
Lundahl leased fifty thousand feet of office space on the upper floors of a Ford repair shop at Fifth and K Streets, northwest of the U.S. Capitol. The neighborhood was so ramshackle that Lundahl thought it an excellent cover: who would imagine that the U.S. government would house a vital national security operation among winos and muggers?
The operation was code-named HTAUTOMAT. Years later, Lundahl chuckled at the memory of Richard Nixon, Foster Dulles and other high officials rolling up in limousines for briefings on U-2 findings and having to step across rats and garbage to make it into the building. Lundahl’s downstairs neighbors apparently never knew what was going on: when they saw U-2 couriers rushing in guarded by men with machine guns, they figured that the government must be using the offices to print money.
Lundahl’s growing number of analysts used the U-2 photography in conjunction with previous intelligence about the areas under study—maps, statistics, reports from tourists and secret agents, old pictures from ground and air. “It was a whole new ball game,” said Amory. “I remember Art telling me that the raw film that came in each time to Westover Air Force Base, if laid down, would cover all four lanes of the Baltimore-Washington Turnpike from beginning to end.” During the Second World War, British intelligence had scored a secret triumph by breaking German codes. Now, as the CIA’s Ray Cline said, “Photography became to the fifties what codebreaking was to the forties.”
Richard Helms found the U-2 material “mindboggling in that it was so much larger and fuller and more accurate than anything we’d been able to come up with.” But Helms was distressed by Bissell’s low opinion of the value of running secret agents into foreign countries. He worried that the “gadgeteers” would so dazzle the Agency that “everyone would forget the historic side of it.” He told colleagues, “You just can’t do away with the human side.”
After the U-2 material was digested, Allen Dulles, Bissell, Lundahl and other analysts briefed the President. To the West Wing, Lundahl brought magnifying glasses and huge boards—“as big as your couch, forty by sixty inches. You could see the guys walking around down there and all the small details.” Usually the President was briefed in the Oval Office. For larger groups, Lundahl stood the enlargements on an easel at the end of the Cabinet table. Sometimes Goodpaster asked for a quick once-over in the West Wing basement with its deep leather sofas, maps and war-room atmosphere.
Asking his usual volley of questions, Eisenhower put on and snatched off his reading glasses as his eyes darted up and down the pictures of factories, railroads, highways, bomber fields and submarine pens. Once the President slapped an analyst on the back and said what a mistake it had been to staff Army intelligence with castoffs before Pearl Harbor: “Thank God for you careerists who came in during the war!”
In 1957, the U-2 operation in West Germany was phased down. Bissell had moved the first squadron from Wiesbaden to Giebelstadt, closer to the East German border. Soon some thought the new base compromised: pilots noticed a car parked near a runway that was later traced to an Eastern bloc government. Bissell moved the squadron to Adana. But from Turkey, it was hard to reach the critical eastern regions of the Soviet Union.
That year, a third U-2 detachment was sent to the U.S. Marine base in Atsugi, Japan. Japan was still emerging from postwar occupation. As Bissell recalled, the 1951 peace treaty did not require the American government to ask permission of the Japanese Prime Minister, Nobusuke Kishi, to fly the U-2 from a U.S. base, but Kishi was informed. Marines were puzzled by the strange-looking plane and its distinctive scream: “Some of us would run out of the hut just to watch it take off.”
Adana and Atsugi became the workhorses of the program. From these bases Bissell also staged U-2 missions that took off or landed in Pakistan, Iran, Norway and elsewhere. Offering air bases to serve American violations of Soviet airspace put the host governments at grave risk. As Charles Bohlen privately told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1957, “The Soviets believe that great powers have a certain dispensation to behave badly. This is not for little powers.” With little powers, Moscow need not worry about picking on someone its own size. “The Pakistanis were always worrywarts,” said Robert Amory. “The Norwegians were firm, but they damned well didn’t like the Bodö field.”
By Bissell’s recollection, the Shah said yes during private talks with a CIA man in Tehran—“I think maybe the station chief, who was very intimate with the Shah.” Norway “was done, I am pretty sure, through Norwegian intelligence and the Norwegian air force.”
Washington promised host governments that if use of their soil for U-2 flights was ever revealed, the United States would declare it had waged the incursions without their approval. Allen Dulles: “One thing that we never reveal at any time is any association or possible association of our allies with us.” These countries were not simply tugging their forelocks and bowing to the wishes of Uncle Sam. As in diplomacy, America’s intelligence partnerships with smaller powers were based on mutual need and obligation. The Shah had only lately been rescued by the CIA, which was now training his intelligence service, SAVAK. The Pentagon was grooming his armed forces to make Iran an island of stability in the Middle East.
The American government wanted a base in Pakistan, but Pakistani leaders were less pliable. When the CIA asked to fly the U-2 from Pakistan into Russia, they evidently complained about the current rate of American military aid. In January 1957, Eisenhower approved a three-year increase. One month later, facilities for housing personnel, planes and equipment were under construction on a corner of the Peshawar airfield.
By Bissell’s recollection, James Cunningham made arrangements with Pakistan’s military leader, General Mohammed Ayub Khan, for flying the U-2 from Lahore and Peshawar. Ayub Khan was said to be proud of his hard bargaining. He probably did not know that the CIA expected the U-2 flights into Russia to end after just a few years: if permission to fly the U-2 from Pakistan was part of the quid pro quo, then his power to demand renewed aid would be diminished.
The General shared power with his fellow Sandhurst man, President Iskander Mirza. Eager to end the chaos that had long rent Pakistan and to win dominance for himself, Ayub Khan flew to Washington in May 1958, where he golfed at Burning Tree and lunched with Allen Dulles. That October in Karachi, Mirza was sleeping in the Presidential mansion when three generals arrived, drew pistols and said his services were no longer needed. He called the American Embassy and was told that the Ambassador was unavailable. This he took to be the handwriting on the wall. He flew to exile in London.
In his exile, Mirza told his son that he had had no objection to U-2 flights from Pakistan: the main thing that had turned the Americans against him was his refusal to countenance a long-term American base. Indeed in 1959, Ayub Khan signed a ten-year lease for an American base at Peshawar, but more likely, the United States felt that Ayub Khan had the better chance of curbing instability in Pakistan and ensuring American interests. Asked years later about Mirza’s version of his ouster, Bissell said, “Broadly and generally, it strikes me as a lot of nonsense. I can’t believe that the U.S. government would be so stupid as to base their whole attitude to a foreign political leader on whether he’ll lease a base or not.… Mirza was taking much more of a risk in letting the U-2 fly out of there than in leasing some ground on a base.” Bissell did not go further and deny any American involvement in the coup.
Perhaps the most sensitive partnership of all was between Washington and London, which in 1957 was recovering from the rupture of Suez. Since the start of the Second World War, it had been a close-knit union of Romans and Greeks: the Americans drew on Britain’s old knowledge of intelligence tradecraft, the British on the superior military and technological resources of the United States. Gluttons for secrecy, the British lamented what they saw as inadequate security-consciousness in Washington, the Americans what they saw as British condescension. But both sides needed each other.
In 1957, frustrated by Eisenhower’s reluctance to sanction U-2 flights, Richard Bissell suggested converting the program into a joint project with the British. Since the start of the program, British agents had been briefed on U-2 flights and provided with much of the product. Bissell proposed that both the President and Harold Macmillan, who had succeeded Eden in January, be designated to order a mission. He told colleagues that he wanted a situation where either the President or the Prime Minister could say yes: the one thing he did not want was a situation where both of them had to say yes.
Eisenhower and Macmillan approved the plan. The Royal Air Force sent pilots for training at Watertown Strip. RAF officers were dispatched to Washington and Adana. The British sent timing, route and target requirements to the CIA, which laid out several flights into Russia made by British pilots flying American U-2s. These missions were flown by Macmillan’s permission and, at least theoretically, were not an American enterprise.
By now, CIA men called the U-2 fleet “R.B.A.F.”—Richard Bissell’s Air Force. Bissell was presented with an “R.B.A.F.” coffee mug emblazoned “OUR LEADER.” He later said, “With a week’s warning, I could take a photograph of any spot on the earth. For anything that was within reach of one of our detachments—most of European Russia, most of Siberia, all of China, the whole Middle East, the whole Mediterranean Basin, the whole of Southeast Asia—I could fly anywhere in the world with about forty-eight hours’ notice.”
He was especially proud of the minuet by which he staged flights from Pakistan: “A C-130 would fly in there with all kinds of stuff and people on it with the mission pilot.… Then the U-2 would fly in and be refueled and the mission pilot put in place and take off.… At least on the first mission, the recovery base was a little airstrip in eastern Iran—nothing but a strip in the desert south of Meshed, near the Baluchistan border. He came in, landed, got into the C-130, the ferry pilot got into the U-2, and they all went back to Adana. It was a very neat, precision operation. Everything had to go on schedule and did go on schedule.”
From Peshawar, the U-2 searched for targets including atomic energy installations along the Trans-Siberian Railway and a large down-range radar array that was a terminal site for missile firings from Kapustin Yar. Pilots gathered information that helped the CIA to learn of Soviet nuclear test explosions, their location, force and fallout. Bissell said, “We ran sort of a milk run for a number of months where one U-2 would fly a true weather mission daily to the North Pole and another would fly a daily mission to the South Pole and back.” From Alaska, the plane soared over the Kamchatka Peninsula, which was the down-range end of long-range missile tests launched from Tyuratam. These flights were, by Bissell’s recollection, the only U-2 penetrations of the Soviet Union from American soil.
Espionage in China had always been a problem for the West. It was hard to slip a white man into a sea of Asians, especially in a police state. After the 1949 revolution, the CIA sent Nationalist volunteers onto the mainland by parachute and rubber boat to hide among old friends and family while seeking information. Ray Cline, Taipei station chief, sometimes sat in the radio shack above the city waiting for signals from his agents: “It was heartbreaking when, after a time, they came through with the prearranged coded signal that indicated that the radio operator had been captured.”
The U-2 was a safer method. From Taiwan, Bissell sent pilots over the Chinese missile range in Kansu province and the nuclear test site at Lop Nor. One mission reputedly produced a photo of what looked like a long-range missile aimed directly at Taipei. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a twelfth-century watchtower.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite into orbit. Americans ran to their lawns and saw Sputnik’s distant light soaring through the dark. An NBC announcer said, “Listen now for the sound which forevermore separates the old from the new,” and millions heard the eerie beep—beep—beep from outer space. The President asked his staff and Cabinet to greet Sputnik with calm poise. “We never thought of our program as one which was in a race with the Soviets,” said Jim Hagerty. Sherman Adams said the U.S. wasn’t interested in “an outer-space basketball game.”
Eisenhower had been braced for Sputnik. That summer, a U-2 had photographed a rocket on the launching pad at Tyuratam. But he had not fully anticipated how the Russian achievement would shatter the self-confidence of the nation which, until now, had thought of itself as the mightiest, best-educated and most advanced society in the world. Senator Henry Jackson demanded a “National Week of Shame and Danger.”
Many Americans did not realize that launching an earth satellite was not the same thing as dropping a bomb on a target; some presumed that Khrushchev now had the technology and missiles in hand to launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States. On November 3, the Russians sent up a second Sputnik with a dog aboard. Eisenhower’s Gallup Poll rating dropped twenty-two points.
The White House scheduled a Presidential television speech. Foster Dulles asked Eisenhower to consider disclosing that “the United States has the capability of photographing the Soviet Union from a very high altitude without interference,” but the President refused: it might calm the public, but why compromise the program after only sixteen months? Besides, it would aggravate the Soviets at a moment of tension. Instead Eisenhower accelerated the American missile program and hired James Killian as the first Presidential assistant for science and technology.
This did not satisfy critics. For six years, some had searched vainly for Eisenhower’s Achilles heel. Now they charged him with complacency. “It is not very reassuring to be told that next year, we will put a better satellite in the air,” said Lyndon Johnson. “Perhaps it will even have chrome trim—and automatic windshield wipers.”
On November 25, the President suffered a stroke. Richard Nixon and Foster Dulles told each other that the unprecedented criticism may have been the cause. Eisenhower quickly recovered; within three weeks, he flew to Paris for a NATO meeting. Still the First Lady worried about his health: “I’m not so sure we’re ever going to be able to live in Gettysburg.”
December was not much better. At Cape Canaveral, a rocket designed to launch the first American satellite exploded on the launch pad. The Washington Post leaked the findings of a Presidential commission on civil defense: “The still top-secret Gaither Report portrays a United States in the gravest danger in its history.… It shows an America exposed to an almost immediate threat from the missile-bristling Soviet Union.” In fact, Eisenhower had privately shelved many of the panel’s conclusions on grounds that they lacked “certain vital information” like the U-2 material. But the public did not know this and the clamor grew.
Sputnik and the Gaither Report threw into partisan politics an issue that had heretofore been principally debated behind closed doors by American intelligence and the Pentagon. It all began with the Bomber Gap. By 1954, the Russians had developed a long-range bomber that Americans dubbed the Bison. In April 1954, American air attachés saw twelve to twenty Bisons in the distance. From this and other intelligence, the Air Force reasoned that the Soviets might have as many as forty of the planes off the production line. This was only months after Albert Wohlstetter’s warning about the vulnerability of SAC bases to a Soviet strike. If the Soviets had enough bombers, they might well be able to wage a successful surprise attack on the United States.
July 1955 brought a worse scare. On Soviet Aviation Day, Western attachés reported seeing ten Bisons flying by, then nine more and nine more again. The Air Force concluded that the Russians must have built twice that number. Combining this with a host of other data, Generals Twining, LeMay and their cohorts warned Congress in the spring of 1956 that Russia’s long-range bomber fleet might be twice the size of SAC’s by 1959. Their concern was sincere; they also knew that evidence of a massive Soviet bomber program would inspire a budget large enough for an American counterpart.
Then came the U-2. Early flights over bomber bases in the western Soviet Union and the Moscow plant that produced the Bison found no hard evidence of a massive effort to build long-range bombers. Nor did other sources. Some in Washington wondered whether the Bisons on Aviation Day might actually have been the same planes flying twice across the reviewing stand. Sputnik altered anxieties over a Bomber Gap: American analysts still assumed that the Russians wished to build a mammoth nuclear force aimed at North America, but now they assumed it would be done with missiles.
Nineteen fifty-eight was the year of the Missile Gap. “At the Pentagon, they shudder when they speak of the Gap, which means the years 1960, 1961, 1962 and 1963,” wrote Stewart and Joseph Alsop in their column. “They shudder because in those years, the American government will flaccidly permit the Kremlin to open an almost unchallenged superiority in the nuclear striking power that was once our superiority.” Many Americans feared that if the Russians were first to deploy an ICBM, they would gain a decisive military edge over the United States. The President thought that American deterrence would be sound until the Russians gained the power to destroy virtually all of America’s bomber bases at once. But a National Intelligence Estimate in 1958 warned that the Russians could have a hundred ICBMs by 1959 or 1960—enough to do the job.
Anxiety over a Missile Gap made intelligence more urgent, but by 1958, Eisenhower was less willing to authorize U-2 flights into Russia. As Bissell recalled, the reason was “fear of being shot down and simply fear of provocation.” Andrew Goodpaster said, “It always distressed Eisenhower that he was doing this, and it was only out of necessity … an ugly necessity.” Three weeks after Sputnik, Bissell had asked for more flights but the President refused, saying, “It might be best to ‘lie low’ for a while in the present tense international circumstances.”
In January 1958, when Foster Dulles and General Twining appealed for more missions, Eisenhower warned that they might trigger “a Soviet reaction which, superficially at least, might seem justified.” Perhaps Khrushchev would strike West Berlin. Twining voiced his doubts: flights into Russia had been “a rather regular practice for the last ten years.” Why should the Russians retaliate now?
On March 6, the Soviet Embassy gave the State Department a note protesting a violation of Soviet airspace in the Far East. In the Oval Office, the President told Dulles, “Such infractions must be discontinued. We should reply to the Soviets by saying that we were not aware of the matter referred to, but that strong measures are being taken to prevent any reoccurrence.” Weren’t American generals always talking about retaliation if Soviet bombers ever neared the United States? “The Soviets might have the same attitude and might misinterpret the overflight as being designed to start a nuclear war.”
Goodpaster called Allen Dulles and asked him to stop “further operations contemplated in the plan for special reconnaissance activities.” Later, flights resumed. The Russians issued another protest on April 21.
During the lull, Bissell used the U-2 to monitor the Indonesian rebellion. By the spring of 1958, President Sukarno had expropriated Dutch private holdings, brought Communists into his government and asked Moscow for military aid. The President asked Allen Dulles to launch a $10 million effort to topple him. Rebels got CIA money and arms. To stir the people into panic, Guatemala-style, bomber pilots secretly employed by the CIA roared over the islands. When Sukarno charged American involvement and warned the United States not to “play with fire,” Eisenhower told a press conference that “our policy is one of careful neutrality.”
On May 18, one of the bomber pilots, Allen Pope, was shot down. As with the U-2, the CIA had told fliers to strip themselves of anything that might tie them to the American government, but Pope had disobeyed. Sukarno’s forces threw him into jail, showed off the pilot’s documents and planned a lavish trial castigating the United States. Much of the Western press described Pope as an American “soldier of fortune,” but the President could hardly keep on claiming that the United States was neutral. Allen Dulles ordered his men to disengage. The revolt collapsed, Sukarno tightened his grip on Indonesia and Eisenhower was presented with an example of insubordination that undermined his foreign policy and nearly caused him grave embarrassment.
There were more to come. In July, an RB-47 reconnaissance plane flew into Soviet airspace over the Caspian and narrowly escaped. Foster Dulles told the President he didn’t know why it happened but thought it was a “permissible” mistake. “I am of the opinion it is not permissible,” barked Eisenhower. “I am getting weary of orders being disobeyed—and someone should be fired.” That same month, the Soviets protested incursions by U.S. Air Force balloons that the President had earlier ordered the Air Force to stop.
Eisenhower blew his top. He told an aide that if he had done “some of the things that have been done in the last few days,” he would have shot himself. “People in the service either ought to obey orders or get the hell out of the service!” He told Defense Secretary Neil McElroy that “there is disturbing evidence of a deterioration in the processes of discipline and responsibility within the Armed Forces.” He wanted action at once: “The harm done by this type of thing to the conduct of our international affairs and to our national security is obvious.”
Although the President did not know it, the U-2 program was not exempt from this lack of discipline. One reason for this was that the men who flew the planes had not cut their teeth as CIA agents but as daredevil pilots. Like Allen Pope, some U-2 fliers carried identification over Russia; one, by his own account, managed to smoke cigarettes while flying his plane. This was outside the Soviet Union and presumably at low altitude, yet one need only imagine Eisenhower’s reaction had this been reported to him.
In Moscow, Khrushchev claimed that the Soviet Union was cranking out missiles “like sausages.” But the U-2 found no hard evidence of crash Soviet long-range missile production. Instead the black planes and other sources discovered failures and delays: by August 1958, the Russians had evidently launched only six ICBMs, a trivial number if they were to deploy a hundred by 1959 or 1960. James Killian showed the President U-2 pictures “which showed how far behind they were.” By now, Killian and other scientists realized how complex it was to build long-range missiles, launchers and other apparatus: even if the Russians had secretly managed to build dozens of missiles, it was doubtful that they could have many ready to fire.
The first model of Soviet ICBM, dubbed the SS-6 by Americans, was so large and heavy that it had to be moved along railroad tracks and heavy roads that were not difficult for the U-2 to survey. Air Force officers argued that the Russians could be hiding the missiles in barns, silos, monasteries and strange-looking buildings in Siberia. One CIA man later recalled that “to the Air Force, every flyspeck on film was a missile.” In August 1958, Stuart Symington came to the Oval Office and told Eisenhower that he was being too complacent. The President replied that whatever Symington’s sources in Air Force intelligence, he could not possibly know everything that a President knew. He did not mention the U-2.
Eisenhower had long been horrified by the prospect of spending “unconscionable sums” for defense far into the future. He believed that the high taxes and deficits required would sap productivity, fuel inflation and ruin the American system: “Any person who doesn’t clearly understand that national security and national solvency are mutually dependent and that permanent maintenance of a crushing weight of military power would eventually produce dictatorship should not be entrusted with any kind of responsibility in our country.”
The notion of a military-industrial establishment and Cold War psychosis feeding off of each other disturbed him. He was disgusted by advertisements placed by defense contractors in Aviation Week and the “selfish” demands especially of Air Force generals. When Neil McElroy once warned him that further budget cuts might harm American security, he replied, “If you go to any military installation in the world where the American flag is flying and tell the commander that Ike says he’ll give him an extra star for his shoulder if he cuts his budget, there’ll be such a rush to cut costs that you’ll have to get out of the way.” And: “God help the nation when it has a President who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do.”
The President believed that the greatest threat to national security was being frightened into an eternal arms race that would induce wild inflation and ultimate national bankruptcy. He was as skeptical of the Missile Gap as he had been of the much-feared invasion of Western Europe a decade before. He sent Goodpaster to look through old intelligence warnings of a Bomber Gap and list the false assumptions that had underlain them. Eisenhower was determined to keep a tight rein on the Pentagon: he reduced conventional forces and increased American reliance on nuclear defense in order to hold military spending to roughly $40 billion per year. Average annual inflation was held down to just over one percent throughout his Presidency.
Eisenhower’s caution about Soviet missiles and American defense inspired public caricature as a doddering Micawber. In public, Richard Nixon stood by the President. In private, he let it be known among influential journalists that he opposed Eisenhower’s parsimony on defense. He confidentially told the Alsop brothers that the President “regards me as a political expert only. If I try to speak up on defense matters, say, from a strict military point of view, he says, ‘What does this guy know about it?’ So I put the case on a political basis.… Well, Eisenhower said the greatest danger was national bankruptcy, and he had the final decision.… You’ve got to realize that a Vice President is in a very special position, a difficult position.”
Nixon suggested that McElroy was “a fine man, a very charming guy,” but not a tough Secretary of Defense: “There just aren’t enough sons-of-bitches about now. You know what I mean? That’s an impossible job anyway, but you need a son-of-a-bitch in it.” He complained about the President’s aversion to public conflict: “You know, there is this myth now, that a man has to be noncontroversial, that everybody’s got to like, that he never gets into fights—this ‘togetherness’ bullshit. I don’t believe in that. I think the time will come when we’ll look back at this era and ask ourselves whether we were crazy or something.”
Joseph Alsop wrote to Isaiah Berlin, “One prays—how odd it seems!—for the course of nature to transfer the burden to Nixon (who exactly resembles an heir to a very rich family … now utterly distraught because Papa has grown a little senile and spends his time throwing the family fortune out the window—really he is like that, I lunched with him the other day, and he all but asked me how it was possible to argue with a ramolli papa without getting disinherited yourself!)”
In the Oval Office, the President excoriated the “sanctimonious, hypocritical bastards” making hay from the false issue of the Missile Gap. But he could not fully rebut them without revealing classified intelligence: revealing the U-2 evidence would compromise the program. As Thomas Gates said, “We had the dope, but we couldn’t say we were flying the U-2.” Eisenhower was agonized by his inability to meet the public attack with full force.
In the fall of 1958, Allen Dulles asked Bissell to take over the CIA’s covert action department as Deputy Director for Plans. As Robert Amory said, “Once Bissell had the U-2 behind him, he could do no wrong.” Unsure he wanted to seal his career so permanently in secrecy, Bissell took ten days to think it over before saying yes. When he moved into his new office, he asked young aides to handle overnight cable traffic and somewhat circumvented Richard Helms, his inherited deputy. Helms bore this with characteristic stoicism, but this sometimes lapsed: once he reputedly told a colleague, “Why don’t you take it up with Wonder Boy next door?”
From his new post, Bissell continued to manage the U-2 program. Through 1958, the black planes informed CIA on Soviet sites including the weapons plant near Alma-Ata, the defensive missile test site at Sary-Shagan, the nuclear test ranges at Novaya Zemlya and Semipalatinsk. Combined with information from other sources like the American listening post at Samsun, Turkey, Washington was often able to announce Soviet missile and nuclear tests before Moscow did.
Allen Dulles later said, “We would get some indication, for example, that there was some nuclear development in Tomsk. We wouldn’t know much about it, but we targeted the flights on the basis of all the intelligence that we had and then, of course, we picked up a good many things that had not been covered by intelligence.”
The CIA had known about Kapustin Yar since 1947 but not about the newer missile testing site at Tyuratam until early 1957, when it was located by radar and the U-2. A U-2 pilot flew from Peshawar to Bodö, roughly the same route as that assigned Frank Powers on May Day 1960. “I remember about a week after that flight when Tyuratam was sighted and we had a session in Allen’s office,” said Bissell. “Art Lundahl came in and he had a complete scale model of Tyuratam—everything in it.”
Before the U-2, the Joint Chiefs had been myopic in choosing Soviet targets. Operational and target planners had often been forced to depend on maps of Czarist vintage, captured German aerial photographs from the early Second War, even the 1912 edition of Baedeker’s. They had known precious little about the large new cities and installations beyond the Urals. After the flights into Russia began, Lawrence Houston of the CIA went to Omaha and asked a colonel in SAC’s targeting section, “What has been the impact on your work of the U-2 project?”
“As far as Russia and Siberia are concerned, we’ve had to start over from scratch.”
Houston said, “That’s just what I wanted to hear.” During the years in which the U-2 flew across the Soviet Union, the American list of potential Soviet targets rose from roughly three to twenty thousand.
The U-2 brought a measure of stability to the nervous relations between the United States and Soviet Union. By providing intelligence that helped to reassure Eisenhower that Moscow was planning neither a surprise attack nor a crash missile program, the U-2 allowed him to resist enormous post-Sputnik pressures from the Pentagon, Congress and the public to escalate the arms race. By exposing large portions of the Soviet military complex, it enabled him to allocate American defense resources more effectively. A few American generals thought that knowing the United States could fly over their territory at will was making the Russians a bit less cocky.
“One thing that’s always amused me is that after the first week of flights, when they tracked two or three of them, when you stop and think of it, the Russians knew almost everything significant about the U-2,” Bissell said years later. “They could estimate its range. They knew its altitude pretty well. They obviously knew its speed. Pretty clearly they could infer, at least, that it was a reconnaissance aircraft. And so what else is there that is really important to know?
“Yet for three and a half years, this remained one of the most highly classified programs that the U.S. operated. And for those three and a half years, aside from three diplomatic protests, the Russians never said anything about it.… The Russians were not about to admit to the whole world, or especially their own people, that the U.S. could overfly them at will and with impunity.… You can almost say that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. governments collaborated in keeping this program secret from the U.S. and Russian publics.… It seems to me that with quite a lot of intelligence activities, each side tacitly better preserve the other side’s secrets.… This thing went on for three years or more and, aside from a dozen people in Moscow, nobody got inflamed.”
What about the dozen people in Moscow?
In the nuclear age, when both sides could destroy each other, American policy-makers were sometimes inclined to presume that Soviet anxieties were largely a mirror image of their own. This was not altogether sensible. For most of its history, the United States had been protected by two oceans. Its northern border was undefended; millions of Latin Americans crossed the Texas border without arousing a war scare among the American people.
This luxurious sense of geographical security was alien to Russia with its ancient history of invasion by Scythians, Khazars, Visigoths, Avars, Varangians, Huns, Mongols, Tatars, Swedes, Poles, Turks, Teutons and Napoleonic hordes. In 1918, the fledgling Soviet Union struggled against Allied intervention and in 1941 against invasion by Hitler’s armies. No matter that the Czars and their heirs had expansionist ambitions themselves. What Soviets drummed into their populace in schools, the press, by billboards and lectures was how often they had been injured by foreign invasion. This was used to justify the obsessive secrecy and brutal will of the Soviet government.
In the Bolshevik parlance, the Soviet Union was faced with “capitalist encirclement.” In the 1950s, this meant Western bases in Britain, West Germany, Turkey, Iran, Japan and other states, eavesdropping gear on land and sea, spy planes that played cat-and-mouse with Soviet fighters along the Soviet perimeter. Added to this was Soviet sensitivity about foreign subversion and espionage—CIA agents dropped into the Ukraine, British businessmen “caught red-handed,” other incidents that propagandists inflated and endlessly repeated to increase national vigilance.
What made the Russians feel most insecure, of course, was their military inferiority. Soviet secrecy was not only an expression of national character but a deliberate instrument of national defense. Concealing the Soviet military complex made Western targeting more difficult and allowed Khrushchev to panic Western governments and citizens with false claims of military buildups and awesome new weapons.
The U-2 was capable of arousing virtually every major Soviet anxiety: it took off from Turkey, Japan and other Western bases (encirclement) to violate Soviet frontiers (invasion) for espionage (espionage) in the course of which it photographed and eavesdropped on the Soviet military (lack of secrecy) and confirmed Soviet weakness (military inferiority). The black plane had the potential to undermine the authority of the regime: What might the Soviet people say if they learned that their government was unable to perform the most fundamental task of protecting them from foreign invaders?
As Eisenhower noted, the worst risk was that the Russians would mistake the U-2 for a nuclear bomber. The U-2’s size and shape did not suggest a bomber, but given imperfect Soviet radar and rumored American developments in lightweight nuclear weapons, some Soviet general might interpret the blip on his screen as the spearhead of a surprise nuclear attack and launch World War Three.
Anyone in Washington who convinced himself that the Soviets had grown resigned to the U-2 had only to listen in 1958, when Andrei Gromyko publicly complained about SAC atomic bombers that routinely flew to the edge of the Soviet Union and turned back: “Mankind has several times been on the brink of war, which could have flared up instantly through irresponsible or provocative actions of the U.S. Air Force.” The State Department replied that American proposals to protect against surprise attack like Open Skies were designed not only to defend one side against the other, but also “to give each side knowledge of the activity of the other so as to reduce fears and misjudgments.”
Khrushchev himself gave the Soviet rebuttal: “Aircraft flights of one country over another’s territory, which the Open Skies plan provides for, do not further the solution of the disarmament problem. The peoples of our countries will hardly feel very safe and have peace and tranquility if American planes started flying up and down our land while Soviet planes plowed the American skies at a time of tension and distrust between us. Wouldn’t it be more correct to expect the opposite?”
Since the start of the U-2 program, the National Security Agency had continued to load intelligence gear onto planes that flew along the Soviet border, recording emissions from Soviet radar, microwave and ground communications. Some of the most important radar could only be set off by actual border violation. Pilots played “fox-and-hounds,” storming the border and then pulling away at the last moment. Sometimes they did not pull away.
In June 1958, nine CIA men under Air Force cover were flying a courier mission from Adana to Tehran in one of the two C-118s used by Allen Dulles as his personal plane. Highly secret papers were in the tail compartment; some evidently described U-2 missions in the Mideast and other governments’ participation in the program. The plane strayed into Soviet Armenia. Two Russian MiG pilots rose into the air and fired.
Five of the men jumped; the other four rode the burning plane to the ground. Some who survived were badly beaten by their Russian captors. One was reportedly about to be lynched from a telephone pole when police broke up the screaming mob. Nine days later, the Americans were released to the State Department on the Soviet-Iranian border. Pearre Cabell had departed the plane in Wiesbaden just hours before it was shot down. The Soviets apparently did not know how close they had come to capturing the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.
On September 2, an EC-130 spy plane with electronics experts aboard crossed into Armenia. NSA technicians in Turkey heard and recorded the radio transmission of a Russian MiG pilot firing on the American plane: “There’s a hit.… The tail assembly is falling off.… That will finish him, boys.” The Russians protested the violation and brought six badly mutilated bodies to the Turkish border. The State Department asked why the Soviets had fired on an unarmed plane—and where were the other eleven passengers? The Soviets said they had not fired on the plane—it had crashed on its own. They had no further information.
Eisenhower wanted his eleven crewmen back. NSA had its taped evidence that Russia had fired on the plane. Revealing it publicly would constitute the first time the United States conceded publicly that it eavesdropped on the Soviet Union. The President did not care; he thought it might shame the Soviets into releasing the men. Mikhail Menshikov, the new Soviet Ambassador, was called to the State Department, where the American diplomat Robert Murphy told him that he was about to play the tape. Menshikov said that he was no technician and walked out.
The damning transcript was leaked to the New York Times and published on page one, but the eleven Americans were never heard from again. There was speculation that some had survived the crash and been beaten to death by the Russians, and that the Kremlin was too embarrassed to release their remains to Washington.
“The significance of these incidents wasn’t lost on us,” recalled Frank Powers. “At our altitude, we weren’t too worried about MiGs, but we were beginning to be concerned about surface-to-air missiles.” Before 1958, Soviet SAM strength consisted of SA-1s mainly concentrated in rings around Moscow, but these could not soar high enough to strike the U-2. Then the Russians deployed the SA-2. “Some were uncomfortably close to our altitude. But we knew too that the Russians had a control problem in their guidance system. Because of the speed of the missile and the extremely thin atmosphere, it was almost impossible to make a correction. This did not eliminate the possibility of a lucky hit.”
At the outset of the U-2 program, Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell had told Eisenhower that with advances in Soviet fighter planes and ground-to-air missiles, the U-2 would probably be able to fly safely over Russia for only two or three years. By September 1958, the program was two years and two months old. The President was thinking of halting the flights into the Soviet Union. As Goodpaster said, “They were unlikely to be used very much, if at all, during their remaining useful life. There was more risk of interception.”
Eisenhower did not order Allen Dulles to shut down the program. Instead, in his oblique manner, he raised the idea of shifting the program to the Air Force to save the CIA money. He did not say aloud what both he and Dulles knew: if the Air Force got the U-2, it would probably never fly into Russia again because the President would not send military planes over Soviet territory in peacetime.
Dulles did not wish to surrender his prize. The CIA estimated that the Russians did not yet have the capacity to shoot down a U-2, so why give it up now? Disinclined to pick a fight, he had Bissell bring the CIA’s answer to Goodpaster: “The capability should be kept active for as long as there is little chance of interception.… The aircraft should be kept in a small, autonomous organization so as to provide secrecy, direct control and extremely close supervision.” Giving the U-2 to the Air Force would save little money, and “the extremely high standards of maintenance on which the operation is utterly dependent would be lost.”
Eisenhower did not relent. Perhaps more than anyone else in his government, he knew much how the U-2 provoked the Kremlin. And what if there should be a mishap? The Berlin Tunnel, Allen Pope, the unauthorized plane and balloon flights were all cautionary lessons. Still the President would not simply tell Allen Dulles to fold the program. In the same way he tried to force Richard Nixon to leave the Republican ticket and Dulles to hire an administrator, he continued to use indirection.
In December 1958, Eisenhower saw his Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities and suggested a “re-evaluation of the U-2 program.” Both he and the Board had been “highly enthusiastic” about the U-2, but by now, “we have located adequate targets.” Now he wondered “whether the intelligence which we receive from this source is worth the exacerbation of international tension that results.” Members did not take what Goodpaster later called the President’s “hint.” They said that the U-2 was “highly worthwhile.” The President did not press the matter.
“Dad used to say that he did better when he followed his hunches than when he listened to his advisers,” recalled John Eisenhower. “We knew we were going to run out of luck sometime. It was like a bomber pilot bombing Germany: how many missions is that rabbit’s foot going to last?”