“The Great Thaw”
Khrushchev stepped onto the starlit Moscow airfield, where ten thousand Russians cheered in the dark. His first word was in English: “Okay!”
A hundred thousand Muscovites roared as Khrushchev’s motorcade moved toward a homecoming rally suitable for a sports hero or rock star. The KGB and Party workers had packed seventeen thousand of the faithful into the Lenin Sports Palace to hail the outstanding fighter for peace on his American triumph. Seated in a place of honor, the only foreigner on the platform, was Edward Freers, the American chargé d’affaires whose career had been devoted to avoiding such attention. The Russians would have preferred Tommy Thompson, but the Ambassador had stayed behind for consultations in Washington.
“Dear Comrades!” Khrushchev began, his voice resounding in the hall and on radio and television sets throughout the Soviet Union. “We have just left the plane which completed a nonstop flight from Washington to Moscow.” Applause and ovation.
“I must say from this high platform to the Muscovites and to all of our people, the government and the party, that President Dwight Eisenhower has displayed wise statesmanship in assessing the present international situation. He has shown courage and valor.” Stormy applause (as Pravda always called it).
Khrushchev gave a rambling travelogue on his visit to Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Coon Rapids, Pittsburgh. “Comrades, on September twenty-fifth, we again met with the President at the White House and left with him by helicopter for his country residence, which is called Camp David.… We could not, of course, clear out with the President at one go all the Cold War rubble that has piled up during many years.… But I will tell you frankly, dear Comrades, that I got the impression that the President sincerely wanted to liquidate the Cold War and improve relations between our two countries.” Stormy applause.
“The President was kind enough to invite me to his farm. He showed me his cornfields. Of course, I could not miss the chance of seeing the President’s corn!” The audience laughed. “I made friends with the President’s grandchildren. I asked them whether they wanted to come to Russia. Big and small, they all declared they wanted to go to Russia and see Moscow.…
“We Muscovites like Moscow at all times. But for us, as for all people, spring is the most pleasant time of year because it is the time of joy, of the lush flourishing and awakening of life. So I told the President that, to my mind, it was best to come here at the end of May or early in June.” Stormy applause.
“I do not doubt the President’s intention to exert all of his will to reach agreement between our two countries.… Nevertheless I got the impression that some people in America do not act in the same way as the President. These forces want to continue the Cold War and the arms race.… I would not be in a hurry to say whether these forces are large or small, powerful or weak, and whether the forces supporting the President can win.…
“Let it be known to those who want to continue the Cold War … that in our time, only a madman can start a war and he himself will perish in its flames.… The peoples must straitjacket these madmen. We believe that sound statesmanship and human genius will triumph. As Pushkin said, ‘Hail reason! Down with obscurity!’”
As the hall rocked in thunderous ovation, Khrushchev walked over to a startled Freers, grabbed his hand and thrust it into the air: “Long live Soviet-American friendship! Long live friendship among all the peoples of the world!”
Soon cinemas all over Russia were packing them in for epics starring the leader of the Soviet Union. The first told the story of the “barefooted miner boy” who had risen to be one of the two most powerful men in the world. The second covered the American tour in which Eisenhower and Lodge were mere extras in the gripping drama of Khrushchev’s progress across “the chaotic panorama called U.S.A.”
Alexei Adzhubei and eleven other writers were pressed into service for a seven-hundred-page adulation called Face to Face with America, studded with spontaneous tributes from “simple Soviet men and women” to the “maker of peace.” Pravda ran an American-style editorial cartoon—Khrushchev attacking the snowman of the Cold War with an ice pick.
Enthusiasm among the Soviet people for Khrushchev’s trip was amplified by the Kremlin propaganda machine, but it was genuine. A Newsweek correspondent cabled New York, “Wherever I went in Russia, the ordinary folk have been filled with great expectations by the Eisenhower-Khrushchev talks. And they give the credit for what they believe is a great change in the Cold War to Nikita Khrushchev. Make no mistake about it. Khrushchev has never been so popular in the U.S.S.R.… His journey across America is the topic on all lips. References to ‘Eowa’ and ‘Peetsburg’ are as common as mention of Moscow.”
In Washington, a delighted President read Khrushchev’s homecoming speech and learned that Khrushchev had kept a promise to stop jamming Voice of America broadcasts to the Soviet Union. Eisenhower asked Christian Herter to “keep the ball rolling” on trade, student exchanges and other possible collaboration. Communications between the two governments should be handled by Thompson, not Menshikov: “The reason for this should be obvious.” Gordon Gray noted these developments in a slightly skeptical memo to Allen Dulles called “The Great Thaw.”
“It would be an overstatement to say that we fell into a state of euphoria,” John Eisenhower said later. “But we were relieved that Khrushchev, still glowing from the visit, was … obviously trying to ease tensions.”
Not even a day after landing in Moscow, a weary Khrushchev flew to Peking for a fraternal celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Chinese Revolution. He had some explaining to do. A perceptive cartoonist for the London Evening Standard portrayed Khrushchev with his I LIKE IKE button emerging from a Cadillac to shake hands with Mao Tse-tung in front of a portrait of the “bloodstained capitalist” Eisenhower.
When Khrushchev arrived in Peking, he noted that Mao and his colleagues were “seething with resentment against the Soviet Union and against me.” Hanging everywhere were great portraits of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Khrushchev’s image was nowhere to be seen. In a speech atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, Khrushchev extolled Eisenhower and peaceful coexistence, and warned against testing the capitalists by force. In private talks, he evidently failed to convince Mao that negotiating with the West was not a betrayal of world Communism.
The intensity of the Sino-Soviet conflict remained a secret, but Khrushchev never saw Mao again. The Chinese leader longed for Khrushchev to be taught a lesson that would show him once and for all the folly of truckling before the imperialists.
In Moscow during the fall of 1959, a Russian with close ties to the Kremlin warned the British journalist Alexander Werth that the West had better hurry and improve relations: “If you are too slow about it, Khrushchev himself may throw up the sponge and perhaps adopt a different policy. He may seem to be the supreme, unchallenged boss now, but conditions may change. If his Western policy is sabotaged by the West, he may—or somebody else may—switch over to a different policy.”
Since his accession to power, Khrushchev had pursued contradictory aims. He wished to consolidate his position without Stalinist purges, relax the police state without domestic rebellion or alienating the KGB, reduce military spending without angering the Army, ease the grip on the satellite regimes without allowing them to slip from Moscow’s orbit. He wished to improve relations with the West, but also to exploit the liberation of the Third World from colonialism, undermine NATO and uphold Lenin’s doctrine that capitalism would ultimately be vanquished by Communism.
By the fall of 1959, Khrushchev had perhaps already antagonized Soviet power blocs vital to his political survival—the KGB and Moscow bureaucrats whose wings he clipped, others indignant about his failure to feed the Soviet people and tame Yugoslavia and his capriciousness and crude behavior in front of the world. Even before Khrushchev’s American trip, some Party leaders had complained about the leader of world Communism going to Washington like a traveling salesman.
By now a host of powerful Russians may have been aroused against détente. Ideologues presumably complained that peaceful coexistence was anti-Marxist, Foreign Ministry officials that the new line would alienate Soviet allies—especially China. As in the United States, leaders of the Soviet military-industrial complex doubtless feared that they would suffer from a relaxation of tensions.
By advertising his ability to deal with Eisenhower and his faith in détente, Khrushchev was almost surely taking a calculated risk. No doubt he hoped to arouse the people of the West to pressure their leaders to make large concessions at the Summit. And in speeches, he always left himself a way out by reminding the Soviet people that Cold Warriors like the “unholy Rockefeller-Truman-Acheson trinity” might be too powerful for even Eisenhower to overcome. Nevertheless he was tying his fortunes to events largely beyond his control. Failure of “the Great Thaw” would very likely be a severe setback to a leader who could ill afford one.
In public, Khrushchev’s two days with Eisenhower at Camp David grew warmer with each retelling. Glossing over the conflicts that had almost ruined the talks, he built up the President as the Western champion of détente, almost as if the two men had built a tacit alliance against Cold War forces in both of their countries. In private, Khrushchev still worried about Eisenhower’s determination to take risks for peace. “There was something soft about his character,” he said much later. “He was a good man, but he wasn’t very tough.”
Khrushchev was determined to hold the Big Four summit as soon as possible. His UN envoy, Valerian Zorin, sent word to the White House that Khrushchev “definitely would like a summit before the end of the year.” Delay would grant Khrushchev’s Kremlin enemies, Mao and others additional months in which to undermine him. And who could tell what else might go wrong? Better to act while the bloom was still on the rose.
Khrushchev had failed to reckon with the stubborn will of Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle.
Towering, aloof, melancholy, sardonic, with an unrelenting instinct for grandeur, the legendary President of France had long modeled himself on the leaders of the classical age. As the historian Louis Halle wrote, de Gaulle distinguished between the French people, for whom he had no great respect, and France, which he identified with himself.
Born in 1890, son of an intensely Catholic and monarchist philosophy professor in Lille, he matured in a France obsessed by the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris. He later wrote that “nothing saddened me more profoundly in my youth than our weakness and our mistakes.”
He spent the early years of the Second World War waiting with the Free French armies in Algeria as head of a provisional government. In 1946, when quarreling parties hamstrung the Fourth Republic, he retired to his house at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises and wrote memoirs that were among the best of the century. In 1958, when the Algerian revolt cast his country on the verge of civil war, he consented to save his nation for the second time with authority not notably less than that granted Louis XIV.
Determined to restore France to its ancient status as world power, de Gaulle dislodged the French fleet from NATO and called for a new Western federation under French leadership. He was not especially eager for a Big Four summit. Memories of wartime humiliations by Roosevelt and Churchill induced wariness against a conspiracy of the Anglo-Saxons to rob France of its destiny. He worried that Eisenhower and Macmillan would cave in to Khrushchev and let Germany make trouble for all of Europe.
Despite wartime clashes over Darlan and Giraud in North Africa, de Gaulle had a remotely amiable relationship with Eisenhower, who was thirty-nine days his senior. “I like Eisenhower,” he once told a reporter. The President was “honest and good.” Then, with a deep sigh: “Men can have friends. Statesmen cannot.” He declared in 1957 that the age of giants was over. What was this? The epoch of Eisenhower, Khrushchev and Macmillan! Asked his confidential view of the three leaders, he said of the first two, “Ce sont des cons” [“They are idiots”]. The third he dismissed with a flick of the hand.
“Roosevelt didn’t like him,” Eisenhower once said. “A lot of people don’t like him. But I can’t help but feel that he is truly and sincerely devoted to his country and restoring its self-respect, and you can’t really fault him for that.”
Harold Macmillan, who had supported de Gaulle in wartime North Africa, had a different view: “He talks like a king. There really isn’t any way of explaining anything to him in terms of practical politics. He’s above that. What he needs is a couple of question periods in the House of Commons. But no one questions him.”
De Gaulle was clearly maneuvering to delay the Summit until well into 1960. This would give him more time to assuage right-wing Frenchmen angry about retreat from Algeria. And by then, he could attend the meeting as a more genuine equal of the other three powers, for by then France would have tested its own atomic bomb. When Eisenhower visited Paris in September 1959, de Gaulle had told him that France had to have its own Bomb. Who could assure that a future American President would start a nuclear war just to save Europe? When he suggested that the Americans should help, Eisenhower replied that the McMahon Act prevented him from sending nuclear information abroad.
“McMahon Act indeed!” said de Gaulle. “I changed the constitution of France when I found it was not practical. You tell me it is dangerous for me to know something that a thousand Soviet corporals already know? This I cannot accept. France retains the desire to be great.… Unlike the British, we have not lost our taste for excellence.”
The French Bomb would not be ready for testing until February 1960. In late October 1959, the Elysée Palace announced its considered view that a Big Four summit should not be held before the spring of 1960. From Washington, an exasperated Eisenhower suggested an immediate American-British-French meeting to speed up the process, but de Gaulle replied that he would not be ready for such a meeting until mid-December. By that time, it would be impossible to arrange a summit with Khrushchev before the spring.
At the White House, Eisenhower told Christian Herter that he was “getting a little weary of the other heads of Western governments setting times of meeting at their convenience.” By cable, he asked Llewellyn Thompson to see Khrushchev and explain that he was “trying to get the top people together on the Western side to work out something constructive, but that this takes time.” Khrushchev should know that “we are just as interested as he is in pushing forward to resolve causes of tension, and the fact that he may not see anything happening on occasion does not mean that we have lost interest—rather that there are great difficulties involved.”
De Gaulle had won. In December 1959, the Western leaders formally invited Khrushchev to a Big Four summit to start on Monday, May 16, 1960. They agreed to meet at de Gaulle’s palace in Paris—acknowledgment that France was a power of highest rank. By then, eight months would have passed since Camp David.
On New Year’s Eve 1960, Jane and Llewellyn Thompson went to the annual reception at the Kremlin. At two in the morning, during the ballroom dancing, Khrushchev invited them and the French envoy and his wife to an antechamber, newly furnished in Soviet Modern: the fountain was complete with colored plastic rocks. Khrushchev’s Deputy Premiers, Mikoyan and Kozlov, slipped in before the doors closed.
Khrushchev told the Thompsons that he had hoped to have them and their children to his dacha the next day, but Nina Petrovna had a fever. He hoped that they could come next weekend. For the umpteenth time, he recalled how President Eisenhower had “simply overwhelmed” him with his personality at Camp David. If only the President could serve another term, he was sure that all of their problems could be solved. As usual, he interspersed professions of peace with bellicose remarks, noting that the Soviet Union had fifty nuclear bombs earmarked for Britain, thirty each for France and West Germany.
“How many do you have for us?” asked Jane Thompson.
“That is a secret,” said Khrushchev. Ambassador Thompson proposed a toast to the Paris Summit. Khrushchev said an agreement was “essential”—especially if the West did not want him to sign a peace treaty with East Germany and halt Western access to Berlin.
Thompson did not regard this as a revival of Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum. With Kozlov and Mikoyan as witnesses, Khrushchev was more likely showing that he could still talk tough to the Americans and that he meant business at Paris. Progress on Germany and Berlin was probably vital to his standing with fellow members of the Presidium, for he was about to take another severe political risk.
In January 1960, Khrushchev told the Supreme Soviet of his intention to cut the Soviet military by 1.2 million men. As a result of his “historic” visit to the United States, “the clouds of war have begun to disperse.” In the nuclear age, large standing armies, surface navies and bomber fleets were growing obsolete. Soviet missiles were so accurate that they could hit a “fly in outer space.” Missiles were cheaper than financing millions of soldiers. The savings derived from armed forces reductions would give Soviet workers a better chance to own apartments and television sets. Khrushchev joked that the Red Army would be the first in history to “voluntarily liquidate itself.”
Khrushchev’s sense of humor did not appeal to the Red Army. Over a million soldiers, including a quarter million officers, were slated for retirement from their posts. In Leningrad, naval officers reputedly wept as nearly built cruisers and destroyers were cut up for scrap on Khrushchev’s orders. Officers who had come to Khrushchev’s aid during the Anti-Party Coup warned that Khrushchev’s “recklessness” would harm Soviet security. Others charged that by reducing conventional forces, Khrushchev was undercutting the chief means of aiding pro-Moscow liberation movements and Soviet allies in the Third World.
Khrushchev had almost certainly known that once he announced his military reduction plan, his political position and perhaps his ability to make concessions at a Big Four summit would be weakened. This was probably why he had been so eager to hold the meeting before the end of 1959.
In Washington, Allen Dulles told a private session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Khrushchev was “undoubtedly stepping on many toes” and had “probably disgruntled many of the military by his recent reductions.” Christian Herter said that Khrushchev had certainly “changed his tune,” but they would not know until the Paris Summit “whether he is still the same intransigent individual with whom we have had to deal in the past.”
Ambassador Thompson sent his interpretation by diplomatic pouch to the Secretary of State:
Khrushchev has committed himself to a course where retreat becomes increasingly costly and where the changes already introduced, if successful, tend to encourage additional changes leading in time to a more normal society within the U.S.S.R. The pace of this evolution is difficult to gauge, but I believe it is developing rapidly—due in part to the fact that Khrushchev is 65 and a man in a hurry.
I believe it to be sound American policy to facilitate this evolution in every way practicable.
That winter, Eisenhower traveled the world with the ambition of proving that many nations regarded the United States as something other than a wicked imperialist power: “Such prestige and standing as I have on the earth, I want to use it.” In December, he boarded Air Force One, the new Presidential jet, for a three-week goodwill journey to Rome, Ankara, Karachi, Kabul and New Delhi, where six million Indians cried, “Long live the King of America!” In Tehran, he privately told the Shah that his thinking had “matured.” Then to Athens, Tunis, Paris, Madrid, Casablanca. Two months later, he was off again for South America.
The trips affirmed that Eisenhower was the world’s most respected and beloved leader. At their start, Khrushchev had sent the President a good-luck message, but he was reportedly made nervous by the warmth of Eisenhower’s reception—especially in the Third World and nations along the Soviet border that had yet to be educated to the advantages of Communism.
Khrushchev was keeping an eye on the American Presidential campaign of 1960. He was convinced that Nixon’s election would be a disaster. On New Year’s Eve and other occasions, Thompson had tried and failed to persuade him otherwise. Rockefeller seemed little more promising, although Khrushchev would have enjoyed having a President who was such an obvious symbol of America’s domination by Rockefellers, du Ponts and Morgans. Kennedy was a question mark.
Khrushchev’s nominee was Adlai Stevenson. In January 1960, Ambassador Menshikov invited the former Illinois Governor to the Soviet Embassy in Washington and told him that Khrushchev thought him “more likely to understand Soviet anxieties and purposes” than others. How might the Soviets aid Stevenson’s election? Should their press criticize him and, if so, for what?
As Stevenson later told a friend, Menshikov seemed “quite aware” that a successful Paris Summit and Eisenhower’s Russian visit would help Nixon, “which seems to leave them in some dilemma.” He refused the offer. “As I think about it, I get more and more indignant about being ‘propositioned’ that way, and at the same time more and more perplexed, if that’s the word, by the confidence they have in me.”
In February 1960, with Eisenhower’s encouragement, Henry Cabot Lodge went to the Soviet Union on a private visit. Calling on Khrushchev at the Kremlin, he tried to reassure his old traveling partner about Nixon: “Don’t pay any attention to the campaign speeches.”
Khrushchev brought up the Paris Summit. The “most burning question” was Berlin. If the U.S. came in good faith and “not in the wake of Adenauer,” it could reach solutions without loss of face to either side. But if no agreement was reached on Germany, Soviet-American relations would deteriorate.
Lodge replied that there ought to be many things “in the pot.” No one at the Summit should adopt an attitude of “this—or else.” The world expected that Paris would be the first in a regular series of meetings. There must not be a break, which would destroy this possibility. He asked the translator to translate very carefully as he said, “There is always a minimum of flexibility in foreign relations in the United States in an election year. What is hard or impossible to do in 1952 or 1956 or 1960 is often quite susceptible of achievement in 1953 or 1957 or 1961.”
During the winter of 1960, Khrushchev had been working on preparations for Eisenhower’s trip to the Soviet Union. In January, he smilingly told Thompson that the President was welcome to go “anyplace in the Soviet Union”—even denied areas like Vladivostok and the naval base at Sevastopol, “despite the fact that as a military man, the President is an especially dangerous person.” The reception would be “friendly in the extreme” and there would be no need for security precautions. He hoped that Eisenhower would spend twice the time in the Soviet Union that he had spent in the United States—it was a larger country—and he must be sure to bring his grandchildren.
At Gettysburg, when Khrushchev had invited the grandchildren to Russia, they were thrilled but their father was horrified. John Eisenhower told the President that “our battle to avoid spoiling the children by excessive publicity and attention” was “difficult enough without this exercise.” The President asked him to change his mind and was piqued when he refused.
The President thus wrote Khrushchev that “it will probably be impossible to bring the grandchildren along.” If he brought some and not others, there might be “a real family upheaval.” But he would be joined by his wife, son and daughter-in-law. He would have liked to stay for more than ten days, but in June, Congress would still be in session. He hoped that formalities could be minimized “so that we can have more opportunity to become acquainted with your country, its people and each other.”
Soon the schedule was fixed. On Friday, June 10, the Eisenhowers would arrive in Moscow, where they would attend a state dinner at the Kremlin, visit the Pushkin Gallery, the Exhibition of Economic Achievements, the Baptist Church and the Bolshoi Ballet, and lunch with the Khrushchevs at their dacha. Then to Leningrad for a tour of the Hermitage, dinner at City Hall and a fifteen-minute speech to the Soviet people on radio and television.
In Kiev, the President would lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, deliver another broadcast speech and go to a concert. Back in Moscow, he would receive an honorary degree from Moscow University, view Soviet paintings on American themes, hold a dinner in Khrushchev’s honor at Spaso House and speak for thirty minutes on radio and television. Then he would fly to Irkutsk for a boat trip down the Angara River to a hydroelectric station. On Sunday, June 19, he would fly to Tokyo for the first visit of an American President to Japan.
Khrushchev supervised the plans like a Soviet Ziegfeld. Had he been barred from Disneyland? He was improbably said to be building his own version outside Moscow—a Khrushchevland, depicting great events in Russian history. Eisenhower would be emphatically invited to attend. The Soviet Union had no golf course. Thompson told Khrushchev that this hurt Soviet prestige; he did not need to remind him of the President’s favorite game. Soviet engineers graded land for an eighteen-hole course. Khrushchev was said to be taking lessons so that he could play a few holes with Eisenhower. On a magnificent pine bluff over Lake Baikal, the Russians were building a grand house for the President’s use that years later was still called the Eisenhower Dacha.
Jim Hagerty led an American advance party. At Moscow, an airport guard accosted him for snapping pictures as he walked down the ramp from his plane. But when Hagerty revealed that it was Khrushchev who had given him the camera, the guard begged his apology. From that moment on, Hagerty was allowed to photograph whatever he wished. On a visit to the studios of Radio Moscow, his escorts were mortified when they realized that they had brought him into the room where Voice of America broadcasts had been jammed before Camp David.
Hagerty arranged for a press plane to precede the President to Moscow so that reporters could stand on the airfield at the start of the first peacetime visit of an American President to the Soviet Union.* Among the hundreds on the White House list were James Reston and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, Walter Cronkite and Marvin Kalb of CBS, David Brinkley and John Chancellor of NBC.
In Washington, the State Department compiled a list of Presidential gifts: luggage for Madame Khrushcheva, traveling cosmetic cases for the Khrushchev daughters, a Flexible Flyer sled for Khrushchev’s grandson Nikita Adzhubei, a Steuben vase for President Leonid Brezhnev. Other Russians would receive recordings of Porgy and Bess, Kiss Me Kate and Showboat. The best gift of all would go to the host—an American hydrofoil, which Khrushchev might use for cruises on the Moscow River.
Eisenhower wrote to Khrushchev asking for permission to use his own plane within the Soviet Union. Khrushchev told Thompson that this put him in “difficulty” with the Soviet military: they were afraid that the plane would use “secret means of photographing Soviet territory.” He might have noted that he had not used his own plane to fly within the United States.
Thompson replied that no one should worry: the pilot would be accompanied by a Soviet navigator. Khrushchev later wrote Eisenhower that he had “finally succeeded” in winning his military’s consent to use the plane. The President replied, “This must have presented some problems for you, and I am grateful for your efforts to accommodate my request.”
Khrushchev’s generals were sensitive to the threat of spying from passenger planes because they had been doing the same thing for years. Aircraft flying Soviet officials to the UN in New York had long been said to carry reconnaissance cameras. So was the plane that brought Khrushchev to Washington. After nearly four years of U-2 flights, the Soviets knew that the Americans had more than a passing interest in aerial photography.
They were right to be concerned. In September 1959, when a group of congressmen flew from Moscow to Warsaw in an American plane, Air Force pilots evidently distracted the two Russian escorts in the cockpit while Air Force men in the rear surreptitiously photographed Soviet territory.
And now at Andrews Air Force Base, with Eisenhower’s approval, Air Force One was secretly being turned into a spy plane. In a tightly guarded hangar, riveting guns and blowtorches were used to weld high-resolution cameras into the belly of the aircraft. The Air Force and CIA knew that the President and his party would fly over Soviet bridges, highways, railroads and other points of interest at half the U-2’s altitude. Photographs taken during test flights at thirty thousand feet put even the U-2 photos to shame. The Soviet navigator would be no problem. Cameras were designed to be turned on with a switch disguised as an air valve. Tiny lights visible only to the pilot would show that the cameras were working.
Richard Bissell later said, “I think Ike would have taken the position, ‘All right, if you can put some equipment on my aircraft unobtrusively and take what you get, that’s all right.’ But I think he would have drawn the line at not altering the flight path in any shape or manner.… It would have been very unwise to let it be thought that his trip was being made in any sense or conditioned by intelligence.”
For many of the Soviet people, the spring of 1960 was “the American Spring.” Thompson noted that Russians were “extremely excited” about Eisenhower’s visit. An official of a tiny Russian village told an American diplomat passing through that the town was being facelifted for the President’s arrival. The diplomat said he hadn’t known that the village was on the itinerary. He was told, “We don’t know either, but we’re sprucing everything up because he just might come here. You know, when that President of yours gets here, we will give him a welcome the likes of which no Soviet leader has ever had.”
In Moscow, Soviet citizens had always been cautious about telephoning the U.S. Embassy out of suspicion that the lines were tapped. But now Russians called up Americans they had met and said, “There’s a jazz band in from Leningrad—let’s go take it in” or “I’ve just flown in from Kiev and I’ll only be here for three days—let’s have a party.” Soviet diplomats developed the astonishing habit of telephoning acceptances for receptions at the American Embassy several hours in advance. Muscovites asked American reporters why “Ike,” America’s “peaceloving President,” could not run for another term.
Khrushchev almost certainly looked forward to basking in the acclaim shown his American partner when he toured the Soviet Union, but he may have wondered whether things were going too far. What if Eisenhower got too warm a reception, with its implied criticism of the Soviet regime? Who could tell what kind of anti-Soviet propaganda he might pour out during all of those television speeches the White House had insisted on?
Far more worrisome was that Khrushchev’s rapprochement with the United States may have been starting to have the same effect on the Soviet police state as the Secret Speech had had on Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. The burning hunger for information about the United States and the outside world, the fear of another war, enthusiasm for Eisenhower and détente were all powerful forces which, if unleashed, might threaten the regime. Vladimir Toumanoff of the American Embassy felt that the Soviet people were already showing signs of “stampeding out of the corral.”
Like the Red Army, the KGB thrived by exploiting the perception of an imminent American threat. The secret police might well have reported to Khrushchev that if the opening to the West grew too wide, they could not guarantee the security of the regime.
In Washington, cherry blossoms were beginning to line the banks of the Potomac as the President and State Department prepared for the Paris Summit.
At press conferences that spring, Eisenhower gave the sense of near-intransigence on Berlin. But in the privacy of the Oval Office, he reminded aides that he had promised Khrushchev at Camp David that he would bargain seriously over the issue. When Christian Herter suggested that they try to “buy time,” the President shook his head: the Russians would not be so generous. “The East Germans can stop all economic connection with West Berlin. They could make West Berlin a dead weight on us.… The Western world made a mistake in 1944 and 1945 and must now find a way to pay for it.”
Eisenhower suggested reintroducing Open Skies at Paris, as well as other proposals to curb mutual “secrecy and suspicions.” To knit Moscow and Washington closer together, he planned to suggest annual East-West summits, ministerial meetings, technical and cultural accords.
But his main aspiration was arms control. For seven years, he had hoped to move the world toward disarmament and had failed. This was his final chance. He knew that audacious diplomacy in an election year could become a political lightning rod, but was convinced that he would have a better chance than Nixon or a Democratic President of negotiating a treaty and pushing it through the Senate.
By the middle 1950s, for many politicians, disarmament had become a minor branch of rhetoric. The President sought a new approach—a treaty that would ban all nuclear testing and thereby curb the increasing size and sophistication of nuclear stockpiles. Such a ban might prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by China and less responsible governments who might one day trigger Armageddon. It might lead to other accords that would help to slow the arms race at an early stage and generate mutual trust. World opinion was driven toward a ban by reports of radioactive fallout sweeping over innocent peoples and of strontium 90 in children’s milk.
In 1957, the Gaither Commission told Eisenhower, “This could be the best time to negotiate from strength since the U.S. military position vis-à-vis Russia might never be as strong again.” The President wrote in his diary, “We now enjoy certain advantages in the nuclear world over the Russians.… The most important of these gaps can be closed only by continuous testing on the part of the Russians.” He disagreed with those in his own government who held that “should we discontinue our tests, the Soviets would, by stealing all of our secrets, equal and eventually surpass us.”
That December, he asked some of his science advisers, “Why don’t you fellows help me with this nuclear test ban? Everybody in the Pentagon is against it.”
In October 1958, East and West met for test ban talks at Geneva. To improve the climate, both sides voluntarily agreed to suspend nuclear testing. Despite agreement on many issues, within twelve months the talks were deadlocked. Khrushchev suspected that control posts and inspection teams proposed by the West would act as espionage brigades on Soviet soil, where they might learn new truths about Soviet military weakness. Eisenhower and his allies suspected that testing far below ground or at high altitude could not be monitored by current methods.
But the President wanted a treaty, followed—he hoped—by some actual disarmament. In October 1959, Llewellyn Thompson advised him that Khrushchev too was eager for an accord because “his main objective is to keep China and Germany from getting these weapons.” Thompson believed that the Soviet leader was “far out in advance of many of his people on this issue.… Khrushchev really means and wants to make some progress in the reduction of armaments. He will have great opposition from some of his colleagues, and it is by no means sure that he can carry this out.”
Eisenhower agreed that “Khrushchev cannot be as confident of his position as Stalin was.”
He was ready to try a new approach: ban only those tests that were detectable and then broaden the treaty as detection methods improved. Ban all tests in the atmosphere, all underwater, as high in space as they could be discovered, and underground if they exceeded the force detectable by current means. Both sides should permit about twenty onsite inspections per year on each nation’s territory.
The Soviets agreed—with two stipulations. Khrushchev wanted a voluntary moratorium on small underground tests for at least four years. And something must be done about that outrageous number of on-site inspections.
The President was ready to bargain. In March 1960, he told aides, “We must get an agreement.… We cannot continue to refuse to go a part of the way.… It is in our vital interest to get an agreement.” If they did not succeed, then there was “no hope whatsoever for disarmament.” He was ready “to give Khrushchev every chance to prove that he will do what he says.”
He told reporters, “All the signs are that the Soviets do want a degree of disarmament, and they want to stop testing. That looks to me to be more or less proved.”
On March 28 at Camp David, the President confided to Harold Macmillan that to reach some kind of test ban at Paris, he planned to “capitalize” on Khrushchev’s fear that the Chinese would develop nuclear weapons. He would warn Khrushchev that “action against our rights in Berlin” would “bring a rapid end to the détente, in general, and to any prospect for early disarmament, in particular.” They could negotiate over the length of the moratorium and the number of on-site inspections.
In his diary, Macmillan wrote, “All the omens are good. He is really keen on this and—although he hasn’t said much about it yet—would accept further concessions in the course of negotiation to get it.”
So Eisenhower and Khrushchev each stood on the verge of taking the risk each leader had vowed never to take—a partially unsupervised test ban and inspection teams on Soviet soil. A treaty could be signed at Paris or during the President’s tour of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev felt that the months since Camp David had shown that the Americans had “recognized the failure of their past efforts to discredit us, to humiliate us and to eliminate us.”
The CIA had yet to discover a single operational Soviet ICBM. On August 18, 1959, Allen Dulles told the President that the consensus within the intelligence community was that the Soviets would probably have ten such missiles ready “either in 1959 or in 1960.”
Reports from American agents in Russia and signals intelligence revealed much about Soviet missile development, but Dulles wished to fly more U-2 missions. Eisenhower was hardly willing to fly while Khrushchev was in the United States. Thus on October 26, 1959, Dulles came to the Oval Office with another request.
The President agreed that “there may be substantial intelligence value involved,” but he was “pretty unhappy about the suggestion.” As Bissell recalled, Eisenhower was apprehensive about the chance of a downing and determined to fly as few missions as possible until an American spy satellite came on line, as they hoped, in 1960. In the past, the President had banned U-2 flights during periods of Soviet-American tension. Now he banned them during the months of relative calm.
During the winter, while snow covered much of the Soviet Union, the U-2 was evidently sent to gather intelligence on French nuclear test sites in the Sahara—a risky venture, since close allies professed not to spy on close allies. The plane was also flown over Castro’s Cuba: at the White House, Allen Dulles showed Eisenhower aerial pictures of a sugar refinery that the Agency wished to sabotage.
In February 1960, the President met with his PBCFIA. Perhaps spurred on by Dulles, James Doolittle urged Eisenhower to use the U-2 over Russia “to the maximum degree possible.” But the President demurred: when he went to Paris in May, he would have “one tremendous asset.” That was his reputation for honesty. “If one of these aircraft were lost when we were engaged in apparently sincere deliberations, it could be put on display in Moscow and ruin my effectiveness.”
Eisenhower said that authorizing U-2 missions was “always an agonizing question.” It was essential not to “dissipate” his reputation for “a different mode of behavior from that of Khrushchev” in international affairs—especially since “the embarrassment will be so great if one crashes.”
That month, the President exploded when the New York Times ran a story, based on leaks from unnamed sources, implying that the United States had an excellent means of intelligence-gathering on Soviet missile development. As Kistiakowsky noted, Eisenhower was “exceedingly angry and talked at length about lack of loyalty to the U.S. of these people.”
The President apparently did not know how much the U-2 program had begun to stretch the limits of the word “covert.”
In the summer of 1958, Hanson Baldwin of the Times called Robert Amory and said, “I hope you can break any lunch date so that I can lunch with you at noon.” At the Hay-Adams, where Walter Lippmann was lunching two tables away with Ambassador Menshikov, Baldwin told Amory that despite a crude effort to distract him, he had seen the black plane with the long wings in West Germany: “I know what’s going on. I’m afraid I’ve got to publish it because I was in an unclassified position and it’s a great story.”
“Jesus, Hanson, no!” Amory asked him to let Allen Dulles appeal to his publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Sulzberger agreed to kill the story but told Dulles, “This thing is set in cold type and ready to go if we hear that a Drew Pearson or anybody is about to publish it.”
The Times’s James Reston and Arthur Krock also discovered the U-2 story and remained silent. So did John Leacocos of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post, who consulted his editors and decided not to run the story “because we knew the United States very much needed to discover the secrets of Soviet missilery.” Later, to have been in on the secret of the U-2 became a minor status symbol at Washington cocktail parties.
The voluntary silence of the press was not absolute. In 1958, Model Airplane News reported an “unconfirmed rumor” that “U-2s are flying across the Iron Curtain taking aerial photographs.” Two Oxford students who had been in the Royal Navy wrote in a student monthly that it was not uncommon for Western planes to “lose their way” beyond Soviet frontiers to “provide accurate estimates of the size and type of Russian armaments and troops and the nature of their tactical methods.” They were arrested and sentenced to three months in jail under Britain’s Official Secrets Act.
In September 1959, a pilot testing a U-2 near Atsugi ran out of fuel and made an emergency landing at a glider club’s airstrip. The plane was Number 360, the same aircraft provided Francis Gary Powers for his flight from Peshawar seven months later. For fifteen minutes the pilot waited, mired in mud, radioing the base for help, while club members rushed to the side of the plane and clicked their shutters furiously. American military police landed by helicopter and ordered the Japanese away at gunpoint. The Japanese journal Air Review suspected that the plane was being used for something other than weather reconnaissance: “Otherwise why was it necessary to threaten Japanese with guns to get them away from the crippled plane?”
The restraint of the American press was emblematic of the age. Had the New York Times or Washington Post discovered the U-2 at the time of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, they would have been more likely (although by no means certain) to go ahead and publish.* Had Baldwin and his colleagues revealed the U-2 flights to the world, they would have probably killed the program and a crucial means of intelligence. On the other hand, these leaks gave clear warning that after four years, with hundreds of people and a half dozen foreign governments involved, it was growing harder and harder to keep the U-2 covert.
If details of the U-2 had reached the ears of reporters not in the business of sleuthing for American state secrets, it might only be imagined what information had reached agents of the KGB, who were. The longer the program went on, the greater the chance for the Soviets to learn about it and stop it in a manner of maximum embarrassment to the United States—by hiring one of the pilots as a double agent, sabotaging equipment, developing anti-aircraft weapons to stop the black plane from crossing the Russian skies.
The CIA knew that the U-2 program was a top Soviet intelligence target. In Adana, members of the unit were suspicious of the Turks who swept the hangar floors. Frank Powers’s commanding officer told him that the Soviets were mounting a major effort against the bases in Turkey and Japan: they probably had dossiers on him and his fellow pilots.
Bissell later said, “I’m sure there were intelligence agents at all the bases from which we operated. They would have been fairly easy to recruit and the U.S.S.R. had a high priority, I’m sure, on the U-2 as an intelligence target for them. After all, when your chief rival has shown that he can overfly your country with impunity, your reasoning may well be, ‘Well, today it’s cameras but tomorrow it’s bombs.’”
In early 1959, the CIA learned from Pyotr Popov, one of its prize moles in Soviet military intelligence, that the Russians had amassed much information about the U-2. “It brought me right out of my seat,” Richard Helms recalled. “Bissell and I wondered where they could be getting their information from.” Before Popov could tell them, he was captured while passing notes to an American on a Moscow bus and executed.
In October 1959, a surly twenty-year-old ex-Marine who had worked on radar in Atsugi walked into the American Embassy in Moscow, slapped his passport on the counter and renounced his citizenship. Lee Harvey Oswald was only the third American enlisted man to defect since the Second World War. He boasted that he had offered to tell the Russians about his radar work and that he might have something “of special interest” for them.
Oswald had had a knockabout childhood in New Orleans, Fort Worth, the Bronx and Dallas. At fifteen, after quitting high school, he discovered Marx and told a friend that he would like to “kill President Eisenhower” because he was “exploiting the working class.” At seventeen, he joined the Marines and was trained as a radar controller. Assigned to Atsugi, he was told that the U-2 was a secret reconnaissance project not to be discussed with anyone outside his unit. The unit was sent to the Philippines, where U-2 planes were housed at Subic Bay. One night, a Marine guard was mysteriously shot to death beside one of the hangars. Speculation later had it that Oswald had shot the guard while looking for information about the U-2 for presentation to the Russians.
When he first applied for asylum, the Soviets refused. He slashed his left wrist and languished in Moscow hotels for two months until employed as a factory hand in Minsk. Oswald undoubtedly revealed information about the U-2, but his security clearance had been low. From gossip and his own observations, he might have known details about the plane, its rate of climb, cruising altitude and payload, the radar, the pilots, base security and how it might be circumvented.
Had the Russians found Oswald valuable, they probably would not have left him within reach of Western reporters for two months, and he might have gotten something better than a factory job. Bissell later said, “I don’t think Oswald could have told them much they didn’t already know.… Now what that has to do with the Kennedy assassination God only knows.”
Through the early months of 1960, the public clamor over a Missile Gap had not abated. With the added stimulus of a Presidential campaign, it grew louder.
In Congress, Thomas Gates defended the President against accusations that Soviet missiles were being deliberately underestimated in order to balance the budget. The President invited him to the White House family quarters for a Scotch: “I know you’re having a tough time.… I’m trying to help you in my press conferences.”
Gates reported that the “roughest of all” would be Lyndon Johnson’s Preparedness Committee: “What’s more, that’s under oath. That’s an investigation.”
Eisenhower said, “You took an oath of office, the same as I did. Just stand up there and tell ’em you won’t take their oath.”
“Well, some nights it’s easy to be President,” said Gates, unconvinced. “I think I’ll have another Scotch.”
In fact, the American intelligence community was growing somewhat more relaxed about Soviet missiles. In January 1960, Allen Dulles told Eisenhower that while U-2 coverage was incomplete, a crash Soviet missile effort could not have escaped detection. He and his colleagues had found no such crash program: the Russians still had no operational ICBMs. They would probably have thirty-five or so by mid-1960, perhaps 140 to 200 by mid-1961.
In his diary, Kistiakowsky wrote that “mid-1961 is the point of maximum threat because as of then we still won’t have hardened missile bases and SAC will be vulnerable too, but the threat is not catastrophic. In fact, the missile gap doesn’t look to be very serious.”
Late that winter, Dulles and Bissell asked the President to resume U-2 flights into the Soviet Union. By Bissell’s later recollection, they had not been allowed to fly deep into Russia since Camp David. He and Dulles wished to look at ICBM launch sites in the northern Urals and westward near the White Sea, bomber fields, factories and other targets.
By 1960, the Russians were installing their new SA-2 Guidelines throughout the Soviet Union. The CIA felt these missiles could strike a target as high as seventy thousand feet but, as Bissell later said, “what you were counting on was that when they got above, say, sixty thousand feet, they couldn’t effectively maneuver.” Bissell believed that if one reached a U-2, “it would be a near-miss rather than a hit.”
He had taken precautions. In 1958, U-2s were equipped with granger boxes to foil Soviet radar. In 1959, more powerful engines were installed to increase altitude, especially under the weight of new, heavier espionage equipment. Missions were routed away from known SA-2 sites.
Whenever the CIA asked for a U-2 flight, Goodpaster or the President generally asked, “Do we have anything to indicate that they’ve improved the air defense capability against the aircraft?” As Goodpaster recalled, they were once again assured in 1960 that Soviet anti-aircraft was no grave threat; even if it was, they relied on the Agency’s assurances that no pilot or equipment would survive a downing intact.
Eisenhower viewed his role in the U-2 program chiefly in terms of weighing intelligence needs against diplomatic needs. As Goodpaster later said, Eisenhower knew that resumption of the flights might be “prejudicial to the kind of improvement we were working toward with the Soviets.”
But perhaps Khrushchev had indeed decided to accept the flights as a fact of life until he could stop them. The Russians had not complained for many months. Khrushchev had not uttered a word of protest at Camp David. And the first American spy satellite might not be working until the end of 1960 or later. Without U-2 flights, the CIA would have to go largely blind on Russia. They would almost surely lose the chance to photograph the first operational Soviet ICBMs under construction.
The President set aside any objections he may have had. On April 9, 1960, a U-2 took off from Peshawar and shot into Soviet airspace.
Khrushchev was flabbergasted. The Americans “knew they were causing us terrible headaches whenever one of these planes took off on a mission.” So the terrible headaches were not over, after all! “As far as we were concerned, this sort of espionage was war—war waged by other means.” In October 1959, he had publicly asked the West to “take no action” before the Summit conference that would “worsen the atmosphere” and “sow the seeds of suspicion.” How much more direct did he have to be?
Soviet air defense tracked the U-2 and failed to shoot it down. Andrei Gromyko suggested a diplomatic protest. As Khrushchev recalled, “A public protest could be registered in our press, but we weren’t going to resort to public protest and diplomatic channels any more. What good did it do? The Americans knew perfectly well that they were in the wrong.… We are sick and tired of these unpleasant surprises—sick and tired of being subjected to these indignities. They were making these flights to show up our impotence. Well, we weren’t impotent any longer.”
In the inner reaches of the Kremlin, the incursion may have turned Khrushchev into something of a laughingstock. Was this the work of the President Eisenhower who had displayed such “wise statesmanship” and “desire for peace” at Camp David? Was this Khrushchev’s thanks for his opening to the West? Was this what the Soviet Union could anticipate from peaceful coexistence?
Charles Bohlen years later felt that Khrushchev took the resumption of U-2 flights as “almost a personal insult. More than that, I think it made him out a fool. He’d been telling obviously all the other leaders that Eisenhower was a good, solid guy and you could trust him, and then—whambo—this plane comes over, and this shook a lot of Khrushchev’s authority in the Soviet Union.”
Khrushchev’s foes could chortle that just five weeks before the Paris Summit, the United States was returning to its old tricks. Either the Americans were giving up on détente or they had never been serious in the first place. Perhaps that was why Eisenhower had allowed the Summit to be delayed and delayed.
For eleven days after the U-2 incursion, Khrushchev vanished from public view. He was said to be relaxing in the Caucasus, but for Khrushchev, this was an unusually long period of silence. Another omen was his failure to resurface in Moscow for Lenin’s ninetieth birthday celebration on April 22, a command performance for Communist leaders around the world.
Through the winter and early spring, Khrushchev had been making tough speeches on what the West had better do about Berlin, largely to strengthen his bargaining position at the Summit. In April, Richard Nixon, Christian Herter and Douglas Dillon reciprocated. Dillon demanded Soviet concessions on Eastern Europe, Korea and elsewhere: by threatening Berlin, Khrushchev was “skating on very thin ice.” Herter and Dillon were presumably trying to lower public expectations and strengthen American leverage before Paris, but the timing of the speeches made them ripe for citation by Khrushchev’s rivals as more evidence that the United States was reverting to Cold War.
That month, Eisenhower wrote Khrushchev that if the Summit lasted longer than a week, he would have to depart for a planned state visit to Portugal and leave Nixon in his place. To Khrushchev, sending Nixon to a peace conference was “like putting the goat in charge of the cabbage patch”: was this the deed of a President who was serious about bargaining at Paris?
The Soviet press responded with attacks on Herter, Dillon, Allen Dulles and other “Cold War circles” in the United States. The President was excluded from criticism, but Pravda notably reprinted a statement by Adlai Stevenson rebuking the Eisenhower Administration for its “fruitless anti-Communism and self-deception.”
From Peking, Mao Tse-tung was delighted to pour oil on troubled waters. A diatribe called “Long Live Leninism!” (evidently written by Mao) denounced Khrushchev’s campaign for détente as a betrayal of the founding father. The People’s Daily informed its readers of thirty-seven “aggressive” acts committed by the United States since Camp David: “We see no substantive change in the imperialists’ war policy or of Eisenhower himself.”
Khrushchev suffered other blows. Two pillars of the Soviet military were replaced by men whom Western intelligence considered more hard-line. Mikoyan, a Khrushchev ally and proponent of détente, was said to be in sudden decline. Khrushchev may have felt that he had been through all of this before—in 1956, when Eastern Europe flared up after his Secret Speech and he had ended similar weeks of seclusion by chanting, “We are all Stalinists.” Now was he under pressure to toughen his American policy before the Paris Summit?
On Monday morning, April 25, Soviet Party workers hung red hammer-and-sickle banners in the main square of Baku for the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik liberation of Azerbaidzhan. Khrushchev had chosen this moment to re-emerge into public view with a speech on nationwide radio and television. It was three weeks before the start of the Paris Summit.
Standing under a large portrait of himself, he said, “I presume that you would like to know what the Soviet government thinks of the present international situation. We consider it to be good.… We trust that common sense will prevail—that when the Summit closes and the leaders leave Paris, relations between the countries at the talks will be better than before.”
But recent events had put him on guard. “Take the recent speech by the American Undersecretary of State, Douglas Dillon.… That speech just reeks of the spirit of the Cold War.… Why did Dillon have to make a statement so clearly out of keeping with relations between the Soviet Union and the United States since my talks with President Eisenhower at Camp David?”
Other things made him “sit up with a start.” Disarmament—the West seemed to be dragging its feet. And the German problem? “Some people seem to hope to reduce this meeting to an ineffectual exchange of opinions and pleasant—they may be—talks.” If the talks did not ultimately lead to a German peace treaty, he would sign his separate peace to bar the West from Berlin. The crowd clapped and cheered. “Comrades, the Soviet Union is now stronger than ever before! Our might is indomitable!”
After the April 9 U-2 flight, Eisenhower was impressed by the fact that Khrushchev, “for his own reasons,” did not protest. As Kistiakowsky later said, “This was virtually inviting us to repeat the sortie.”
Dulles and Bissell appealed for another mission. Importance: “well above average.” They wished to get a fresh look at Tyuratam and other Soviet military-industrial landmarks such as Sverdlovsk. But according to Bissell, the most vital target was six hundred miles north of Moscow at Plesetsk. As Arthur Lundahl recalled, the April 9 flight and other sources had found evidence that the first operational ICBMs were being deployed there, but they had not obtained the kind of photography they would have wished. Another run would reveal Soviet progress.
Bissell argued that if they waited, they might miss the chance to see the missiles under construction. And by then, the missiles might be camouflaged. In the northern latitudes, the sun’s angle was judged critical for U-2 photography. It was argued that a mission over Plesetsk could only be flown effectively from April through July.
Christian Herter later said, “The summit meeting was very much on my mind, as it was on everybody’s mind at that time. The real issue was: How urgent was the information, and is there any one time that is more favorable than another? From a technical point of view, the time was more favorable at that time than another. From a diplomatic point of view, it seemed to me that with the President scheduled to go to Russia later, there would have been the same difficulty.”
If they waited until July and weather was poor, the U-2 might be barred from taking clear pictures of Plesetsk until April 1961. In the meantime they might obtain other forms of intelligence, but these would probably be inconclusive. They might photograph the target from a satellite, but so far the United States had been unable to launch one.
Allen Dulles later noted that in times of tension, people said that “flights should be stopped because they increase tension. In times of sweetness and light, they should not be run because it would disturb any ‘honeymoon’ in our relations with the Soviet Union.” By that logic, he said, one would never fly at all.
“There is always some international conference or something,” said Thomas Gates.
More than Herter, Dulles or Gates, the President was eager to build a lasting détente and knew how each incursion provoked the Russians. Still Khrushchev had not complained of the April flight and had not been able to knock it down. Perhaps it was caution enough to close down the program for the weeks immediately before the Paris conference. Thus Eisenhower sent the U-2 into the Soviet Union one more time.
* Franklin Roosevelt had, of course, gone to Yalta in February 1945.
* National American media acceded to the CIA’s request not to publish details about the Glomar Explorer in 1974. (See Notes.)