Recalls Major General Roger K. Rhodarmer during his presentation at the Early Cold War Overflights Symposium, then a lieutenant colonel and known as the “legman” for Headquarters US Air Force overflight operations: “I know we got RB-57As in both Europe and the Pacific, but I was not much involved in that program. Those birds could get up to 56,000 feet, some even higher. The RB-57D models built for the SENSINT program also were coming along, and the Air Staff was wondering where we were going to base these things. The air force had already bought the damn things, once they understood the pressure from on high for penetration overflights. The RB-57D had a modified J-57 engine that had a lot of thrust and long, extended wings, and a bigger fuselage than the C-model. So we ended up building a brand new airplane using modification money. Then the RB-57D became a major issue for me. The air force had sent briefers out to USAFE and FEAF to tell them that we had this new airplane coming along. Both USAFE and FEAF just weren’t interested. The airplane had unique engines, had new wings, required airfields of different sizes—they just weren’t interested. They had their own little airplanes and were very satisfied with what they had and what they were doing. In essence, they turned down the RB-57D for good reasons, and it was even hard for us to see where you could use this thing. I went up to the Glenn Martin plant in Baltimore to look at the airplane. I nearly fell out of my chair. I went to General Everest and told him that this plane was coming and it had to go somewhere. We tried to interest SAC, but General LeMay wouldn’t even think of having another airplane in his inventory—he already had the B-36, the B-47, and the B-52 was just getting ready to enter the force. He didn’t want to introduce another new airplane, especially a really oddball bird.
“Anyway, someone got a message to General [John Paul] McConnell, who was the director of operations at SAC headquarters. I then was asked to brief him and his staff on what exactly this new airplane was all about. Before I started that briefing, someone told me to go and see a Colonel Robert Smith who was the head of Intelligence at SAC. I gave Colonel Smith a rundown on the RB-57D—and he could hardly stand still. It was exactly the kind of airplane he wanted. What annoyed the folks at Strategic Air Command a little was that we had not put better cameras in the plane. We had used the K-38s and standard cameras. Even though Smith didn’t like that part, he got on board and persuaded General McConnell at the meeting. After some impassioned remarks by Smith about the RB-57D, General McConnell finally got up and said, ‘OK, goddamn it, if anybody needs to run this thing SAC better take it or it’ll go to hell in a handbasket!’ It was the best speech I ever heard, because he had influence with LeMay and the SAC staff. They activated the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, appointed a commander, and off we went. The aircrews, maintenance, training, everything grew up with that airplane as it came out of the Martin plant front door. By the time they were delivered, everything was ready. We had to have ready all the pressure suits and everything. The wing was activated and moved down to Valdosta, Georgia. Those airplanes took off and damn near went straight up.”
While Rhodarmer was selling the RB-57D to SAC, the people in the 4080th tried to make the aircraft do what it was supposed to. The Pratt and Whitney J-57-P-9 engines, Westinghouse autopilots, and some of the more complicated electronic countermeasure systems did not function properly. The greatly enlarged wing kept causing problems. The main wing spar had to be strengthened, as did sections of the wing panels. The Martin-developed honeycomb wing surfaces were subject to water seepage and wing stress. Then there were parts problems, and on and on, all the little things that can go wrong with a new airframe. In time, it was all taken care of, and the aircraft made its first satisfactory flights after twenty failures in June 1957. The last aircraft was delivered from the Martin Company to the 4080th in March 1957.
“Meanwhile, back at the Pentagon, the Sensitive Intelligence, SENSINT, overflight program was going fine,” recalls Roger Rhodarmer. “One day in the spring of 1956 I got a call from a guy I knew, asking me to come over to the E-Ring to talk. He told me, ‘I need to brief you on a project we’ve got going here.’ And he proceeded to tell me about the U-2, that was going to impact our RB-57D program—because the U-2 engine wasn’t working right and the CIA needed the J-57 engines which we used on the D-model. The U-2 was having trouble with airflow through the engine at altitude, and it would not stay lit. This introduced me to a new world and Brigadier General Osmond ‘Ozzie’ Ritland, the deputy to Richard ‘Dick’ Bissell, who was in charge of the U-2 project at CIA. Ritland told me that he knew what I was doing with the RB-57D, and to come over and brief Dick Bissell on the SENSINT overflight program. After getting the OK from my boss, General Everest, I worked up a complete flip-chart briefing on the program—I was told they were cleared for God and everything else. On the appointed date I went over, along with General Ritland, to brief Dick Bissell, who was a most charming fellow. Just a few days before this briefing, SAC had flown six RB-47E/H aircraft on May 6 and 7 from Thule, Greenland, over the North Pole into northern Siberia, exiting at Anadyr on the Bering Sea, and landing at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. Part of my briefing to Dick Bissell included this particular flight, and it really impressed him.
“Bissell came just about out of his chair; he could hardly believe what I told him. He had this new airplane, the U-2, that could fly at extreme altitudes, and now he knew that it could probably fly unmolested over the Soviet Union. We talked about distances and altitudes; then Bissell, in his enthusiasm, canceled all of his appointments, and we went out for lunch. Someone in Bissell’s shop thought it would be a good idea to give my briefing to the president. So the word came back that we needed to prepare a briefing on sensitive intelligence operations similar to the one I gave to Bissell, but this time at the White House. When the word came down, I was given the prime job to make sure it was done right. The briefing covered everything from the early years to the present, what the air force had done and how well it was done. Then we waited for a month, and one day we got a call to come over and see General Thomas D. White, the air force vice chief of staff. ‘We are going to take this briefing to the White House,’ he said. ‘Are you guys ready?’ Then he added, ‘Don’t worry. I know President Eisenhower. Now show me the briefing.’ We gave General White a quick summary, and then we all jumped into a car and drove over to the White House. Once there, I sat outside the Oval Office, and General White took the charts and the rest and went in. They were in there for some time, longer than I expected, and I was just sweating it out, wondering if I would be called in on some aspect or another. I was never asked to come in. When the door opened, General White stepped out accompanied by the president. General White then said to me, ‘Let’s go. The president reviewed the program and it’s OK.’ That was the beginning of my introduction to the CIA and the U-2 program.
A NASA WB-57F—a modified RB-57D—at Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico. The D/F series of aircraft performed photographic reconnaissance and flew air sampling missions; some flew for the Air Weather Service, a component of the Military Airlift Command.
“Meanwhile, we were beginning to receive the RB-57Ds and training pilots to fly them down there in Georgia. At SAC headquarters, Colonel Smith set up a photo-processing facility. Everything was ready to go. What they wanted to do was overfly Vladivostok—but before that could happen, we had a meeting with General LeMay, Smith and me, about bringing the RB-57Ds into Yokota Air Base, Japan. We got ready to leave for Japan when I got a call from a guy at CIA to stop by his office. He asked me to take some papers to General Laurence S. Kuter, who commanded FEAF, and to General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the Far East Theater commander. The papers were a request to base U-2 aircraft at Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan—and I was not to discuss any of this with my SAC friends involved in the RB-57D deployment. Sometime before that, the CIA people obviously had checked me out as someone who could be trusted with such an assignment. After that, it was like I had been working with the agency forever.
“Upon arriving in Japan, we met with Generals Hunter Harris and Kuter, and we explained the coming bed-down of the RB-57Ds. Then I asked for a private meeting with General Kuter—me, a lieutenant colonel, wanting to have a private meeting with a four-star general. I repeated my request to several gatekeeper generals, leaving them peeved at me, but I got my wish. I delivered the papers to General Kuter as instructed, then asked him to set up a similar meeting with General Lemnitzer, which he did. Both of them gave me an OK on the U-2 matter. General Lemnitzer requested I update him the next time he came to the Pentagon, which I agreed to do.
“Six RB-57Ds arrived at Yokota Air Base, Japan, in November 1956. The code name was Black Knight, suggested by a West Pointer who was involved in the program from the beginning. Earlier overflight projects were named after pretty girls such as ‘Slick Chick’ and ‘Heart Throb.’ Black Knight sounded a bit more robust, so we used Black Knight for the RB-57D planned overflight effort.”
The target for the first RB-57D mission was Vladivostok and the adjacent airfields, a target that had been overflown by RF-86s and RB-57As in earlier years. General Curtis E. LeMay was there himself to send his newest reconnaissance aircraft on its way. Like other missions planned by the general and his staff, he liked to have his ships arrive in numbers, not necessarily that all of them would be committed, but sending several aircraft at a target tended to have the effect of getting the Russians to turn on all or most of their radars and start talking on the air. All this of course would be picked up by ground stations and other airborne sleuths equipped with the appropriate receivers and linguists if necessary. When Colonel Harold Austin made his lone overflight of the Kola Peninsula in May 1954, LeMay sent three RB-47s into the Barents Sea area; two turned back. During Project Home Run earlier in May 1956, SAC chose to use several RB-47s to overfly Soviet territory. So, in keeping with past practices, this time SAC launched all six RB-57Ds toward the Vladivostok area, three aircraft turning back and the remaining three penetrating Soviet territory. Because the Yokota area was deemed less than secure and open to monitoring, the RBs relocated to Iwo Jima, an isolated and relatively secure location, and launched their high-altitude reconnaissance mission against Vladivostok from there.
A shoulder patch of the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing—later worn by the pilots who flew U-2s over Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
“The aircraft, I believe, did a hell of a good job,” recalled General Rhodarmer. “However, the Soviets tracked them from the start, and things really hit the fan. We had to go over and brief the State Department. We told them about the flight and then we were left sitting outside of Secretary Dulles’s office while the State ‘legman’ went inside. As I recall, the Russian ambassador to the United States was in there, who had handed the secretary of state a formal protest note over our overflights by the RB-57Ds and earlier flights by RB-47 aircraft. When it was all over and they trooped out, I heard one American say, ‘How did you know their tail numbers?’ Remember, they were flying at 60,000 feet. The Russian official replied, ‘Didn’t you ever think of ground observatories?’ A telescope! Apparently they were not only tracking the RB-57s with their radars but also were looking at them through a high-resolution telescope. The Russians had no trouble tracking those planes at all. A few days after the Soviet protest, President Eisenhower instructed then Colonel, later General, Andrew J. Goodpaster to relay his order to stop military reconnaissance flights over the Iron Curtain countries—for the time being.” That was how the RB-57D ended the SENSINT program.
“From then on, the air force conducted only peripheral reconnaissance flights,” Rhodarmer observed. “We had developed an airplane called Sharp Cut, an RB-57C, a two-seater, with a beautiful 240-inch lens on an oblique-looking camera that could look far into the Soviet Union—designed by James Baker and produced at Boston University’s Optical Research Laboratory. They could get up high over the Black Sea and see Kapustin Yar damn near from Turkey. There were also long-range oblique photography missions flown by RB-47s out of Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, along the coast of Siberia, [that] looked way inside the Soviet Union.” Control of overflight operations was quite informal until 1956, and they were known only to a few generals, their “legmen,” and the president. “In mid-1956, we built an operations center in the basement of the Pentagon; it was a ‘Green Door’ operation, probably the only one in the Pentagon at the time. Soon after the Operations Center went into business, the SENSINT program was canceled; however, we also incorporated by this time the air force peripheral missions. Then, by 1960, the Joint Reconnaissance Center was set up in the Pentagon. The air force was not alone in this business. The US Navy was flying peripheral missions as well, and had ships and submarines doing reconnaissance of various types. All of this activity and information was pulled together in the JRC. Then, in 1961, the National Reconnaissance Office was created as space reconnaissance entered the picture.” The very existence of the NRO was kept secret for years, as was its name. It was also the year, 1961, when the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA, the host of the 2001 Early Cold War Overflights Symposium, was created.
Rhodarmer continued, “When the U-2 program was getting started, the director of the CIA, Allen W. Dulles, was not supportive of the CIA getting into this business. I think it was Dick Bissell who told me, ‘You know the boss. He still likes spies and agents on the ground, that sort of thing.’ Dulles had the attitude that aerial reconnaissance should just stay within the air force. The CIA could get all the pictures they wanted without risk to themselves. But President Eisenhower had made up his mind that he wanted a civilian shop in control of this activity. We had gone through some hellacious diplomatic problems as a result of shootdowns of PARPRO aircraft in the Baltic and elsewhere. Those shootdowns involved military people, and it became complicated to deal with this through international diplomatic channels. A civilian-run operation seemed to make things a lot cleaner.”
Overflights of super-high-flying U-2 aircraft, 70,000-plus feet up, piloted by civilian pilots, most of whom were all former air force pilots, seemed to provide the means to safely continue overflights of the Soviet Union. Starting out first from Wiesbaden and Giebelstadt Air Bases in Germany, then flying out of Incirlik, Turkey, and subsequently Peshawar, Pakistan, the CIA U-2s overflew the Soviet Union repeatedly. But 70,000-plus feet wasn’t that safe an altitude after all. An RB-57D flown by the Nationalist Chinese out of Taiwan was shot down over China on October 7, 1959—by a Russian-supplied SA-2 surface-to-air missile. On May 1, 1960, a CIA-flown U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers was downed by a salvo of SA-2 SAMs near Sverdlovsk, USSR. According to General Rhodarmer, “One vulnerable aspect of the U-2 at that high altitude was that all you had to do was disturb the atmosphere in front of the airplane, and that would make the engine flame out. That May 1960 shootdown put President Eisenhower in a hell of a position, but he had accepted the risk at the outset. It was quite a shock when Powers showed up alive. It would have been cleaner if he had just taken his cyanide shot. Eisenhower had also started other overhead reconnaissance programs, including satellites. By the time President John F. Kennedy arrived on the scene the following January, he just accepted everything and supported it. There was never very much that was ever written down. As General Everest once told me, ‘When this SENSINT program ends, it will be like it never existed.’”
A modern-day Lockheed U-2/TR-1, Dragon Lady, around since 1955 and still earning its pay. The aircraft has grown in size and capabilities. The U-2 is a lasting tribute to Kelly Johnson, who designed not only the U-2 but also such aircraft as the pre–World War II P-38 and the magnificent Cold War Mach 3+ SR-71.
THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS THROUGH THE EYES OF A RAVEN (1962)
I survived 1,000 bomber raids as a young boy in Berlin in 1945. I knew if this thing went nuclear, both my family and I would perish.
—Wolfgang W. E. Samuel
On April 29, 1958, I processed out of the 28th Weather Squadron at Bushy Park, a su
burb of London, and General Eisenhower’s one-time headquarters prior to the D-Day landings, and took a train to Burtonwood in the north of England. There, I boarded a civilian contract flight to McGuire Air Force Base, near Wrightstown, New Jersey. At McGuire, I was given new orders assigning me to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado—for discharge from the air force—and a Greyhound bus ticket home. A ticket to Colorado and my future. I hadn’t done too well that first year at the University of Colorado back in 1953–1954, so I had joined the air force just in time to qualify for the Korean War GI Bill—which was going to be my “personal scholarship” to get me through the University of Colorado and a commission in the US Air Force—and of course a pilot training slot; that’s what it was all about for me. During the dark days of the Berlin airlift back in 1948, I lived as a refugee kid in a rundown refugee camp just off the north end of the RAF Fassberg runway. Day and night, the C-54s carrying coal to Berlin flew over our rotten barracks, maybe 100+ feet above us. That engine noise to me was the sound of freedom; having lived under the Communists in the east of Germany, I had no desire to experience them again. Then, one winter night, one of those freedom planes crashed, fell out of the sky, right near our camp. Several days later, I went out to the crash site, which was covered in black oil and coal, an engine sticking up out of the soft marshy ground, lots of bits and pieces of airplane all over the place. I wondered about these Americans. Three years earlier they had bombed me when I lived in Berlin; now they were dying to save that very city. I wanted to be like them, maybe wear their uniform, fly with them—of course dreams like that never come true for people like me. Well, I got to come to America in 1951. Couldn’t speak a word of English, had maybe an eighth-grade education—two years later I graduated from East High School in Denver, Colorado. But I really wasn’t ready yet to go to college, which I heard I needed to become an officer in the US Air Force—so I could go to flight training. That first year in high school, I had bought myself a set of second lieutenant bars in a pawn shop—they represented my goal, and nothing was going to keep from getting there and flying with those men of the Berlin airlift.
Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage Page 24
