President Truman, taken aback by events, like everyone else, voiced his frustration to reporters on November 30, 1950, saying that he “would use the atomic bomb, if necessary, to assure victory.” Of course, such a statement scared the daylights out of our British ally, and Prime Minister Clement Attlee, a staunch supporter of the Berlin airlift in 1948–1949, quickly flew to Washington to get things straightened out. “Getting things straightened out” meant for the United States to confer with the United Kingdom before making rash moves with nuclear weapons. With the United States vulnerable in Korea, the Soviet Union, with its vast tank armies deployed along the West German border, was viewed with suspicion. Are they going to take advantage of American vulnerability? We had no intelligence, no reliable information on what they were doing, not to mention what their intentions might be. After conferring with Attlee in early December, Truman authorized “overflights of denied territory” in the Far East—meaning Communist China and the Soviet Union. Additionally, the fourth production model of a B-47 bomber was pulled from the production line to be given photo-reconnaissance capabilities to overfly eastern Siberia to see if the Soviets had deployed any of their strategic bombers, potentially threatening Alaska and the west coast. Truman also recalled General Dwight D. Eisenhower to active duty, who assumed the duties of NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), with its headquarters in Mons, near Brussels, Belgium. All of this didn’t do anything to alleviate the Western lack of military capability, nor did we have the information—intelligence in other words—to make informed decisions about what we needed to ensure the safety of our people. In Europe, along the borders of the Soviet Union, the US Air Force and US Navy had already begun flying peripheral reconnaissance—PARPRO missions in Pentagon jargon—as early as the Berlin airlift days, and suffered their first loss to Russian fighters over the eastern Baltic Sea in April 1950. The British were also busy selecting aircrews to fly reconnaissance over European Russia using American planes—RB-45Cs. The stage was set. The Soviet Union was a closed society to outsiders, but not much longer. America was going to get the information it needed to build an appropriate force structure to oppose the Soviet threat—and the best and easiest way to accomplish that was by direct overflights of the Soviet Union to gather information on military deployments, production facilities, and of course target information for our own bombers.
The result of all the uncertainty faced by America’s and Great Britain’s political leadership and their military planners quickly resulted in overflights of denied Chinese and Russian territory by RF-80, RF-86, and RB-45 jet reconnaissance aircraft. Much of the information gathered, however, was to support the ongoing war effort in Korea. The information brought back by reconnaissance flights over Chinese ports was passed to the B-29 bomber crews flying out of Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, and Yokota Air Base, Japan, who then tried to catch the ships as they were unloading in North Korean ports. On the European side of the Soviet Union, the British were the ones who initiated the overflight program in 1952, when they flew three American RB-45C reconnaissance aircraft deep into European Russia. Six months later, two American RB-47Bs flew over eastern Siberia, adjacent to the Bering Sea, to see if by chance the Soviets had moved TU-4 bombers onto Siberian airfields. The year that followed saw the death of Stalin, the turmoil that accompanies a dictator’s passing, and the swearing in of a new president for the United States—Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower, within a short period of time, not only sanctioned Truman’s overflights initiated during a national emergency and a period of war but expanded on them with what became known as the Sensitive Intelligence Program, SENSINT, in 1954.
If anyone understood the value of having up-to-date, accurate information on one’s adversaries, intelligence in other words, it was General Eisenhower, who had led the Allied armies in World War II from the shores of Normandy to the Elbe River. Eisenhower remembered Pearl Harbor—an intelligence failure that all who experienced it vowed was never going to happen again. And yet it did happen again just five years after V-J Day. We were totally surprised when North Korea overran South Korean and American forces, nearly running them into the Sea of Japan. And then again later that same year, strategic surprise came when the Chinese Communists intervened that November in the Korean conflict. When it came to knowing what our potential adversaries might be up to, we seemed to be totally ignorant. Eisenhower vowed to fix that problem once and for all, instituting a “compartmented” intelligence collection effort where “Need to Know” became the mantra. “Need to Know” meant that the fewest people possible were to be privy to information gathered by overflights of denied territory. And only a handful needed to know about such flights at all. Even the aircrews directly involved would know nothing about missions flown other than their own, and they were briefed to never talk about their overflights—to anyone. Requests for overflights originated with the most senior military commanders, were vetted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Department of State, and the CIA, and approved, without exception, by the commander in chief. Eisenhower, like others before him, knew that such undertakings as overflying denied territory, although a necessity for the United States, were at best a violation of international law and at worst could be interpreted as an act of war. Therefore the planning, approval, and execution of such flights were restricted to a handful of people; the fewer people who knew about any of this, the better. Top secret compartmented intelligence information (SCI) became a rigorously enforced concept and provided the framework to limit access to sensitive national programs.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower in December 1943 with President Franklin Roosevelt at La Marsa, Tunisia.
Under the auspices of the SENSINT program, RF-86Fs, RB-47E/Hs, RB-57A/D/F/Ws, and supersonic RF-100As entered the inventory and were employed in Europe and the Far East. The truly amazing thing is that we experienced no losses. We kept on flying higher and higher—at 40,000 feet, plus or minus a few thousand feet, the MiG-15 struggled and wasn’t a threat to our reconnaissance aircraft. The MiG-17 improved on the lack of performance of the MiG-15, but we bested it, too, by moving up to 50,000 feet—then the MiG-19 came along, pushing the envelope. We kept on going higher and higher with lightweight, better engines and large winged aircraft such as the RB-57Ds and Ws, and eventually the U-2, which flew above 70,000 feet. What Eisenhower gained from numerous overflights was an insight into the economy of the Soviet Union and its military and nuclear force structure and deployments. It allowed him to make rational and economic decisions as to our own military needs, including putting the brakes on the nonstop expansion of SAC’s bomber force. So, when on May 1, 1954, the Soviets put on their version of Thanksgiving with a huge military parade in Red Square, including a flyover of purportedly one hundred new Bison jet bombers, political Washington went into an uproar and spoke of a “bomber gap.” Actually, if there was a bomber gap, it was in our favor, and Eisenhower knew that. He had up-to-date information on the subject provided by his fearless aviators who overflew the Soviet Union. The same scenario played out in October 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1—this time, it was a missile gap. Well, we had experienced setbacks with our Vanguard rockets, which kept blowing up on the launchpads. But Eisenhower knew where we stood in missile development and what the Soviet threat actually was—and, like the bomber gap, the missile gap proved illusionary, a gap that existed only for the uninformed. Nevertheless, Eisenhower was not about to share publicly the critical information he gained through the SENSINT and U-2 overflight programs.
All good things have to come to an end sometime, one way or another. For the super-successful SENSINT program, the mass overflights by RB-47s in early 1956 got the Soviets’ attention, and they let us know in private that they didn’t care for us to continue such efforts. But it was the flight of three RB-57Ds over Vladivostok, the huge Russian naval base adjacent to the Sea of Japan, that really upset them. In a note of December 15, 1956, they voiced their displeasure: “The Government of the Union of Soviet Socialis
t Republics considers it necessary to advise the Government of the United States as follows: According to precisely determined data, on December 11, 1956, between 13:07 and 13:21, Vladivostok time, three American jet planes, type B-57, coming from the direction of the Sea of Japan, south of Vladivostok, violated the national boundary of the USSR by invading the airspace of the Soviet Union.” Followed by several more paragraphs expressing their displeasure, the note concluded, “In case of any repetition in the future of violations of the airspace of the USSR by American planes, the Government of the United States of America will have to bear the full responsibility for the consequences of such violations.”49 The American response was brief and polite, but President Eisenhower got the message—and ended the SENSINT program. Many of the airframes, such as RF-100s, that had flown shallow penetrations over Eastern Bloc countries, as well as RF-86 and RB-57 aircraft, were passed on to the Nationalist Chinese for flights over Communist China. Farsightedly, back in 1954, President Eisenhower had approved the development of the U-2, a powered lightweight glider that could reach altitudes where no fighter could go, beyond 70,000 feet. The designer? Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, of course. The impetus for the U-2 program was to preclude strategic surprise, Eisenhower’s mantra. No more Pearl Harbors or Korean surprises while Eisenhower was president. He assumed the presidency with that overriding thought in mind, and he was going to leave knowing that the nation was equipped to preclude military surprise of any kind. In addition to the development of the U-2, Eisenhower pushed the CIA into assuming the overflight role of the Soviet Union, using contractors, in other words, highly paid US Air Force fighter pilots, to get the military out of the spy flight business, with its potentially military ramifications.
Writes R. Cargill Hall, in his article “Clandestine Victory: Eisenhower and Overhead Reconnaissance in the Cold War”: in a November 23, 1954, “meeting in the Oval Office with the secretaries of state and defense and senior CIA and Air Force officials, Eisenhower approved the program under CIA management. Because the intelligence agency possessed no infrastructure or personnel to bring it into operation, the president ordered the Air Force to furnish all of the assistance needed to train, base and operate the new reconnaissance aircraft.”50 Among the chosen few to get the CIA into the overflight business, not really supported by Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, was Marion “Hack” Mixson, who had trained the Royal Air Force contingent to fly the RB-45C in 1951. “Kelly Johnson promised delivery of the first of the spy planes in eight months.” True to form, Kelly Johnson delivered not only on time but also below program cost. The U-2 flew its first test flight on July 21, 1955. So, when the SENSINT program ended in late 1956, the U-2 had already assumed the role of overflying the Soviet Union. “Between June 20 and July 10, 1956, U-2s launched from West Germany—Wiesbaden and Giebelstadt Air Bases—made eight overflights inside the Iron Curtain, five of them over the Soviet Union. Among other sites, they imaged downtown Leningrad and Moscow. Earlier, the US Air Force had claimed that the USSR possessed over a hundred Bison long-range heavy bombers, but the U-2 photography belied that claim. The U-2 missions covered nine Soviet long-range bomber bases in European Russia, including the Fili airframe plant near Moscow that produced the bombers, and they failed to uncover any of them.” The SENSINT shutdown initially also shut down the U-2 overflights, but Eisenhower quickly reconsidered, allowing continued overflights of the Soviet Union by U-2 aircraft.
“Eisenhower approved a flight from Pakistan to Norway, across the Soviet Union. Scheduled for late April 1960, it did not take place until May 1, the communist ‘All Saints’ Day,’ just fifteen days before another Four Power Summit Conference. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, flew north over Stalinabad, the Tyuratam missile test center, and then proceeded northwest toward Yurya and Plesetsk, the submarine shipyard at Severodvinsk, the naval base at Murmansk, with recovery scheduled in Norway late in the day. While operating at its design altitude of 70,000 feet, over the city of Sverdlovsk, Powers’s plane was brought down by a salvo of SA-2 surface-to-air missiles. The pilot survived.” According to Ben Rich, the longtime director of Lockheed’s famed Skunk Works, “a Soviet missile battery had launched in shotgun fashion 14 SA-2s at the approaching U-2, a sign that they were waiting for his arrival. One missile had knocked down a Russian fighter trying to intercept Powers, and the shock waves from the exploding missiles had knocked off the U-2s tail.”51
Premier Khrushchev took full advantage of the opportunity at the summit conference in Paris, demanding a personal apology. The U-2 shootdown ended the overflight program for good, including a follow-on program called OXCART, which produced the CIA-flown Mach 3+ A-12 spy plane. An air force two-seat version flew for the remainder of the Cold War years at altitudes over 80,000 feet along the periphery of the Soviet Union—but never over the Soviet Union or Communist China, the current PRC, Peoples Republic of China. However, the SR-71 cameras were of such high quality that they could look for hundreds of miles into the Soviet Union while flying offshore. President Dwight D. Eisenhower handed over the national reigns in January 1961 to President John F. Kennedy, leaving him not just with an interstate highway system that brought the US infrastructure into the twentieth century but also with a nascent Corona satellite reconnaissance program that no longer came with the downside associated with aircraft overflights, even if flown by quasicivilians. As for the Soviet Union—in 1960 it no longer was a closed society as it had been in 1948. The Open Skies proposal that Eisenhower broached to Khrushchev in 1960, rejected of course, in fact was implemented with the launch of the Corona spy satellite.
The highly successful U-2 program had its teething problems like any other new aircraft design. By 1958, twelve U-2s had been lost due to accidents. “The CIA had paid for 20 aircraft,” writes Chris Pocock, an authority on the U-2, “and the USAF had taken delivery of another 30. Kelly Johnson offered the government a sweet deal to produce another five aircraft, partially built from spare parts left over from the earlier contracts. The USAF took up the offer, and five additional aircraft were delivered by March of 1959.”53
The overflights program of the United States during the early Cold War years was a survival measure that provided the information needed to preclude strategic surprise in the nuclear age. Noted Richard Helms, the director of the CIA from 1966 to 1973, “The U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union provided us with the greatest intelligence breakthrough of the 20th Century. For the first time, American policy makers had accurate, credible information on Soviet strategic assets…. Those overflights eliminated almost entirely the ability of the Kremlin ever to launch a surprise preemptive strike against the West. There was no way they could secretly prepare for war without our cameras revealing the size and scope of those activities.”52
There were, however, some authors who maintained, on the flimsiest evidence, that at times General LeMay, the SAC commander, initiated overflights on his own accord. Those stories were false and did injustice to a program that was tightly controlled at the highest level of the US government, the president of the United States. However, General LeMay pretty much ran the PARPRO reconnaissance program, in which I personally participated. Peripheral reconnaissance missions were flown over international waters along the shores and borders of the Soviet Union and its satellites, as well as the PRC and North Korea. An issue that arose as early as 1948 was what constituted the national limit of offshore sovereignty. International law called for an offshore limit of three miles. Russia, and later the Soviet Union, extended that limit to twelve miles, and in July 1948 our State Department, to be supersafe, called for a forty-mile limit, which didn’t sit well with our military, which continued to lobby for a twelve-mile limit. Our cameras weren’t that good at the time to provide useful imagery beyond the twelve-mile limit. By August 1948, State relented and agreed to a twenty-mile limit in the Pacific. Things changed with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, but peripheral reconnaissance flights worldwide stayed beyond the twelve-mile limit. With th
e advent of high-flying jets and a significant increase in camera effectiveness and film resolution, peripheral reconnaissance proved very productive. In addition, reconnaissance began to capture electronic emissions over a broad frequency spectrum from offshore locations. It is here, in the peacetime aerial reconnaissance program, flying over international waters, where we suffered significant losses in aircraft and crews.
From September 1962 to September 1967, the air force’s ground-to-air missile units shot down five KMT (Kuomintang) U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. The picture shows four U-2 aircraft exhibited at the Chinese People’s Revolutionary Military Museum.
Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage Page 31
