Ike's Spies

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  However, the President’s other advisers, from the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the State Department, downgraded the danger. Foster Dulles, for example, once told Ike, laughing, “If the Soviets ever capture one of these planes, I’m sure they will never admit it. To do so would make it necessary for them to admit also that for years we had been carrying on flights over their territory while they had been helpless to do anything about the matter.”7

  Of all those concerned, Ike later wrote, only John Eisenhower, Richard Bissell, and Andrew Goodpaster agreed with him that “if ever one of the planes fell in Soviet territory a wave of excitement mounting almost to panic would sweep the world, inspired by the standard Soviet claim of injustice, unfairness, aggression, and ruthlessness.”8

  After the event, in a July 1960 postmortem, Ike said that “all his advisers, including Foster Dulles, had missed badly in their estimate regarding the U-2.… He did not wish to say ‘I told you so’ but recalled that he was the one and only one who had put much weight on this factor, and that he had given it great emphasis. Being only one person, he had not felt he could oppose the combined opinion of all his associates. He added that the action that was taken was probably the right action, and what he would have done anyhow even if his advisers had correctly assessed the potential reaction.”9

  In other words, the President, like his advisers, was extremely anxious to make more flights, whatever the risk. The purpose, in the spring of 1960, was to fly over territory that had not been covered previously, territory that the CIA believed might be being used by the Soviets to build new ICBM sites. Ike wanted to know, before the summit, what the facts were.10

  There was also a feeling that the United States had best fly as many missions as it could before the SAMS got any better. Francis Gary Powers thought that was the major reason for his May 1, 1960, flight. There had been two flights in close succession in April, Powers later wrote, and “the pilots believed the resumption of the flights was due at least in part to the agency’s fear that Russia was now close to solving her missile-guidance problem.”11

  Powers also believed that the CIA had not informed Ike “of the many dangers involved, lest he consider the advisability of discontinuing the overflight program entirely.” Powers further had the impression that “Eisenhower believed the pilots had been ordered to kill themselves rather than submit to capture.”12

  On this last point, Powers was certainly wrong. Eisenhower had no such impression. What he did believe was that no pilot could escape alive from a SAM hit.

  MID-APRIL 1960, THE WHITE HOUSE. In the world’s most famous office, John Eisenhower and Andrew Goodpaster leaned over the President’s shoulders, tracing out for him on a huge map of Russia the proposed flight pattern for a U-2 mission. Ike asked a few questions. Bissell, across the President’s desk, explained why the CIA thought there might be new missile sites along the route. Eisenhower grunted, then turned to the Secretary of State, Christian Herter (Dulles had died of cancer the previous year).

  Herter was worried about the timing, with the Summit meeting only a month away. Ike’s attitude was that “there would never be a good time for a failure.” Still, he too was worried. The President told Bissell he had an authorization to fly for the following two weeks.13

  Every day for the next fourteen days, Russia was covered by clouds. The U-2 needed near-perfect weather to fly. The weather never improved. Bissell applied for an extension. Ike had Goodpaster call Bissell and tell him the flight was authorized for one more week, that is, up to May 2. If he could not get it off the ground by then, it was scratched for good, because it would be too close to the Paris meeting to risk it.

  “And that means,” as Bissell summed it up in 1979, “that all of those stories implying that nobody gave any thought to the timing or that the White House forgot that the summit was going on are a bunch of nonsense.”14

  The afternoon of May 1, 1960, Goodpaster called Eisenhower on the telephone to report that a U-2 flying a mission over Russia was “overdue and possibly lost.”15 Whether it had malfunctioned, run out of fuel, or been shot down was unknown and unknowable.

  There was no reason to panic. First, everyone assumed that Powers was dead. Second, the CIA had assured the President “that if a plane were to go down it would be destroyed either in the air or on impact, so that proof of espionage would be lacking. Self-destroying mechanisms were built in.”16 Third, Khrushchev would probably say nothing about it anyway, just as he had not mentioned the many previous flights, including the two in April.

  On the first and second points, the CIA had given Ike bad information. Powers had survived and in any case it would have been impossible to destroy the conclusive evidence that he was engaged in spying on the Soviet Union. That evidence was the film itself. As Lyman Kirkpatrick, a CIA career man who became executive director of the agency, wrote in 1968, “Nobody has ever yet devised a method for quickly destroying a tightly rolled package of hundreds of feet of film. Even if Francis Powers had succeeded in pressing the ‘destruction button’ which would have blown the plane and the camera apart, the odds would still have been quite good that careful Soviet search would have found the rolls of film.”17

  The CIA had fudged when it told the President that the plane had a “self-destruct mechanism.” The device had to be activated by the pilot. Further, it was only a two-and-one-half-pound charge, hardly sufficient to “destroy” a craft as big as the U-2.18

  But the biggest mistake of all turned out to be the assumption behind point three, that Khrushchev would keep quiet. For a while, he did. Then, on May 5, four days after the SAM knocked Powers out of the sky, Khrushchev broke the news, and in such a manner as to ensure the wrecking of the Paris Summit, thereby destroying the bright hopes for an end to the Cold War. Whether that was his intention or not, no one in the West knows or can know, but it was the result.

  Speaking before the Supreme Soviet, in a blistering speech, Khrushchev said that the Russians had shot down an American plane that had intruded Soviet airspace. He angrily denounced the United States for its “aggressive provocation” in sending a “bandit flight” over the Soviet Union. In the course of a long harangue, Khrushchev said the Americans had picked May Day, “the most festive day for our people and the workers of the world,” hoping to catch the Soviets with their guard down, but to no avail.

  In analyzing the event, Khrushchev suggested interpretations that were later picked up in the United States and remain very much alive in the 1980s as conspiracy theories. The Russian Premier charged that militarists in the United States, in the CIA and in the Pentagon, fearful of an outbreak of peace at Paris, had sent Powers over Russia precisely to wreck the conference. “Aggressive imperialist forces in the United States in recent times have been taking the most active measures to undermine the summit or at least to hinder any agreement that might be reached.”

  Then Khrushchev offered an explanation that still finds wide support among American intellectuals and liberals—that Ike did not know what the militarists were doing behind his back. “Was this aggressive act carried out by Pentagon militarists?” he asked. “If such actions are taken by American military men on their own account, it must be of special concern to world opinion.”19

  Ike did not deny the charges or reply to the innuendos. Meanwhile, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration went ahead with the long-established cover story. It issued a statement on May 5 that began, “One of N.A.S.A.’s U-2 research airplanes, in use since 1956 in a continuing program to study meteorological conditions found at high altitude, has been missing since May 1, when its pilot reported he was having oxygen difficulties over the Lake Van, Turkey, area.” The pilot was identified as thirty-year-old Francis Gary Powers, a civilian flying under contract to Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Presumably, the U-2 had strayed off course, perhaps crossing the border into Russia. The unstated assumption was that Powers’ weather plane was the one the Russians had shot down.20

  The following day,
Khrushchev released a photograph of a wrecked airplane, describing it as the U-2 Powers had flown. It was not, however, a U-2, but another airplane. The Premier was setting a trap. He wanted Eisenhower to continue to believe that Powers was dead, the U-2 destroyed, so that the United States would stick to its “weather research” story, as it did. On May 7, Khrushchev sprang his great surprise. He jubilantly reported to a “wildly cheering” Supreme Soviet that “we have parts of the plane and we also have the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking. The pilot is in Moscow and so are the parts of the plane.”

  Khrushchev made his account a story of high drama and low skullduggery interspersed with bitingly sarcastic remarks about the American cover story. Cries of “Shame, Shame!” rose from the deputies as Khrushchev heaped scorn on the CIA, mixed with cries of “Bandits, Bandits!”21

  Upon receiving this news, which he found “unbelievable,”22 Eisenhower made a serious mistake. At Secretary Herter’s urging, he authorized the State Department to issue a statement denying that Powers had any authorization to fly over the Soviet Union.

  As James Reston reported in the New York Times, “The United States admitted tonight that one of this country’s planes equipped for intelligence purposes had ‘probably’ flown over Soviet territory.

  “An official statement stressed, however, that ‘there was no authorization for any such flight’ from authorities in Washington.

  “As to who might have authorized the flight, officials refused to comment. If this particular flight of the U-2 was not authorized here, it could only be assumed that someone in the chain of command in the Middle East or Europe had given the order.”23

  Critics on one side blamed the President for admitting that the United States had spy planes. Critics on the other side blasted him for not being in command of his own military. Whichever way one examined it, the President looked terrible. The statement only made a bad situation worse.

  In his memoirs, Eisenhower passed over that part of the statement that denied any authorization from Washington. He simply did not mention it. He did explain the “unprecedented” acknowledgment of espionage activities by pointing out that since the Russians had the plane in hand, he could hardly deny its existence.

  Eisenhower also pointed out that the Soviets were notorious for spying on the United States, that their activities in espionage “dwarfed” those of the Americans, and that to charge that flying over a nation in an airplane carrying only a camera was “warmongering” was “just plain silly.”24

  Nevertheless, as Reston reported from Washington in the Times of May 9, “This was a sad and perplexed capital tonight, caught in a swirl of charges of clumsy administration, bad judgment and bad faith.

  “It was depressed and humiliated by the United States having been caught spying over the Soviet Union and trying to cover up its activities in a series of misleading official announcements.”25

  Over the next few days, humiliation gave way to fright, as the headlines became more and more alarmist, “KHRUSHCHEV WARNS OF ROCKET ATTACK ON BASES USED BY U.S. SPYING PLANES,” the Times announced on May 10. The following morning, the headline read, “U.S. VOWS TO DEFEND ALLIES IF RUSSIANS ATTACK BASES.”

  Ike, meanwhile, indicated that he would not make a trip to Russia after the Paris Summit Conference. Khrushchev replied that he would not be welcome anyway. The fate of the conference itself was in doubt. Khrushchev told an impromptu news conference in Moscow that he was putting Powers on trial and added, “You understand that if such aggressive actions continue this might lead to

  Eisenhower held his own news conference. He read a carefully worded statement, saying that the Soviet “fetish of secrecy and concealment was a major cause of international tension and uneasiness.” In firm, measured tones, without a hint of regret or apology, Ike said Khrushchev’s antics over the “flight of an unarmed non-military plane can only reflect a fetish of secrecy.” The President then declared that he was assuming personal responsibility for the flights. He said they were necessary to protect the United States from surprise attacks.27

  Although Ike defended America’s right to find out all that it could about Russian military dispositions, and cited the need for the U-2 program, he also indicated that no more flights would go forth in the immediate future. There were two good reasons for this suspension. First, the obvious one—the Soviets had demonstrated a capacity to shoot down the aircraft. Second, the United States was making progress in photography of the earth from satellites, so the U-2s were not as crucial as they had been.28

  That fact deepens the mystery as to what Khrushchev was up to, with his histrionics, wild charges, and pretended outrage. Soviet satellites were flying over America daily by 1960, and Russian newspapers had even published photographs of the United States taken by cameras aboard such satellites.29

  Reston guessed in the Times that Khrushchev was pretending to be shocked and outraged because he realized that Eisenhower was not going to pull out of Berlin, so he was using the U-2 “to blame the United States for the breakdown of the Paris meeting.”30

  Charles de Gaulle later told Ike he thought the reason Khrushchev made such a fuss about the U-2 was that he feared a presidential visit to Russia, and used the U-2 incident as a way of preventing it. In de Gaulle’s interpretation, Khrushchev did not want to give Ike the opportunity—as Ike had given to Khrushchev when he visited the United States—to speak directly to the Russian people over Soviet television.31

  Whatever his motives, in the week before the Paris meeting Khrushchev kept saying that he doubted that Eisenhower personally knew about the flights. At one point, he even said that the KGB often carried on activities that he did not know about. Several of Ike’s associates, and some members of Congress, urged him to take advantage of this interpretation by dismissing Bissell and/or Allen Dulles, with the thought that this would show that the President had been a “victim of overzealous subordinates.”

  Ike refused, first because it was untrue, second because it would indicate that the CIA was operating irresponsibly, was even out of control, and third because it would allow Khrushchev to say that Eisenhower could not speak for his country since he could not control his own government. Thus, Ike recorded, “I rejected the whole notion out of hand.”32

  On May 14, 1960, Ike flew to Paris. De Gaulle, as host, had already checked with Khrushchev to make certain the Russian leader wanted to go ahead with the meeting. Khrushchev had said that he was ready. When Ike called on de Gaulle on May 15, however, de Gaulle reported that Khrushchev was now making trouble. He had been to see de Gaulle and indicated that he was highly agitated about the U-2 flights. He could not understand why Eisenhower had admitted publicly that he knew about the missions. By Khrushchev’s standards this indicated not American truthfulness, but rather contempt for the Soviets. De Gaulle told Khrushchev that he could not seriously expect Ike to apologize.

  De Gaulle discussed these matters, according to Ike’s interpreter, General Vernon Walters, “with a sort of Olympian detachment.… He did not think that the peccadilloes of intelligence services were appropriate matters to be discussed at meetings of chiefs of government.”33

  The following morning, de Gaulle, presiding, had not even finished calling the initial meeting to order when Khrushchev was on his feet, red-faced, loudly demanding the right to speak. De Gaulle nodded, and Khrushchev launched into a tirade against the United States. Soon he was shouting.

  De Gaulle interrupted, turned to the Soviet interpreter, and said, “The acoustics in this room are excellent. We can all hear the chairman. There is no need for him to raise his voice.” The interpreter blanched, turned to Khrushchev, and began to translate. De Gaulle cut him off and motioned to his own interpreter, who unfalteringly translated into Russian. Khrushchev cast a furious glance at de Gaulle, then continued to read in a lower voice.

  He soon lashed himself into an even greater frenzy. He pointed overhead and shouted, “I have been overflown.”

  De Gaulle interrupte
d again. He said that he, too, had been overflown.

  “By your American allies?” asked Khrushchev, incredulous.

  “No,” replied General de Gaulle, “by you. Yesterday that satellite you launched just before you left Moscow to impress us overflew the sky of France eighteen times without my permission. How do I know you do not have cameras aboard which are taking pictures of my country?”

  Khrushchev’s jaw dropped. Then he smiled. He raised both hands above his head and said, “God sees me. My hands are clean. You don’t think I would do a thing like that?”

  De Gaulle grunted.

  Khrushchev returned to reading his speech. Soon he exclaimed, “What devil made the Americans do this?” De Gaulle observed that there were devils on both sides and that this matter was not worthy of the consideration of chiefs of government to whom the world was looking for signs of peace.

  Khrushchev then announced that unless Eisenhower would apologize he would walk out of the conference. Ike refused to apologize. Khrushchev repeated his threat to walk out.

  De Gaulle looked at Khrushchev, according to translator Walters, “as one would look at a naughty child.” He adjourned the meeting. As Eisenhower started to leave the room, de Gaulle caught him by the elbow and drew him aside, with Walters to interpret. He then said to the President, “I do not know what Khrushchev is going to do nor what is going to happen, but whatever he does, or whatever happens, I want you to know that I am with you to the end.”34

  The next day Khrushchev returned to Moscow. The Paris Summit Conference was over.

  In summing up the event in his memoirs, Eisenhower admitted that “the big error we made was, of course, in the issuance of a premature and erroneous cover story. Allowing myself to be persuaded on this score is my principal personal regret.”35