by Td Barnes
In all fairness to the agency, starting in 1949, the CIA reporting on the potential for war in Korea was more explicit. When President Truman sought military proposals for withdrawing U.S. forces from the peninsula, the CIA warned that removing U.S. troops would likely lead to war. Nevertheless, the critics did not fault President Truman for withdrawing all American soldiers from Korea. In doing so, he all but waved a flag to signal the Soviet bear to come and get South Korea.
Almost from the moment of the last U.S. military personnel departure, North Korea began a continuing southward movement of the expanding North Korean People’s Army toward the thirty-eighth parallel. The CIA saw the acquisition of heavy equipment and armor. However, recognizing “the present program of propaganda, infiltration, sabotage, subversion and guerrilla operations against southern Korea,” the agency did not see an invasion as imminent.
No one blamed President Truman for disbanding the Office of Strategic Services, which could have probably foreseen the surprise attack across the thirty-eighth parallel. Instead, critics of the CIA before and after the Korean invasion focused on the CIA’s relatively few references to Korea in intelligence reporting. They noted the lack of any predictive estimated or other “actionable” warning information to allow U.S. policymakers to anticipate Korean events before they reached the crisis stage. The critics rated it an intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. The administration feared the war quickly widening into another world war should the Chinese or Soviets decide to get involved as well. The critics were wrong, and the president was right. Regardless, during the next two years, the agency underwent significant organizational changes and hired additional personnel to remedy any real or alleged deficiencies, resulting in a larger CIA and a new Directorate of Intelligence created in early 1952.
In some ways, the United States invited the war by not including South Korea in the strategic Asian Defense Perimeter. Officially, the United States never declared it a war. President Truman described it as a “police action.” It became the “Forgotten War” or the “Unknown War” from the lack of public attention it received both during and after the action.
To the CIA, this was the second U.S. war to occur from the lack of prior intelligence to foresee the invasion—another Pearl Harbor. The CIA vowed it would never allow a sneak attack to happen again.
The United States entered the Korean War flying propeller-engine bombers and fighters virtually unopposed. The Soviet Union showed up with the MiG-15. Suddenly, there was a MiG Alley, where American pilots found themselves clashing with Soviet-piloted MiG-15s over North Korea. The Soviet Union extended its air defense policy even more during its proxy war against the United States during the Korean War, downing a twin-engine U.S. Navy Neptune bomber near Vladivostok in 1951 and an RB-29 in the Sea of Japan on June 13, 1952.
Regardless of its name, lost in the war were 5 million soldiers and civilians: 36,574 Americans died, 7,984 of them still missing in action and 4,714 still listed as prisoners of war, many of these believed taken to the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the Korean War failed to receive the same media attention in the United States as had World War II. The television series M*A*S*H, a comedy set in a field hospital in South Korea, became the most famous representation of the war. The final episode became the most watched in television history up to that time.
The United States emerged from the Korean War, where American pilots faced the Soviet MiG-15, urgently needing strategic intelligence on the Soviet Union and its satellite states. At significant risk, U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft began long-range aerial reconnaissance on peripheral flights using oblique photography to penetrate the veil of secrecy around military activities in the Soviet interior. These shallow penetration reconnaissance flights covered only the Soviet Union west of the Urals and west of the Volga River, and only a few of the important regions for which they paid a high price in lives lost and increased international tension. The United States lost ten RB-47 planes with seventy-five crew members and pilots to Russian antiaircraft guns.
They found that only an electronic reconnaissance mission, however, could provide signal data on the existence of Soviet radar. They began actual intrusions into Soviet territory, seeking to photograph targets impossible to image from the periphery. The RB-47s found gaps in the Soviet air warning network, looking for weaknesses where they could dart in with a penetration photography flight to photograph what they could. At best, the U.S. intelligence gained fragmentary bits of SENSINT (sensitive intelligence).
However, this information came at a high cost of lives. The Soviet air defenses aggressively attacked the existing reconnaissance aircraft, primarily bombers converted for reconnaissance duty such as the Boeing RB-47, making them vulnerable to antiaircraft artillery, missiles and fighters. In Operation Home Run, six crews flew RB-47 reconnaissance aircraft to penetrate the northern area of Russia without making it public for discussion. The United States kept this secret because it did not want to admit to these operations. The Soviet Union kept it a secret because it did not want to acknowledge that the United States could overfly the Soviet Union with such ease. Nonetheless, avoiding the navy and air force aircrew losses called for a spy plane with a camera that the Soviet Union could not shoot down.
President Harry Truman wanted to develop such a plane; however, the United States Air Force chief, General Curtis LeMay, refused to build an aircraft that did not shoot guns or drop bombs. He protected his turf by opposing anyone other than the U.S. Air Force doing any such flying.
Faced with a stalemate with the air force, and wishing to use civilian aircrews and nonmilitary planes, the president turned to the Central Intelligence Agency to secretly build such a plane. But first, the CIA had to battle both the U.S. Air Force and the politicians in Washington to do so. These political battles would continue through twelve directors of Central Intelligence and several presidents occupying the Oval Office.
PROJECT LINCOLN—THE BEACON HILL REPORT
On June 15, 1952, a group met concerning the loss of lives while conducting reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union. The group of experts became known as Project LINCOLN and their report the BEACON HILL Report, a study of Air Force Intelligence prepared at a secretarial school on Beacon Hill in Boston to research aerial reconnaissance.
Physicist Carl Overhage, working on the development of Technicolor at Kodak, chaired the study group of experts in aerodynamics, propulsion, optics and a broad spectrum of fields. The group included Saville Davis from the Christian Science Monitor, Allen Donovan from the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Peter Goldmark from Columbia Broadcasting System Laboratories, Stewart Miller of Bell Laboratories and Louis Ridenour of Ridenour Associates, Inc.
One of the group was Edward M. Purcell, a physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1954 for his work in nuclear resonance. He had served on advisory bodies that included the USAF Scientific Advisory Committee and Edwin Land’s Technological Capabilities Panel study group.
Another of the group was James G. Baker, a Harvard astronomer and lens designer who was a leading designer of high-acuity aerial lenses during World War II and continued this work after the war. He also headed the Air Force Intelligence Systems Panel and served on the Technological Capabilities Panel’s Project Three committee that urged the development of the U-2 aircraft. Baker designed the lenses for the U-2’s cameras.
Committee member Richard Perkin, the president of the Perkin-Elmer Corporation, was a close friend of James Baker and was also a member of several advisory panels, including the BEACON HILL project. He would later help Baker decide what cameras to use in the first U-2 aircraft.
Edwin Land was an incredibly talented inventor famous for the development of polarizing filters and the instant-film camera. He also devoted considerable time and energy to voluntary government service. During World War II, Land worked for the Radiation Laboratories, and after the war, he served on numerous air force advisory panels. As the head of the Technological Capabilities Panel’s study
group investigating U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities, Land became a strong advocate of the development of a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft (the CL-282) under civilian rather than air force control. Land and James Killian persuaded President Eisenhower to approve the U-2 project and, later, the first photo satellite project. Land also served on the President’s Board of Consultants for Foreign Intelligence Activities.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Leghorn, an MIT graduate in physics, served as recon pilot in World War II and was recalled from Kodak during the Korean War to develop the overflight concept. He headed the Scientific Engineering Institute, working on reducing the U-2’s vulnerability to radar detection. Wikipedia.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Leghorn, the Wright Air Development Command liaison officer on the committee, was an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) graduate in physics. He joined the army air force in 1942 and went to work for reconnaissance expert Colonel George Goddard. By the time of the invasion of Europe, Leghorn was chief of reconnaissance for the Ninth Tactical Air Force. After the war, he began preaching the need for “pre-D-day” reconnaissance to gather intelligence on the Soviet Bloc. He returned to the air force during the Korean War and later worked in Harold Stassen’s Disarmament Office. In 1956, he would become the head of the Scientific Engineering Institute, working on reducing the U-2’s vulnerability to radar detection.
The study group spent weekends at various air bases, laboratories and firms where it conducted briefings on the latest technology and projects focusing on aerial reconnaissance. Members discussed new approaches to aerial reconnaissance using high-flying aircraft, camera-carrying balloons and even an “invisible” dirigible, a giant, flat-shaped airship with a blue tint, a nonreflecting coating, that cruised at an altitude of ninety thousand feet at slow speeds while using a large camera lens to photograph targets of interest.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the panel spent three months detailing ways to improve the amount and quality of intelligence gathered on the Soviet Bloc, advocating radical approaches to obtain national intelligence using radar, radio, photographic surveillance, passive infrared and microwave reconnaissance and the development of high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft.
In March 1953, the need for a reconnaissance plane obtained another believer with William E. Lamar, the chief of the New Developments Office, Bombardment Aircraft Branch, at Wright Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio. He drew up a proposal calling for high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft.
Shortly afterward, the U.S. Air Force implemented the ideas of the BEACON HILL Report that addressed the concerns of the president and the U.S. political and military leaders regarding the Soviet Union’s moving inexorably toward having military parity with the United States. This concern came from the Soviet’s displaying alarming progress with nuclear weapons when it detonated a hydrogen bomb manufactured from lithium deuteride. To the United States, this demonstrated a sharp advancement in technology over its heavy water method.
The Soviet Union followed this successful hydrogen bomb test two months later with an aggressive incident where Soviet troops crushed an uprising in East Berlin. Officials such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles saw the Soviet Union as a threat to future peace. A top-secret study by RAND Corporation, an American nonprofit global think tank originally formed by Douglas Aircraft Company, pointed out the vulnerability of the U.S. bases to a surprise attack by Soviet long-range bombers.
Even without the RAND Corporation study, the U.S. Air Force feared the Soviet bomber force surpassing the U.S. fleet. The fear was for an excellent reason: the capability of the Soviet Union to launch a surprise attack on the United States might destroy 85 percent of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber force.
No one wanted another MiG surprise. The Soviet Union escalation of the war in the Far East combined with the RAND Corporation’s study prompted the U.S. Air Force to establish the Intelligence Systems Panel (ISP). Through this new advisory group, the U.S. Air Force sought ways of implementing the construction of high-flying aircraft and high-acuity cameras.
The experts—Land, Overhage, Donovan and Miller—used the BEACON HILL Study Group’s report for recommendations. The CIA contributed Edward L. Allen of the Office of Research and Reports (ORR) and Philip Strong of the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) to the group.
The U.S. military expressed its desire for better strategic aerial reconnaissance to help determine Soviet capabilities and intentions. Thus, when the Intelligence Systems Panel first met at Boston University on August 3, 1953, Strong emphasized the poor state of U.S. knowledge of the Soviet Union. He informed the others that the best intelligence available on the Soviet Union’s interior dated back to the German Luftwaffe during World War II. Worse yet, the German photography covered only the Soviet Union west of the Urals, west of the Volga River and only a few of the important regions.
On July 27, 1953, the Korean War formally ended with the signing of an armistice where North and South Korea remained separated and occupied almost the same territory they had when the war began. The proxy war with the Soviet Union ended with General Curtis E. LeMay, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command (CINSAC), still facing the question of what the Soviet Union was doing behind its closed borders and what Russia and the Soviet Bloc intended to do next. Compounding the general’s lack of knowledge about the Soviet’s war capability was his receiving a scathing review following Strategic Air Command’s performance. His bombers recently had performed dismally during simulated bomb runs against American cities. Consequently, he didn’t trust the air force’s bombing radar guidance system’s bomb-on-target accuracy required for delivery of the first-generation twenty-kiloton atomic bombs available at the time.
The failing Strategic Air Command bombing evaluations highlighted the nation’s concern about the Soviet Union now being a nuclear threat. Military commanders worldwide questioned to what extent the Soviets had developed their nuclear weapons and the magnitude of the Soviet military buildup in Eastern Europe.
President Dwight Eisenhower had earlier proposed to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to allow unfettered overflights by both nations to photograph military installations to stabilize the situation. Khrushchev refused the open skies proposal.
Following Khrushchev’s refusal, Eisenhower decided to give the green light for the development of a reconnaissance aircraft capable of overflights of the Soviet Union above the range of Soviet countermeasures. Eisenhower acknowledged the country’s need for this kind of information. At the same time, he feared the enemy eventually catching the planes and this being a problem. His fear was well grounded.
Earlier, in 1952, the U.S. Air Force at Cape Canaveral in Florida used the SRC-584 radar before transferring it to NASA for use at Beatty and Ely, Nevada, on the NACA (National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics)/NASA High Range corridor extending from Wendover, Nevada, to Dryden/Edwards AFB in California. Thus, the U.S. Air Force and CIA realized that NASA had modified the radar’s tracking capability. If NASA could do so, so could the Soviet Union. The successful modification proved the need for a new reconnaissance aircraft to overfly the Soviet Union. It showed the United States needed an aircraft capable of escaping detection by the same model radar that Russia used.
In 1953, the Soviet Union’s best interceptor, the MiG-17, could barely reach forty-five thousand feet, so many thought an aircraft flying at seventy thousand feet placed it beyond the reach of Soviet fighters, missiles and radar. For early warning, the Soviet Union used an SCR-370 having a range of 120 miles. Though having a greater range, the curvature of the earth limited its track capability to a maximum forty-thousand-foot altitude.
For tracking, the Soviet Union used the early American-built (Signal Corps Radar) SRC-584 radar system that Russia obtained through the World War II Lend-Lease program. The SRC-584 system was microwave-type radar designed and built by the MIT Radiation Laboratory as the U.S. Army’s antiaircraft gun-laying system during
World War II. The SRC-584 tracking radar detected bomber-size targets at a maximum range of only forty miles, tracked them at eighteen miles and up to ninety thousand feet. However, the SRC-584 radar used such high-power consumption that it burned out its cavity magnetron tube (an electron tube for amplifying or generating microwaves, with the flow of electron control by an external magnetic field). Therefore, unless it received a warning from the search radar, the target-tracking radars remained inactive. Consequently, Major John Seaberg and his collaborators based their advocacy of high-altitude photo reconnaissance on the belief that the Soviet Union search radar could not detect an aircraft flying higher than sixty-five thousand feet, and even if it did, its tracking radars would be inactive. The four believed that an aircraft ascending to sixty-five thousand feet before entering the range of the radar could fly undetected by the early warning radar.
The SCR-584 Mod-II microwave-type radar (Signal Corps Radio #584) built by the MIT Radiation Laboratory was used during World War II for the U.S. Army’s primary antiaircraft gun-laying system and provided the Soviet Union without compensation under the March 1941 Lend-Lease Act. The Soviet Union used this radar to track the CIA’s U-2 overflights. NASA.
John H. “Jack” Carter, now retired from the U.S. Air Force and the assistant director of Lockheed’s Advanced Development Program, heard about the competition for a high-flying reconnaissance plane. He dropped by to see Eugene Kiefer, an old friend and colleague from AFDAP (the U.S. Air Force’s Office of Development Planning). He then returned to California, where he sought out Lockheed vice president L. Eugene Root, the top civilian official at AFDAP. Carter proposed to Root that Lockheed should submit a design for an aircraft capable of reaching altitudes between sixty-five and seventy thousand feet and a speed near Mach 0.8. He introduced a nonstandard model, one that eliminated the landing gear, disregarded military specifications and had low load factors. He emphasized the need to accelerate development to allow the aircraft to serve a long and useful life.
