Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  When the President felt it was necessary, he would initiate the flights himself, rather than waiting for Bissell to come to him with a proposal. On November 6, 1956, for example, at 8:37 A.M., he met with Allen Dulles and Goodpaster. The Suez crisis was at its height. It was also Election Day, Eisenhower vs. Stevenson. The President ordered Dulles to conduct U-2 flights over Syria, Egypt, and Israel to make certain that the Russians were not moving airplanes into Egypt. Goodpaster’s minutes record, “The President said that if reconnaissance discloses Soviet Air Forces on Syrian bases he would think that there would be reason for the British and French to destroy them. The President asked if our forces in the Mediterranean are equipped with atomic anti-submarine weapons.”

  To Dulles, Ike said, “If the Soviets should attack Britain and France directly, we would of course be in a major war.”9

  With that, Ike and Mamie drove up to Gettysburg to vote. At noon they returned to Washington by helicopter. On the way into the White House from the airport, Goodpaster reported that the U-2 flights revealed no Soviet aircraft were moving into Syria, or from Syria to Egypt. World War III was not about to begin.10

  Simultaneously, U-2s were flying over East Europe to monitor Red Army activity during the Hungarian crisis. Khrushchev protested, privately but firmly. Secretary of State Dulles called the President on the telephone to say “we are in trouble about these overflights.” Ike said he was considering a “complete stoppage of the entire business.”

  Dulles said, “I think we will have to admit this was done and say we are sorry. We cannot deny it. Relations with Russia are getting pretty tense at the moment.” All this was taken down verbatim by the tape recorder Ike had installed in his office.

  Dulles said he had “always been afraid that as their [the Russians’] problems at home increased, they might get reckless abroad.” Ike said he would call Charles Wilson and “have him stop it” until the crisis receded.11

  By the beginning of 1957, the U-2 program was securely in place, including flights over the Soviet Union when the President authorized them. Bissell had about five hundred people in his organization. There were one hundred in Washington, another one hundred at the western testing facilities (Bissell was already looking ahead to the next generation of spy in the sky planes, and to the development of even better cameras).12 Overseas, there were 150 men each at the two active airbases, which had been moved to Turkey and Japan. “We quite literally had the ability to cover almost any part of the surface of the earth for photograph reconnaissance, within twenty-four hours of notice …” Bissell declared.

  Francis Gary Powers was in the first group recruited from SAC by Bissell. Powers began flying regularly in September 1956. His initial assignment was to fly over the Mediterranean, where he was to “watch for and photograph any concentration of two or more ships.” The ships he was looking for were British and French; what the CIA, and Ike, wanted to know was how quickly and in what strength London and Paris were preparing for an attack on Egypt. Powers flew a number of such missions, taking off from the U-2 base at Adana, Turkey, flying over Cyprus, on to Malta, and back to base, or to Cyprus, then over to Egypt, across the Sinai, then north to Israel, and back to Turkey. On a flight on October 30, 1956, Powers saw and photographed black puffs of smoke in the Sinai—the first shots in the Israeli invasion of Egypt.13

  Another U-2 pilot, making a pass over Egyptian airfields, saw Egyptian planes lined up wing tip to wing tip. He made a loop to get on the correct course for the next leg of his flight plan and passed over the airfield again. This time—five minutes had elapsed—he saw the Egyptian Air Force in flames. The Israelis had struck while he was making his turn.14 All this information gave the President an accurate picture of what was going on and thus allowed him to make his policy decisions on the basis of facts, not guesses.

  Ike made immediate practical use of the results of other U-2 flights. As one example, in September 1958 the Chinese were making the most dreadful threats against Formosa. The immediate issue was the tiny offshore pair of islands, Quemoy and Matsu. Chou En-lai warned that if Chiang Kai-shek did not abandon them, the Communists would invade Formosa. America would then be drawn into the conflict, and World War III might be under way. The China lobby warned that there had better not be any appeasement; the British and other NATO allies warned that they were not ready to go to war to defend a couple of tiny Nationalist Chinese islands.

  U-2 flights revealed that there was no Chinese buildup for an invasion. Armed with that intelligence, Ike went on national television to report, “There is not going to be any appeasement, and … there is not going to be any war.” The “crisis” disappeared.15

  The U-2s paid off in the long-range strategic sense, as well as for short-term tactical decisions. In fact, the U-2 photographs undoubtedly saved the American taxpayer more money than any other government initiative of the 1950s, because those photographs gave Ike the essential information he had to have to hold to his New Look in defense policy.

  As President, Eisenhower was responsible first and foremost for the defense of his country. As a professional soldier, he was keenly aware of the military threat the Soviets presented. As a statesman, however, he had long ago concluded that the greatest threat was that the Russians would frighten the United States into an arms race that would lead to unmanageable inflation and ultimate bankruptcy. He believed that America’s greatest strength lay in her economic productivity, not in bombs and missiles. He believed further that a sound economy depended on a balanced federal budget, which he thought was the key to stopping inflation. To balance the budget, he had to cut back on defense spending.

  To do that, he cut back on conventional arms, reducing the Army and the Navy, while relying increasingly on nuclear weapons for massive retaliation. As a result, Ike was able to hold Defense spending to an annual expenditure of around $40 billion throughout his eight years in office. This figure was some $10 billion under what Truman had proposed, and what the Democrats were advocating be spent. By holding down the defense costs, Ike was able to balance his budget more often than not, with one result being an annual inflation rate of 1.25 percent, or a total of 10 percent for his whole eight years in office.

  This accomplishment was based on Ike’s understanding of how massive retaliation worked. He argued that to deter the Russians what one had to do was be in a position to drop one or two bombs on Moscow. No Russian gain anywhere would be worth the loss of Moscow. The United States did not need thousands of bombers and missiles to make the threat believable. It was by no means necessary to be able to destroy the Soviet Union to deter the Kremlin.

  Ike’s fundamental insight, in short, was that in the nuclear age, Clausewitzian strategy, with its emphasis on the destruction of the enemy’s fighting forces, no longer applied. The United States and the Soviet Union were in exactly the position Oppenheimer had said they were, two scorpions in a bottle.

  Under those circumstances, the United States did not have to go into an all-out, fabulously expensive program of producing atomic bombs and ICBMS to deliver them. Indeed, Ike believed that the more the nation spent on defense, at least after a certain point, the less secure the nation became. That flew in the face of common sense, but was of course exactly true, for the obvious reason that the more the Americans built, the more the Russians would build, and there was no defense against ICBMS tipped with nuclear warheads. No arms race ever made much sense, Ike often said, but an arms race in the nuclear age was absolute madness.16

  Eisenhower’s Democratic critics, led by three Senate hawks, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hubert H. Humphrey, assailed him. They charged that he was allowing his Neanderthal fiscal views to endanger the national security. By 1958 they were claiming that a “bomber gap” existed; in 1959 it became a “missile gap.” The Russians had gotten ahead of the United States in strategic weapons. America was suddenly vulnerable to a Soviet first strike.

  Ike knew that the “gaps” were all nonsense. He knew because of the
U-2 flights. They revealed, in 1957 and 1958 and 1959, that the Russians had by no means gone into a crash program of building either missiles or bombers. They proved that the United States, even with its modest bomber fleet and relatively small ICBM fleet (around two hundred by 1961), had a clear lead over the Soviets, a lead of about two to one.

  As Bissell pointed out, the U-2 flights were the heart of a “very elaborate program of identifying Russian nuclear facilities.” The photographs showed where the sites were located, their physical size and shape, the number of missile launchers, and so on. One or two firing ranges that had not been suspected were uncovered; in addition, the U-2 photos revealed the location of Russian radar installations. All this was basic, priceless knowledge.

  In addition, as Andrew Goodpaster said in a 1979 interview, the flights showed what the Russians were not doing. If Khrushchev had been building bombers and rockets at maximum capacity, the “bomber gap” and the “missile gap” might have become reality. But photographic intelligence showed conclusively that the Soviets were building at a rate considerably short of capacity, and there was nothing in the pipeline, such as movement of basic supplies to construction sites, to indicate that they intended to speed up. There was no need to panic.17

  The President would not be forced into spending money for weapons that were not needed. Of course, it was easier for Eisenhower to say no on such matters than any President before or since because—as one Senate hawk put it—“How the hell can I argue with Ike Eisenhower on military matters?”

  The JCS could, and did, argue with the President. They could not win the argument, and two Army chiefs of staff—Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor—resigned in protest over Ike’s reduction of the Army. Ike had been there himself, and he knew perfectly well that the Pentagon had to argue that not enough was being done for the nation’s defenses. In August of 1956 he wrote his oldest friend, Swede Hazlett, an advocate of more defense spending, “Let us not forget that the Armed Services are to defend a ‘way of life,’ not merely land, property or lives.” The President said he wanted to make the JCS accept the need for a “balance between minimum requirements in the costly implements of war and the health of our economy.”18

  Or, as he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”19

  Persuading the JCS to accept that position was one of the most difficult and frustrating tasks Eisenhower undertook as President. In a typical telephone comment to Foster Dulles, a month after the Hungary/Suez crisis, Ike said that “he was going to crack down on Defense people tomorrow, that he is getting desperate with the inability of the men there to understand what can be spent on military weapons and what must be spent to wage the peace.”20

  One remarkable aspect of Eisenhower’s involvement with the U-2 was that he never revealed his sources, even after Powers was shot down, when it would have been greatly to his personal advantage to do so. Throughout 1960, Kennedy and the Democrats cried “missile gap” again and again, until it became almost the central theme of JFK’s presidential campaign. Ike contented himself with responding that it simply was not true, without indicating how he knew.

  He was badly disappointed, even hurt, when two of his own men, Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, turned against him on this issue. Rockefeller issued a “report” that repeated most of the charges the Democrats had made with regard to Defense spending. Nixon, at the height of the presidential campaign of 1960, went to New York, conferred with Rockefeller, and emerged to tell reporters that he, too, believed not enough was being done for America’s defense. Their joint statement declared that “the U.S. can afford and must provide the increased expenditures to implement fully this necessary program for strengthening our defense posture. There must be no price ceiling on America’s security.”

  In his memoirs, Ike put it politely when he commented, “That statement seemed somewhat astonishing, coming as it did from two people who had long been in administration councils.”21

  During the campaign, Eisenhower did nevertheless speak for Nixon. His one major address took up the question of increased Defense spending, and might have been pointed at both candidates, although he referred only to the Democrats: “If they would pay for these programs by deficit spending, raising the debt of our children and grandchildren, and thereby debase our currency, let them so confess.”22

  Kennedy won the election. As President, he began a crash program to build ICBMS. When Ike left office, the United States had about two hundred ICBMS. When Kennedy was assassinated, the number was one thousand and growing daily. Four years later Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, confessed that there never had been a “missile gap,” or if there had, it was in America’s favor. By then it was too late; the modern arms race was under way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Francis Gary Powers and the Summit That Never Was

  MAY 1, 1960. A beautiful day in Russia. At Adana, Turkey, Francis Gary Powers dresses in his pressurized flying suit, climbs into the cockpit of his plane, and takes off for Bodo, Norway. Midway through an uneventful flight there is a flash, followed by a boom and an explosion. The U-2 rocks, starts to crash. Powers ejects. His parachute opens and he floats to earth near Sverdlovsk. He is immediately captured and taken away for questioning.

  “THE CIA PROMISED us that the Russians would never get a U-2 pilot alive,” John Eisenhower declared, his eyes flashing. “And then they gave the S.O.B. a parachute!”1

  His father put it less vehemently, but was equally firm. The U-2 program, Ike declared in his memoirs, operated under “the assumption that in the event of a mishap the plane would virtually disintegrate. It would be impossible, if things should go wrong, for the Soviets to come in possession of the equipment intact—or, unfortunately, of a live pilot. This was a cruel assumption, but I was assured that the young pilots undertaking these missions were doing so with their eyes wide open and motivated by a high degree of patriotism, a swashbuckling bravado, and certain material inducements.”2

  Richard Bissell, too, thought no pilot would ever emerge alive from a crash, whether brought about by a malfunction of the U-2 or as a result of a Russian attack. The CIA did provide the pilots with cyanide, but told them that whether to take it or not was their decision. The idea was to boost pilot morale by letting them think they had a chance to survive; the truth was that the CIA did not believe they had one chance in a million.3

  So, the cover story in the event a U-2 went down, worked out years in advance, was based on the assumption that the pilot would be dead. “We were quite prepared to say, if the Russians showed photographs of it, either that it wasn’t the U-2 or that they had taken the plane and moved it. We believed that we would make a pretty plausible case for the cover story. And we felt that it would be very difficult for them to disprove that,” Bissell declared. “So the whole point of the story was to explain what had happened—that a pilot had inadvertently crossed the border and had been shot down and landed inside, and that they had moved the wreckage.”4

  But the CIA gave Francis Gary Powers a parachute, never expecting that he would be able to use it, and as a result the Paris Summit Conference of May 1960, which had once seemed so full of promise, was wrecked, and the United States suffered one of its most embarrassing moments in the entire history of the Cold War.

  The event made Ike look indecisive, foolish, and not in control of his own government. It also led to the charge, widely believed, that the CIA had engaged in a conspiracy to sabotage Ike’s search for peace by arranging for Powers’ crash.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1960, hope had bloomed around the world. It seemed that the Cold War might be ending, to be replaced by a period of growing cooperation and trust between the Super Powers. Mr. Khrushchev had made a trip to the United States in September 1959 that was a huge success, a media event of the first magnitu
de. He almost seemed to be an American politician out for votes. A jolly fat man, he roared with laughter at jokes and was duly impressed by American productivity. To the delight of photographers, he matched his girth against that of a portly Iowa farmer. He spoke constantly of the need for peace. Nearly as old as Ike and fully as bald, Khrushchev—again like Ike—had a grandfather image. He seemed, somehow, comforting.

  At Camp David, the serene presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains that Ike had named after his grandson, Khrushchev added to the impression that he was a reasonable man whose sole interest was movement toward genuine peace. He had previously issued an ultimatum on West Berlin—if the United States, Britain, and France did not withdraw their occupation troops from that city, he threatened, he would turn over the access routes to the East Germans and then the Allies would have to fight their way through to Berlin. Now, at Camp David, Khrushchev said that he had not meant it to be a threat. The ultimatum was not an ultimatum. There could be negotiations.

  The two leaders then agreed to meet in mid-May 1960 at a summit conference in Paris, where—it was hoped—“the Spirit of Camp David” could engulf the world. Afterward, Ike would repay Khrushchev’s visit, taking along his family for a tour of the Soviet Union. Small wonder hopes were high for an end to the Cold War, for the beginning of peace.

  IKE DID NOT SHARE THOSE HOPES. He was always suspicious of media events. He had told Khrushchev that political summits tended to be like real mountain summits—barren.5 He had always expected Khrushchev to back down on his Berlin ultimatum, as long as the President of the United States stood firm, as he had during the Camp David talks. Ike was unimpressed by Khrushchev’s public calls for peace. He would be convinced that Khrushchev was serious only when he saw some real indication that the Soviets were ready for peace. But the Soviets operated a closed system—Westerners could not even get a road map of the Soviet Union, much less an indication of their military dispositions—so the only way to see what they were up to was to spy on them. Therefore, as the date for the summit approached, Eisenhower ordered increased U-2 reconnaissance over Russia.