Ike's Spies

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The man, Richard Bissell, draws himself up to his full six-feet-four-inch height, glances up and down the pool, then hurriedly moves inside K. He walks quickly down the corridor to his office. Six hours earlier he had approved mission plans for a spy flight over the Soviet Union. Now he has returned for the “go-no-go” briefing.

  In his office, Bissell’s project team has been waiting for him. He sits behind his desk, picks up a paper clip, and leans back in his chair, swinging his long legs and big feet up onto his desk. As is his habit, he twiddles the paper clip, bending it into fantastic shapes. Tossing it aside, he fidgets with a pencil, polishes his glasses, looks up at the ceiling, all the while listening to reports, occasionally interjecting an “O.K.” or a “Right, right!” and less frequently shaking his head and mumbling “No, no.”

  He’s like an atomic bomb, a tremendous bundle of energy bound up in one small space, always on the verge of bursting.

  His weatherman reports that conditions over Russia have not changed since the previous briefing—the weather remains favorable. That is the key. The President authorized the flight four days earlier, for a ten-day period. If Bissell cannot get it off the ground in those ten days, he will have to scrub the mission and return to the White House to start all over again. He has already postponed the flight three times because of cloud cover over Russia.

  The liaison man with the airbase in Wiesbaden, West Germany, reports that the plane and pilot are ready. The technical man says that the camera and film are properly set up for the operation. Other experts confirm that they are ready to bring the film from Germany to the labs in Washington for immediate processing.

  Nodding vigorously, Bissell lets a little of his tremendous energy burst forth. “All right,” he announces. “Let’s go.”

  AND WITH THAT the most elaborate, technologically advanced, and spectacularly successful spy mission in the history of espionage to that date was launched. The word was flashed to Wiesbaden, and within minutes the first U-2 was airborne on its initial flight over Soviet territory.1

  Bissell was accustomed to high-risk situations. He had been in the middle of the PBSUCCESS operation in Guatemala and involved in other CIA activities. He went home after making his decision and enjoyed a good night’s sleep. The following morning, at a quarter to nine, he walked into Allen Dulles’ office.

  Dulles eagerly asked if Bissell had gotten the U-2 mission off the ground.

  “Yes,” Bissell replied. “It’s in the air now.”

  “Where is it going?” Dulles asked.

  “Going first over Moscow,” Bissell replied, “and then over Leningrad.”

  “My God!” Dulles exclaimed. “Do you think that was wise, for the first time?”

  “It’ll be easier the first time than any later time,” Bissell assured his boss.

  The remainder of the morning, Bissell and his project people sat around, rather like Walter Cronkite and the men at Mission Control in Houston during a rocket launching, waiting for a report. Toward noon, a cable from Wiesbaden came in. The U-2 was back. The weather had been perfect, the pilot had used all his film, the film was on its way to Washington. A cheer went up. Bissell, all smiles, hurried down the hall to tell Dulles.

  The director of the CIA went to the White House, where he had the great pleasure of reporting the successful flight to the President and seeing one of Ike’s famous grins spread across his face.

  THE U-2 PROGRAM was the CIA’S greatest coup. It got its start because Ike insisted that the U. S. Government keep itself at the cutting edge of technology and saw to it that his nation’s best scientists were working for the government on matters of national security. On the basis of his own World War II experience, Eisenhower had great faith in aerial reconnaissance, and had been deeply impressed by the miracles that could be performed by photographic interpretation. As President, one of his great fears was that the United States might again be caught by another surprise attack, as at Pearl Harbor, but this time on the mainland and far more devastating, as it would be carried out with nuclear bombs.

  In early 1954, about a year after he took office, Ike appointed a Surprise Attack Panel, under the chairmanship of James R. Killian, president of MIT from 1948 to 1959 and Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Science and Technology from 1957 to 1959. The Surprise Attack Panel had three subcommittees, one of which was concerned with intelligence. Its leading members were Edwin H. Land and Edward Purcell.

  Land was the inventor of the Polaroid camera, and president, chairman of the board, and director of research for the Polaroid Corporation. During World War II he had worked for the Navy on plastic lenses. Purcell was a Harvard professor of physics, winner of the Nobel Prize (1952), and an expert in such areas as microwave phenomena, nuclear magnetism, and radio-frequency spectroscopy.

  The subcommittee met regularly. It was greatly impressed by the work of Arthur Lundahl, a PI (photo interpreter) of World War II who had joined the CIA and ran the small photo interpretation office of the DDI. Lundahl was a farsighted visionary who constantly touted the potential of the picture that told more than 10,000 words, or than 1,000 spies. Ray Cline called Lundahl “the supersalesman of photo interpretation.” At the start, he had only twenty men under him; by the end of the 1950s, there were 1,200 PIS in the CIA.2

  Lundahl showed Killian, Land, and Purcell some astonishing developments in photography. Land was much impressed by the new cameras, lenses, and special films that made high-level photography practical. Seeing what Lundahl could accomplish, the subcommittee of the Surprise Attack Panel began casting about for a way to fly over Russia to take pictures.

  Land learned that six months earlier Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, a designer at Lockheed, had proposed to the Air Force a high-altitude single-engine reconnaissance aircraft. Johnson had even submitted a design concept and a few drawings. The Air Force, unimpressed, contracted instead for a new version of the Candara bomber, with new wings and redesigned for weight reduction. Four of these lightweight Candaras were built and flown, but they proved to be unsatisfactory.

  Discouraged, the Air Force had turned to a balloon project. Unmanned balloons, equipped with the latest cameras, were to float across the U.S.S.R., to be recovered in the Pacific. Two or three balloons were actually built, and the attempt was made, but those flights, like the Candaras, were unsuccessful.

  Land, meanwhile, had decided that the Air Force made a mistake when it turned down Kelly Johnson and Lockheed. He and Purcell went to Allen Dulles for a private meeting. They convinced Dulles. The day before Thanksgiving, 1954, Land, Purcell, Dulles, and Killian went to the Oval Office to meet with the President. They took no papers with them, and no minutes were kept.

  Ike listened, considered, and approved immediately. This was unusual for him, as he ordinarily liked to sleep on a decision. He told Allen Dulles to get on it. Dulles called Richard Bissell on the phone and told him to get over to the White House.

  Bissell was there in half an hour. “Because all the discussion had been conducted at such a high level in the executive branch,” he later explained, “nobody had really worked out how anything was to be done. Nobody knew where the money was coming from. Nobody knew how much it would cost. Nobody knew who would procure the aircraft. Nobody had even given any thought to where it could develop, where flight testing could be done, where people could be trained or by whom, who would fly it or anything.”

  Washington has a reputation as a town in which it is difficult to get anything done, and nothing gets done quickly, but with a presidential mandate to act, the pieces tend to fall into place. That afternoon—still the day before Thanksgiving, 1954—Bissell went to the Pentagon to meet with the Air Force people who had been working on the Candara, balloon, and other high-altitude projects. As Bissell succinctly put it in an interview in 1979, “the program was kicked off then and there.” Trevor Gardiner of the Air Force called Kelly Johnson long-distance and gave Lockheed the go-ahead to build a U-2.

  Immediately the qu
estion of funding arose. Bissell said he would recommend to Dulles that the CIA fund the procurement of the airplane out of the Reserve Fund, which money could be released on presidential authority or by the Director of the Budget. He went back to see Dulles. Dulles approved. Then over to the Director of the Budget, and he also approved. So the money was found to make covert procurement possible.

  Bissell had a genius for administration. He set up his project office in a downtown Washington office building. He started off with four men—a finance officer, a contracting officer, an operations officer, and an administrative officer. Two or three others were later added, but the project office staff never went above eight men.

  Lockheed called the plane the U-2. It was built in a separate little hangar in California called the “skunk works,” because no one not working on the craft was allowed near the hangar. Pratt-Whitney built the engine, a modified J-57, and Hycon built the cameras.3

  The speed with which the plane and cameras were made ready for operations was simply incredible. By early 1955, only a few months after Ike said to build it, the first U-2 was ready—and Bissell had brought it in at a cost $3 million below the original cost estimate.4

  The plane itself, as Ray Cline described it, “looked more like a kite built around a camera than an airplane; it was nearly all wing and its single jet engine made it shoot into the air like an arrow and soar higher than any other aircraft of its day.” To hold down the weight, it landed on one set of tandem wheels rather than the normal pair. As a result, when forward momentum was lost on landing, the U-2 simply fell over on one of its long wing tips. Taking off, the wings had to be held up by little pogo sticks on wheels that dropped off when the plane was airborne.5

  The plane could fly miles high in the sky, attaining altitudes of better than 70,000 feet for cruising. From that immense distance, the cameras were so good they could take a picture of a parking lot and the PI could actually count the lines for the stalls or the number of cars parked in the lot.

  Bissell went to the White House, along with Dulles and two Air Force generals, to report that the U-2 was ready for test flights. He asked Ike to extend the boundaries of an atomic-energy test site in the southwestern United States, which the President immediately did. Then Bissell had a small airbase built on the edge of a salt-lake bed, and he was ready to start test flights.

  At this point an inevitable jurisdictional dispute began. The Air Force, by now well aware of Ike’s wholehearted support for the project, tried to take it over. General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command argued that SAC ought to take charge of the operational phase of the project. Dulles and Bissell refused and Ike backed them up. The most the President would give SAC was a deputy’s post under Bissell.

  The President also insisted that although the pilots would be recruited from SAC, they would have to acquire civilian status and fly under contract with the CIA. Ike wanted the entire project conducted as a civilian intelligence-collecting operation rather than as a military operation.

  Eisenhower, meanwhile, used his foreknowledge of the U-2 to make the boldest proposal for peace in the history of the Cold War. At the Geneva Summit Conference in July 1955, a week or so after the first U-2 test flight, Ike described the new program to British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, “who was most enthusiastic.” The next day, July 21, 1955, Eisenhower spoke to the full conference. He made an offer, which came to be called “Open Skies,” that was an extraordinary, farsighted proposal. Had the Russians been equally farsighted, Open Skies might well have put a lid on the arms race. It certainly would have lowered tension.

  Ike told the conference, to the astonishment of everyone present except for Eden and a half-dozen top advisers, that the United States was prepared to exchange military blueprints and charts with the Soviets. He was making the offer, he said, to show American sincerity in approaching the problem of disarmament. The world’s great fear was a surprise nuclear attack. An exchange of all military information would ease that fear.

  The President said he was willing to go further. He invited the Russians to build airfields in the States, from which their people could freely fly over American military installations to reassure themselves that no surprise first strikes were in the offing. Each plane would carry an American representative along on the reconnaissance flights. The United States would want the same privileges in Russia.

  Of course, as soon as the U-2 was operational, the United States would be able to spy unilaterally over the U.S.S.R. Ike’s offer of a reciprocal agreement was quite remarkable, the clearest proof of what chances and risks he was willing to take for peace.

  The immediate reception was remarkable, too. As Ike recorded in his memoirs, “As I finished, a most extraordinary natural phenomenon took place. Without warning, and simultaneous with my closing words, the loudest clap of thunder I have ever heard roared into the room, and the conference was plunged into Stygian darkness.… For a moment there was stunned silence. Then I remarked that I had not dreamed I was so eloquent as to put the lights out.”

  Despite the thunder, Premier Nikita Khrushchev turned him down. He said the idea of Open Skies was nothing more than a bald espionage plot against Mother Russia. Ike argued, to no avail.6

  The U-2 tests, meanwhile, went well, with a minimum of hitches. By early 1956 Bissell was satisfied. He ordered twenty-two U-2s from Lockheed. The pilots were ready, too, having flown missions which Bissell directed from Washington that simulated overseas conditions. As the Church Committee noted, quite correctly, getting the plane, the pilots, the cameras, and the film prepared for actual missions so quickly “was a technical achievement nothing short of spectacular.”7

  Bissell flew to London, where he conferred with Eden, who agreed to allow the CIA to fly U-2 missions from the SAC base at Lakenhurst in the United Kingdom. Bissell sent over a few U-2s, which flew some practice missions over East Europe, but then the British grew skittish.

  An incident in Portsmouth Harbor involved a Russian cruiser that was paying a courtesy call. The British Secret Service sent a frogman under the ship to get a look at its signaling gear and underwater apparatus. His body was found, three days later, floating in the harbor. Whether the Russians killed him or not no one knew. In any event, Eden indicated to Ike that he did not want Lakenhurst-based U-2s flying over Russia.

  So Eisenhower sent Bissell to West Germany, where he met with Konrad Adenauer. The German Chancellor gave him permission to base the U-2 in Wiesbaden. Later the base moved to a small World War II Luftwaffe airfield that had been deactivated, close to the East German border but far from any city or town.

  In early June 1956, Bissell and the Dulles brothers went to the Oval Office to request permission to overfly the Soviet Union itself. Ike listened, asked some questions, and said he would give Bissell his decision. A day later, General Goodpaster called Bissell on the phone and said that the President had authorized the flight for a period of ten days. Bissell said he assumed that meant ten days of good weather, not just ten calendar days. Goodpaster said, “No, you have just ten calendar days and you will have to take your chances with the weather.” The flight went, successfully, five days later.

  In the next five days, Bissell ran six additional missions. Then came a great shock—the Russians sent in a private but firm diplomatic protest. Much to the CIA’S disappointment, it turned out that Russian radar was tracking the U-2 flights. The agency had assumed the spy planes flew too high to be spotted—American radar could not follow them, but the Russians, the CIA discovered, had better radar than the United States. Ike told Bissell to slow down, “and it was quite a few months before he was ready to authorize another flight.” From then on, the President authorized flights one by one.

  As Bissell explained in 1979, the entire program “was controlled very tightly by the President personally.” Before each flight, Bissell would draw up on a map the proposed flight plan. They would spread the map on the President’s desk in the Oval Office. With John Eisenhower standing beh
ind one shoulder, Andy Goodpaster behind the other, Ike would study the route. Bissell, the Dulles brothers, Secretary Wilson, and the chairman of the JCS would all be present.

  When Bissell’s presentation was over, after he had explained why the CIA wanted pictures of specific spots, “the President would ask a lot of questions. He would ask me to come around and explain this or that feature of the flight, and there were occasions, more than once, when he would say, ‘Well, you can go there, but I want you to leave out that leg and go straight that way. I want you to go from B to D because it looks to me like you might be getting a little exposed over here,’ or something of that kind.”

  “So we had very, very tight ground rules,” Bissell continued, “very tight control by the President. Then, once the mission was approved, it was my responsibility to watch the weather forecasts three times a day, and select the actual time, and then notify all concerned that the mission was about to take off.”8

  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.”