Back on the other side of the world in the spring of 1953, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had reconsidered strategic overflight reconnaissance after word reached Western intelligence of a formidable Soviet missile program under way at a base called Kapustin Yar, near Stalingrad. Once again, Churchill approved an overflight. This time the RAF and the USAF collaborated to squeeze a large, oblique-looking camera into the aft fuselage of a standard RAF B-2 twin-engine Canberra bomber. This bomber could not be air-refueled; but, stripped of all excess weight and with its bomb bay filled with fuel tanks, the aircraft possessed a range sufficient for it to fly at high altitude from Germany across the southern U.S.S.R., and then swing south to Iran.
The British assigned the name Project ROBIN to this effort, which consisted of two or three shallow-penetration missions over the Eastern bloc satellite states preparatory to the main event. Approved by the prime minister, the key mission was flown in late August 1953 from Giebelstadt in West Germany, near the East German border. The Canberra was tracked by Soviet radar almost from the moment of takeoff. Happily for an RAF aircrew flying in broad daylight, accurate radar tracking did not prevent various elements of the Soviet air defense system from performing a Three Stooges routine for Stalin's heirs in the Kremlin. In the face of an air defense system on full alert, the “unidentified” aircraft, operating at 46,000 to 48,000 feet altitude, remained untouched. With its hundredinch focal-length camera peering obliquely out the port side, it flew doggedly east past Kiev, Kharkov, and Stalingrad to its target, Kapustin Yar.
In spite of frantic commands and radar vectoring, Soviet fighter aircraft could not see the airplane above them and did not successfully intercept the plane until it approached Kapustin Yar. Though they managed to hit the British machine, it flew on, and the fighters lost sight of it again. Damage to the aircraft, however, introduced vibration, which adversely affected the optics performance of the camera. Pictures of Kapustin Yar furnished to the USAF and CIA were blurred and of poor quality; they apparently revealed little. The Canberra turned southeast to follow the Volga River. It escaped and managed to land safely in Iran. Its near-loss ended any further British thoughts of daytime strategic reconnaissance overflights of the western U.S.S.R.
But the flight had unexpected results. Seven years later, on August 5, 1960, The Philadelphia Inquirer carried an account of the mission by a Soviet defector who had served in 1953 as an air defense radar officer: “During the [Canberra] flight all sorts of unbelievable things happened…. In one region, theoperator accidentally sent the Soviet flights west instead of east; in Kharkov, the pilots confused the planes [aloft] and found themselves firing at each other.”
The result was a major purge. Many generals and officers were removed from their posts. One general was demoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel and committed suicide. Other personnel were sent to punishment battalions.
However discouraging the outcome of the Canberra's daytime flight to Kapustin Yar, the British and Americans soon agreed on another group of nighttime strategic reconnaissance overflights of the western U.S.S.R. (By this time the USAF had transferred its RB-45Cs from SAC to the Tactical Air Command [TAC], and General LeMay no longer played a direct role in the missions.) At Sculthorpe RAFB, the RAF's Special Duty Flight re-formed with most of the same crews from the 1952 overflight missions; they were once again led by Squadron Leader John Crampton and Squadron Leader Rex Sanders. RAF Bomber Command's chief scientist, “Lew” Llewelyn, worked to improve the pictures produced by the cameras that filmed images on the radar scopes. In late April the RAF aircrews learned that the mission plan was virtually identical to the one flown in 1952, except that the third aircraft would make a deeper penetration of southern Russia.
The Special Duty Flight executed the mission on the night of April 28–29, 1954. The primary targets again involved bases of the Soviet Long-Range Air Force. The RB-45Cs again were repainted in RAF colors, and Crampton and Sanders again took the southern run, but it did not go so easily for them this time. As their airplane approached Kiev—and while Sanders tended the radar—Crampton was startled to see a highway of bursting flak about 200 yards before him at exactly his own altitude, 36,000 feet. Briefed to return if the security of the flight was compromised, he hauled the airplane around on its starboard
wing tip, until its gyro compass pointed west, and descended to thirtyfour thousand feet to avoid the flak, which was set to explode at a fixed altitude. He cut short the mission. Nonetheless, the return track took the aircraft close to many of the remaining targets, which Sanders photographed as they passed. When the RB-45C met up with its tanker over West Germany, the refueling boom refused to stay in the aircraft receptacle. Fearing that it might have been damaged by the flak over Kiev, Crampton landed near Munich to refuel. Meanwhile, the other two flights covered their routes without misadventure, though numerous fighters were sent up after them. A few weeks later, in early May, the RAF Special Duty Flight disbanded for the last time.
By now Western leaders had been alerted to the existence of a new Soviet Myacheslav-4 jet-turbine-powered intercontinental bomber (NATO codenamed “Bison”). With the number of Bison bombers and nuclear weapons believed to be growing, the region of greatest concern in the U.S.S.R., and about which the least was known, was the Kola Peninsula in extreme northwest Russia, above the Arctic Circle. Intercontinental bombers positioned here could fly foreshortened routes over the North Pole to attack targets in America—and also could easily strike targets in Great Britain. A daytime photographic mission was called for. Whether the British agreed or not, Eisenhower approved one of his own.
In mid-April 1954, SAC—on instructions from the JCS—dispatched a detachment of RB-47Es to the Fairford RAF base near Oxford. The RB-47E mounted in its nose and bomb bay the same type of cameras carried in the RB-45C. On May 8 three aircrews were briefed separately for a secret mission to be conducted in radio silence near the Kola Peninsula in the northern region of the U.S.S.R. Two crews were instructed to turn back at a certain coordinate; unbeknownst to them, the third crew was instructed to fly on into Soviet territory and photograph nine airfields over a six-hundred-mile course from Murmansk south to Arkhangelsk, then southwest to Onega, at which point the aircraft would head due west to the safety of Scandinavia.
The aircrew named to fly this deep-penetration overflight consisted of Captain Harold Austin, pilot; Captain Carl Holt, copilot; and Major Vance Heavilin, navigator. When these men took off from Fairford early on May 8, 1954, they were quite unaware that they followed by one week the nighttime flight of the three RB-45Cs over the western-central Soviet Union. Soviet air defenses still reverberated from that futile exercise. After a refueling off southern Norway, and at the designated departure point about a hundred miles north of Murmansk, two of the three aircraft turned back. Austin's pressed on. Two nonplussed aircrews watched over their shoulders as a comrade receded from view toward the Soviet mainland. It is a tribute to SAC's remarkable standards of professional training that the two aircrews did not break radio silence but, as briefed, returned to base.
Austin's aircraft coasted in over the Kola Peninsula at Murmansk, at noon, at 40,000 feet altitude, and at 440 knots (506 mph) airspeed. Heavilin turned on the radar cameras, along with the suite of cameras in the nose and bomb bay. The weather, Austin recalled, was crystal-clear; it was one of those days when “you could see forever.” Before they left the Murmansk area, a flight of three MiG fighters joined them, apparently confirming the identity of the intruder. As they approached airfield targets at Arkhangelsk, six more MiGs arrived, now intent on destroying the American aircraft. Cannon tracers flew above and below the RB-47E; the interceptors could not stay steady at that altitude, and their aim was poor. A running gun battle ensued as Austin finished covering his targets and turned toward Finland. As he banked the plane, a MiG struck from above, and the aircraft took a cannon shell through the top of the port wing, knocking out the intercom. Holt had fired the tail gun, but it jammed after th
e first burst. Nevertheless, he kept the MiGs at a safe distance long enough to reach the Finnish border.
Austin's RB-47E, with its cameras and film, succeeded in reaching Fairford after another refueling over the North Sea. The photographs reassured Western leaders that long-range bombers were not deployed on the Kola Peninsula. For their extraordinary aerial feat, the aircrew members each received two Distinguished Flying Crosses, though the SAC commander, General LeMay, made it plain that he would rather have decorated them only with a Silver Star. That award, however, required the approval of a board in Washington whose members were not cleared to know about SENSINT overflights.
If such reconnaissance overflights were to continue at a reasonable risk, another kind of airplane was required, one that operated above all known Soviet air defenses. A few months later, in November 1954, President Eisenhower approved Project Aquatone, a secret air force–CIA effort directed to build a jetpowered glider that could fly at altitudes in excess of seventy thousand feet, far above Soviet air defenses. So the U-2 was born.
There was at least one further overflight of the Soviet Union launched from Great Britain. In March 1955 a nighttime USAF mission led by Major John Anderson followed routes and overflew targets that were nearly identical to those of earlier RAF flights: Three RB-45Cs took off from the Sculthorpe RAF base, flew east at thirty thousand feet, and simultaneously crossed the frontiers of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Baltic States—though this time the Ukraine track was farther to the south. The mission objective, as before, involved radarscope photography of Soviet military installations and cities for Allied target folders. Soviet fighters again scrambled into the night sky but, even with ground radar vectoring, could not locate the reconnaissance aircraft in the darkness. All of the RB-45Cs returned safely, landing in West Germany. These crew members, too, received Distinguished Flying Crosses.
That reconnaissance overflight mission preceded by a few months the Four-Power Summit Conference held in Geneva, Switzerland, in July 1955. There President Eisenhower, in an unannounced disarmament proposal, would call for mutual Soviet and Western overflights, eventually called “Open Skies.” At the time, the U-2 aircraft was about to begin flight trials in Nevada. Although Soviet officials rejected the Open Skies proposal, the president had determined to employ the U-2 in daytime missions over the western Soviet Union to assay the number of bombers in the Soviet Long-Range Air Force—a number, USAF leaders insisted, that surpassed the number of such bombers in the air force inventory.
But the fragile U-2 was not air-refuelable. Even though its unrefueled radius of action was anticipated to be substantial, around 3,400 miles, when launched from England or West Germany, it would be unable to fly far beyond the Ural Mountains and return in safety. And it was not designed to operate in the snow and ice of Arctic bases. For American intelligence, the U.S.S.R.'s vast Arctic territory, stretching 3,500 miles from the Kola Peninsula in the West to Wrangel Island in the East, remained largely terra incognita—and the U-2 appeared unable to explore it.
Between March 30 and May 7, 1955, shortly before the summit conference convened, the Strategic Air Command conducted Project Seashore, again on instructions from the JCS. Four RB-47Es, specially modified with the sidelooking hundred-inch focal-length cameras like those carried by the Canberra, teamed with four RB-47Hs to fly PARPRO missions from Eielson AFB, Alaska, along Siberia's northern and eastern shores. The resulting intelligence of increased aerial forces in the region caused the nation's leaders to consider overflights of Russia's entire northern slope that would locate and identify air defenses as well as the disposition of aerial forces there. In early February 1956, President Eisenhower terminated Project Genetrix, the launching of highaltitude photoreconnaissance balloons that would drift across the U.S.S.R. In the four preceding weeks, SAC had launched 516 of them from Western Europe and Turkey. Those that succeeded in crossing the U.S.S.R. released their gondolas by parachute, the gondolas being recovered in midair by C-119 cargo aircraft near Japan. But so many were shot down by Soviet air defenses, or were otherwise lost, that only forty-four were retrieved. At the same time, Eisenhower approved an air force project to fly SAC reconnaissance aircraft over and around the Soviet far north, mapping it completely, photographically and electronically.
The Strategic Air Command's Project Homerun overflights—unknown to all but a few until now—were launched from Thule, Greenland, between March 21 and May 10, 1956. During that seven-week period, RB-47E photo reconnaissance aircraft and RB-47H electronic reconnaissance aircraft flew almost daily over the North Pole to reconnoiter the entire northern slope and interior portions of the U.S.S.R., from the Kola Peninsula to the Bering Strait. It was a 3,400-mile round trip. The special SAC detachment formed for this operation included, with spares, sixteen RB-47Es of the 10th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron, Lockbourne AFB, Ohio; five RB-47Hs from the 343rd Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron from Forbes AFB, Kansas; and two full squadrons of some twenty-eight KC-97 tankers. All of these aircraft shared Thule's single ten-thousand-foot snow-and-ice-covered runway; all of them took off, refueled over the North Pole, and landed in complete radio silence.
The air base, located 690 miles north of the Arctic Circle on North Star Bay, is thirty-nine miles north of the nearest human habitation, the Eskimo village of Thule. The aircrews typically deplaned in temperatures of 35 degrees below zero (in an era when windchill factors were unheard of), in a region devoid of vegetation and covered in snow, at a time of year when darkness ruled nearly twenty-four hours a day. Maintenance crews and flight crews alike were quartered in what looked like railroad refrigerator cars, down to the levered door handles. Toilets operated via the “armstrong” flush system—hand-pumped. After receiving Arctic clothing, including fur-lined parkas and mukluks, the crews spent the first week in Arctic survival training and practicing Arctic flight operations: takeoffs and landings on ice-covered runways, navigating over the Pole, and air refueling in radio silence.
Planners had divided the Soviet Arctic into three basic sectors, spanning a
total of 3,500 miles. The first extended eastward from the Kola Peninsula to Dikson on the Kara Sea; the second extended from Dikson to Tiksi on the Laptev Sea; and the third from Tiksi to the Bering Strait. The RB-47s normally flew in pairs, often with an E (photoreconnaissance) and H (electronic reconnaissance) model teamed, in a normal wing formation. Because one tanker was required for each bomber, the KC-97s operated in a similar fashion. Each flight of one or more reconnaissance aircraft over the North Pole to the Soviet Union, whatever the number in it, was counted as a mission. About four or five missions were flown each day, rotating aircraft and crews, with the RB-47Es and Hs always arriving over Soviet territory during daylight. The aircrews for different missions were briefed separately, and no one knew where their compatriots were going or asked what became of the film and electronic recordings turned in at the end of the day.
The Thule missions photomapped the island of Novaya Zemlya (or “Banana Island,” as the aircrews referred to it) and its atomic test site. They flew in behind the Ural Mountains and down rivers, reconnoitering the timber, mining, and nickel smelting industries in the region. Siberia, they discovered, remained mostly wilderness, with few roads or towns. Most of the Thule missions, however, operated but a few miles inside Soviet territory all across the Arctic, locating, identifying, and photographing the infrequent radar stations and air bases. They confirmed that the Soviet Union's northern regions were poorly defended against enemy aircraft: Only on three or four occasions did Russian aircraft attempt to intercept missions, never successfully. At Thule, Brigadier General Hewitt T. Wheless, commander of the 801st Air Division, directed the operation along with Colonel William J. Meng, commander of the 26th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing at Lockbourne, which supplied the RB-47Es. Major George A. Brown served with them as the project operations officer and mission planner.
The Thule missions drew down in early May 1956, beginning with the RB47Hs' departure f
or Lockbourne AFB. Before the RB-47Es followed them, they conducted the so-called massed overflight. In a single mission flown on May 6 and 7, six RB-47Es took off from Thule, flew over the North Pole, and entered Siberia in daylight near Ambarchik. Flying abreast, they proceeded south at forty thousand feet, with engines operating at full power. The aircraft turned eastward and, while photomapping the entire region, exited the U.S.S.R. over Anadyr on the Bering Strait. The RB-47Es recovered at Eielson AFB, Alaska, and the next day returned over the North Pole to Thule.
In his retirement years, General Curtis LeMay more than once referred erroneously to a massed overflight of Vladivostok. In Tom Coffey's book Iron Eagle, based on interviews with the general, LeMay declared, “I flew the entire SAC reconnaissance force over the Siberian city of Vladivostok.” But later writers have conveniently forgotten—or ignored—his words at the end of this accounting: “It wasn't my idea,” he said. “I was ordered to do it.” Whether LeMay altered and exaggerated the account for effect or for reasons of his own, we will probably never know.
The Cold War Page 22