by Dwayne Day
28. Maj. Gen. Robert W. Burns, USAF Acting Deputy Chief of Staff, Operations, to Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, CINCSAC, Subject: “Special Aerial Photographic Operations,” July 5, 1952, Accession 810–60, Package 129, Records of U.S. Air Force Commands, Activities, and Organizations, RG 342, NARA. For Tupolev’s reverse engineering of the B-29, see Steven J. Zaloga, Target America: The Soviet Union and the Strategic Arms Race, 1945–1964 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1993), 63–79.
29. Robert A. Lovett, Secretary of Defense, memorandum to General of the Army Omar N. Bradley, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Subject: “Reconnaissance Requirements,” August 12, 1952, TS Accession 810–60, package 129, RG 342, NARA.
30. Maj. Gen. R. M. Ramey, USAF Director of Operations, to Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, CINCSAC, Subject: “Special Aerial Photographic Operations,” August 15, 1952, with attachment: Lt. Col. P. O. Robertson, Acting Chief, Reconnaissance Division, memorandum to General Montgomery, Subject: “Project 52 AFR-18 [Instructions],” August 13, 1952, Accession 810–60, package 129, RG 342, NARA; and Col. Donald E. Hillman, USAF (Ret.), with R. Cargill Hall, “Overflight: Strategic Reconnaissance of the USSR,” Air Power History 43 (Spring 1996): 28–39.
31. Headquarters USAF, Directorate of Intelligence, “Briefing for the Secretary of the Air Force, 23 June 1953” (script), and “Index to Charts,” June 22, 1953 (script), p. 6, Accession 81–0325, Box 1, Case 14, RG 342, NARA. General LeMay awarded each member of the aircrews a Distinguished Flying Cross for this hazardous reconnaissance mission in lieu of a Silver Star, which he would have preferred to give. But the latter award required justification at USAF Headquarters, an action that would acquaint too many people with the reason for the award. In May 1953, LeMay struck an agreement with Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Nathan F. Twining to award DFCs or Air Medals to SAC reconnaissance aircrews operating overseas, who “performed special missions from bases in the United Kingdom.” Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, CINCSAC, letter to Gen. N. F. Twining, Chief of Staff, USAF, November 17, 1955, Box 60, Twining File, LeMay Papers, LC.
The secrecy surrounding these JCS-directed “special missions” was so tight that many senior Air Force leaders without a “need to know” in their entire career knew nothing more than rumor. One of them, Gen. Horace M. Wade, SAC Commander of the Eighth Air Force, later Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, who retired as Vice Chief of Staff of the USAF, reflected on these years: “We were desperate. We were desperate for intelligence from the inside of Russia. I have a feeling, if the truth were really known, that there was a B-47 that was flown from Alaska across Russia and landed in Turkey.… I can’t prove it, but I have a feeling that this was done.” Gen. Horace M. Wade, USAF (Ret.), interview by Hugh N. Ahmann, Portland, Oregon, October 10–12, 1978, USAF Oral History Collection, p. 316, Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell AFB, Alabama.
32. Gen. Jacob E. Smart, USAF (Ret.), letter to R. Cargill Hall, April 8, 1996. Smart, who in the mid-1950s served Far East Air Forces (FEAF) as director of operations, continued: At Headquarters FEAF, “we selected the optimum date and time of each mission based on a wide range of factors including sun-angle, weather, status of crew, aircraft and equipment, perceived activity in the target area, preparedness of supporting units—notably real-time intelligence gathering, air-sea rescue, etc.—all with care to avoid alerting friend, foe, or the media that something unusual was under way or planned.”
33. Unknown to American intelligence until some years later, the BISON did not perform well and the Soviets built about 100 of these jet bombers, only enough to equip three wings. See Bill Gunston and Yefim Gordon, “The Extinct Bison,” Air International 49 (October 1995): 222–29; 49 (November 1995): 275–79; and 49 (December 1995): 342–47.
34. For Eisenhower’s views of the importance of this intelligence, see Christopher M. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 199–201, 220–21; for the role of Killian and Land in 1954, see R. Cargill Hall, “The Eisenhower Administration and the Cold War,” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives 27 (Spring 1995): 62–63.
35. Documents pertaining to the president’s approval of this Soviet overflight have not been located but most likely reside in CIA, OSD, or JCS files instead of the Eisenhower Library. (It was the president’s custom to listen to an overflight proposal and, if he approved it, initial the flight plan. In the case of the U-2, that document was returned to the CIA by Allen Dulles.) Learning of this and preceding overflights, Director of Naval Intelligence Rear Adm. Carl F. Espe requested photographs of the Soviet Union from the Air Force Director of Intelligence, Maj. Gen. J. A. Samford. Espe cited a total of six such flights, including the most recent one on May 8. Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Carl F. Espe, memorandum to Director of Intelligence, USAF, Maj. Gen. J. A. Samford, Subject: “Photography, Request For,” May 25, 1954, in entry 214, Box 77, Folder 4–1114/1129, RG 341, NARA. Samford’s reply has not been found in Air Force or Navy archives or records.
Beginning with the Korean War, some historical evidence suggests that the JCS did delegate to JCS commanders, under certain circumstances, authority to conduct reconnaissance missions close to, or limited overflights of, the littoral regions of Communist China and the Soviet Union. See Gen. Bryce Poe II, “The Korean War: An Airman’s Perception,” draft paper cleared for public release on July 19, 1995, pp. 2, 23–25. Regrettably, when word of SAC-generated overflights of the Soviet Union became public knowledge before any pertinent Cold War records had been declassified, some authors in search of a conspiracy concluded that one JCS commander, CINCSAC General Curtis LeMay, authorized all of them without permission in a vain attempt to provoke the Soviet Union into starting World War III. Purposefully culling and arranging quotes from interviews, and ignoring all the conventions of scholarship, they affirmed for readers that Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had to contend with a real “General Ripper” loose in the national military establishment. See, for instance, Richard Rhodes, “The General and World War III,” New Yorker, June 19, 1995, 47–59, and Paul Lashmar, “Killer on the Edge: The Warmongering Career of Curtis LeMay,” New Statesman and Society, September 15, 1995, 20–22.
36. Crampton, “Royal Air Force RB-45C Special Duty Flight”; and James G. Baker, interview by R. Cargill Hall, May 9, 1996.
37. Eugene P. Kiefer, letter to Donald Welzenbach, March 16, 1988; Harold F. (“Bud”) Wienberg, interview by R. Cargill Hall, March 16, 1995 (hereafter Wienberg interview); and Merton E. Davies and William R. Harris, RAND’s Role in the Evolution of Balloon and Satellite Observation Systems and Related U.S. Space Technology, R-3692-RC (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1988), 33; see also Thomas A. Sturm, The USAF Scientific Advisory Board: Its First Twenty Years, 1944–1964 (reprint: Washington, D.C.: Air Force History Office, Government Printing Office, 1986), 44–45, 48, and appendix C, “SAB Membership Roster.” The Davies and Harris volume is the most comprehensive and thorough survey available on these subjects.
38. For an unclassified account of this project, later known as MOBY DICK and GENETRIX, see Curtis Peebles, The Moby Dick Project: Reconnaissance Balloons Over Russia (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
39. Camera shutter and lens technology, they knew, would require major improvement to move up from the altitude of 13 miles, employed for balloon and aerial platforms, to an altitude of 300 miles then planned at RAND for a reconnaissance satellite and still provide useful images of objects on the earth’s surface.
40. Davies and Harris, RAND’s Role, 35–38.
41. The contents of the AFDAP intelligence and reconnaissance DPO was described by Richard S. Leghorn in comments on an early draft of this study, July 5, 1995. A copy of the I&R DPO has not been found.
42. Jay Miller, Lockheed U-2 (Arlington, Tex.: Aerofax, 1983), 10–12, 17–18. Miller’s account is based on documents provided by and an interview by a principal at WADC, Maj.
John Seaberg. The X-16 effort was canceled shortly after the U-2 began test flights in August 1955.
43. Welzenbach, “Strategic Overhead Reconnaissance,” chap. 8. For other authoritative accounts, see Miller, Lockheed U-2; also Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson with Maggie Smith, Kelly: More than My Share of It All (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), chap. 13; and Ben R. Rich with Leo Janos, Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (New York: Little, Brown, 1994), chaps. 6 and 7.
44. Burton Klein, telephone interview by R. Cargill Hall, October 4, 1995.
45. Ibid.
46. Not only would this unarmed single-engine aircraft fly higher, but, as Killian later told Herbert York, it would be “manifestly less hostile” than Air Force reconnaissance bombers used on overflight missions. Herbert F. York and G. Allen Greb, “Strategic Reconnaissance,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 33, no. 4 (April 1977): 35. Also, regarding U-2 origins, James G. Baker, letter to R. Cargill Hall, December 21, 1993. Baker was a member of Din Land’s TCP intelligence committee and designed the remarkable B-2 camera later employed in the U-2. He also served as chairman of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board’s intelligence systems panel in 1954. As he recollected events, Allen Donovan brought word of Kelly Johnson’s CL-282 to members of the Air Force panel at a meeting after Baker had returned from a trip to Europe in early March (the meeting would have had to follow in late March–July). “We kept these discussions very close indeed and carried them over into the TCP not long afterward. As a result, Din met at Lockheed with Kelly Johnson and called me from California. Din said words I cannot forget: “ ‘Jim, I think we have your airplane.’ ”
47. A. J. Goodpaster, “Memorandum of Conference with the President, 0810, Nov. 24, 1954,” “ACW Diary, Nov 1954,” A7, Bay 3, Anne C. Whitman Series, Anne Whitman File, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereafter DDE). The best accounting of events leading to the November 24 meeting appear in Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Random House, 1990), 16–19; James R. Killian Jr., Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 82; and Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: The U-2 Affair (New York: Harper and Row, 1991), 82; also Donald Welzenbach, “Din Land: Patriot from Polaroid,” Optics and Photonics News 5 (October 1994): 23–24.
48. A biographical sketch of the versatile and complex Richard Bissell appears in Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). For his own posthumous accounting, see Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior.
For an account of the significant intelligence results of the U-2 missions, see the statement of Allen W. Dulles, DCI, before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on May 31, 1960, regarding “Events Incident to the Summit Conference,” in U.S. Senate, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Historical Series, vol. 12, 86th Congr., 2d sess., 1960 (declassified and made public November 1982), 280–87.
49. Ritland and Mixson chose U-2 pilots from an Air Force pool. Once chosen, they were seconded to the CIA from the Air Force. They were restored to military status after a period of service with the CIA. Wienberg interview. Although CL-282 and the U-2 shared a basic design concept, the latter aircraft differed substantially in configuration and equipment from the original Lockheed proposal. For example, a Pratt & Whitney J57 axial flow turbojet engine recommended by John Seaberg powered the U-2 instead of the GE J73 engine that Kelly Johnson first specified.
50. In 1955 Nelson Rockefeller served as special assistant to the president for psychological warfare, while Harold Stassen served as special assistant to the president for disarmament.
51. Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster, USA (Ret.) letter to R. Cargill Hall, January 11, 1996; and John Eisenhower, letter to R. Cargill Hall, January 9, 1996. According to Leghorn, Stephen Posony, another member of Schriever’s AFDAP team from Air Force intelligence, helped draft the Open Skies proposal for Nelson Rockefeller. Solid accounts appear in Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 25–26; Eisenhower, Strictly Personal, 177–78; and Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Mandate for Change (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), 519.
52. “Statement on Disarmament, July 21,” Department of State Bulletin 33, no. 841 (August 1, 1955): 174. The term “Open Skies” was coined later by the popular press and applied to this disarmament plan. The background of this proposal, as debated in the National Security Council, is contained in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, vol. 20, Regulation of Armaments; Atomic Energy (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1990), see esp. docs. 33 through 48.
53. The most authoritative account of these events appears in W. W. Rostow, Open Skies: Eisenhower’s Proposal of July 21, 1955 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982).
54. NSC 5522, “[Executive Department] Comments on the Report to the President by the Technological Capabilities Panel of the Science Advisory Committee,” June 8, 1955. For instance, see comments by Donald Quarles for the Department of Defense and Allen Dulles for the CIA at pp. A15-A44, and A45-A56. White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs: Records, 1952–61, NSC Policy Papers, Box 16, Folder NSC 5522 Technological Capabilities Panel, DDE. Also, R. Cargill Hall, “The Eisenhower Administration and the Cold War: Framing American Astronautics to Serve National Security,” Prologue 27 (Spring 1995): 59–72; and Hall, “The Origins of U.S. Space Policy: Eisenhower, Open Skies, and Freedom of Space,” in Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, vol. 1, ed. John Logsdon et al., NASA SP-4407 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1995), 225–33.
55. Richard S. Leghorn, interview by R. Cargill Hall and Donald Welzenbach, December 13, 1995. Leghorn’s views of strategic reconnaissance employed as an arms control and disarmament inspection system at this time appeared in a seminal article: “U.S. Can Photograph Russia from the Air Now: Planes Available, Equipment on Hand, Techniques Set,” US. News and World Report, August 5, 1955, 70–75.
56. Paul E. Worthman recollections cited by Rostow in Open Skies, 189–94; Tom D. Crouch, The Eagle Aloft: Two Centuries of the Balloon in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 644–49; and Peebles, The Moby Dick Project.
57. Levison, interview by R. Cargill Hall, May 9, 1996 (hereafter Levison interview); Levison, letter to Hall, September 2, 1996.
58. Crouch, Eagle Aloft, 644–49; and Levison interview. In the event aerial retrieval failed, the camera-carrying gondolas were designed to float on the ocean’s surface and radiate a signal for 24 hours before a plug dissolved and the gondola sank.
59. Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, 112.
60. Sergei Khrushchev, interview by R. Cargill Hall and Richard S. Leghorn, Providence, R.I., July 5, 1995.
61. See Hall, “Eisenhower Administration and the Cold War.”
62. Executive Order 10656, February 6, 1956, as cited in U.S. Government Organization Manual, 1958–1959 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1958), 538.
63. Kenneth E. Greer, “CORONA,” Studies in Intelligence, Supplement 17 (Spring 1973), as reprinted in CORONA: America’s First Satellite Program, ed. Kevin C. Ruffner, Center for the Study of Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1995), 4–5.
64. Jacob Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960 (Washington D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1990). The Teapot Committee report and recommendation, as it was popularly known, is reprinted at appendix 1 of the Neufeld book.
65. William G. King, USAF (Ret.), telephone interview by R. Cargill Hall, September 9, 1996; James S. Coolbaugh, “The Beginnings of the Air Force Satellite Program: A Memoir,” contained in Space Policy Institute Collection, George Washington University; and Hall, “Origins of U.S. Space Policy,” 218–21.
66. Troetschel, “An Early History of the Air Force
Space Program,” n.d., contained in SPI; Coolbaugh, “Beginnings of the Air Force Satellite Program”; and King interview, September 9, 1996.
67. Back in the spring of 1956, Truax and Coolbaugh “flew a B-25 up and down the West Coast looking for the best spot to locate a satellite launch facility. RAND’s recommendation of Alaska as the place to locate such a facility was long forgotten. We finally settled on two sites. The ideal place for polar launches was the south side of the Army’s Camp Cooke, which was located on Point Arguello, about 55 miles WNW of Santa Barbara. The other site which could have been used was near Santa Cruz. (This latter location became Lockheed’s Santa Cruz Test Facility, where the Agena stage was ‘hot’-fired as part of its pre-launch validation.) We were lucky in our selection of the Camp Cooke site because the Navy had a radar tracking site there and Bob knew the Navy officer in charge of the operation, Commander Bob Frietag. When ‘the dust settled,’ the Air Force was authorized to build a launch base for satellites there. This action predated the Air Force’s acquisition of Camp Cooke for a missile launch base by about nine months.” Coolbaugh, “Beginning of the Air Force Satellite Program,” 44.
68. Hall, “Origins of U.S. Space Policy,” 224.
69. Amrom H. Katz and Merton E. Davies, “On the Utility of Very Large Satellite Payloads for Reconnaissance,” RAND D-5817, November 14, 1958, 6.
70. Davies and Harris, RAND’s Role, 69–70. A number of conditions prefigured the choice of a long-lived readout reconnaissance satellite. Beside the demand for indications and warning of surprise attack that arose in the 1950s, when RAND conducted its early satellite studies, returning anything from earth orbit was judged technically unfeasible. Moreover, without an ICBM available, a satellite program also would have to develop and pay for its own booster. Finally, without the reentry option, whatever was placed in orbit would have to function for a long time, at least one year, to justify the expense of getting it up there. For a discussion of these conditions, see Amrom H. Katz, “Some Notes on the Evolution of RAND’s Thinking on Reconnaissance Satellites,” RAND D-4753, November 27, 1957.