by Ben R Rich
Once the pilot reached seventy thousand feet he tried to maintain 400 knots true airspeed, about as fast as a commercial jetliner, and keep the engine from overheating and operating at maximum efficiency.
At altitude the pilot flew nose high and wings level, so for him to be able to see down we installed a cockpit device known as a drift sight—basically an upside-down periscope that had four levels of magnification and could be swiveled in a 360-degree arc. The pilots also had to plot their navigation by sextant, plotting precise routes while maintaining total radio silence and photographing particular targets with the pinpoint accuracy of a bombardier. A screwup could mean death by ground fire or fighter attack—and a guaranteed international crisis.
The airplane and the missions were much too demanding to trust to any but the best pilots available. The CIA found that out in the late fall of 1955, when they made a totally off-the-wall decision to try to recruit foreign pilots to fly this top-secret program. The rationale was that it would be less embarrassing if, say, a Turkish national was shot down over Russia than an American. Our government could plausibly deny any involvement. The president had cut out the Air Force from the U-2 program on the basis that the CIA was better at keeping secret a very classified program and that if a plane should be shot down it was not as provocative somehow with a civilian pilot at the controls as with an Air Force fighter pilot. Much to the chagrin of the Air Force and of several high-level CIA officials, the White House ordered the CIA to recruit pilots from NATO countries who could pass themselves off as pilots for an international high-altitude weather survey program, which was the cover story for the U-2 operation. So seven foreign pilots arrived in the late fall of 1955 and began training under the tutelage of Colonel Bill Yancey, of the Strategic Air Command, and a small crew of top-notch blue-suiter flight instructors, who had been thoroughly checked out on the U-2 by our own test pilot corps. But from the first day the undertaking appeared hopeless. The pilots lacked experience to fly such a demanding airplane as the U-2, and several of them freaked out, realizing that they would be forced to land on two tandem wheels. In less than two weeks, they were sent packing, and Kelly noted with a sigh of relief in his journal: “It’s been decided to use only American pilots from now on, thank God.”
Before the year ended, General Curtis LeMay, the tough, cigar-chomping commander of the Strategic Air Command, got into the U-2 act by insisting that SAC recruit the pilots for the U-2 program. LeMay was furious that his own organization was not running the program operationally and thought that Eisenhower had lost his senses by allowing the CIA to start up its own air force. He raised so much hell with Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott that he was finally cut into the deal around the edges by being tasked to hire and train the pilots from within SAC, with the additional promise that U-2s would be made available to the blue-suiters at some future time. In those days the Strategic Air Command had its own fighter wings that were used to escort its bomber force into combat. The SAC fighter pilots selected would have to resign their Air Force commissions and come to work for Lockheed as contract employees under assumed names. We would put them on our payroll and so integrate them into the company that, at the end of the line, even the KGB might have a tough time tracing any of those pilots back to the military. The spooks called this kind of total identity change “sheep dipping.” This was about as close as the government and private enterprise were likely to get as teammates in top-secret espionage.
The Skunk Works would also be reimbursed by special government funds for the salaries and use of its mechanics and maintenance people who would service the U-2s at the secret overseas bases for the duration of the overflights. The agency insisted on using our mechanics over the usual Air Force crews simply because we held the monopoly on knowledge and experience on the workings of the U-2, and on these critical missions over Russia there was no margin for any mechanical failure. We needed perfectly functioning airplanes from takeoff to landing. No pancake landings on a Russian beet field, thank you.
God knows, the Skunk Works had gone out of its way to earn the agency’s trust. We had even kept the production line going by putting up our own money when Congress was late appropriating money to the CIA’s secret Contingency Reserve Fund. Eventually, more than $54 million was allocated for the U-2 program. Out of pure patriotism Kelly defied one of his own strictly held commandments—number 11 to be exact—which insisted that a customer’s funding must be timely. We were sticklers for delivering prompt monthly progress reports to customers and keeping a close accounting of our costs. Kelly required incremental customer payouts to keep us from having to carry the government with our own bank loans. But because of the national security urgency, Kelly obtained a $3 million bank loan to cover our U-2 production costs, at a time when interest rates were only about 5 percent. Still, it was a good example of a defense contractor bailing out his government. And at the end of the line we were actually able to refund about 15 percent of the total U-2 production cost back to the CIA and in the bargain build five extra airplanes from spare fuselages and parts we didn’t need because both the Skunk Works and the U-2 had functioned so beautifully. This was probably the only instance of a cost underrun in the history of the military-industrial complex.
The first group of six U-2 pilots recruited from the SAC fighter squadrons showed up at the Skunk Works in the fall of 1955 wearing civilian clothes and carrying phony IDs. They spent three days getting a thorough briefing on the airplane before flying off to the secret base to begin training with our test pilots. I remember talking to one of them, a nice, dark-haired fellow with a soft West Virginia accent who asked me a few technical questions about the air intakes. I would instantly recognize him four years later when his face was plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the world as Francis Gary Powers.
I learned that those pilots were being paid forty grand annually with an additional thousand a month bonus once they became active overseas. The forty grand would be held for them by our payroll department and they’d collect it only after they were mustered out. Which meant they had to survive in order to collect their just rewards.
Those pilots disappeared off my screen on the morning when they flew off to the base in a CIA-operated C-47 that had all its passenger windows blacked out. But since Skunk Works mechanics and ground crews were used exclusively to maintain the airplanes overseas, and several of my colleagues were forced to make periodic quick trips to add some new device or make a fix, we were able to keep up with the U-2 operations in fits and starts. The first contingent became operational, setting up at a base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, only ten months after the first test flight and less than eighteen months since the plane was first designed. Dick Bissell had personally obtained permission from then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to use German soil for this secret spy operation. Simultaneously, in early June 1956, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of the NASA space program, announced in Washington the beginning of a new high-altitude weather research program using a new Lockheed U-2 airplane that was expected to fly above ten miles high. The announcement was a fraud, claiming that the new U-2 would be charting weather patterns in advance of tomorrow’s jet transports. Our U-2 detachment called itself “The First Weather Reconnaissance Squadron (Provisional).” They were strange weather birds—hidden away in a remote corner of the Wiesbaden air base, guarded by CIA agents carrying submachine guns. And by the time these guys were setting up operations in Germany, with four U-2s and six pilots, we at the Skunk Works were building ten more airplanes that would supply three operational detachments: Detachment A in Germany, Detachment B in Turkey, and Detachment C in Japan.
Once that first detachment was deployed, the secrecy lid clamped shut. All of us inside the Skunk Works felt in our bones that the overflights of Russia were imminent, but only Kelly was plugged in with the CIA; he would disappear for several days and we all speculated that he was either on the scene in Germany (which was untrue) or being briefed in
Washington by Mr. B (which was true) and actually shown the photos taken from the first flights (also true).
The first Russian overflight occurred on July 4, 1956. A CIA pilot named Harvey Stockman flew over northern Poland into Belorussia and over Minsk, then turned left and headed to Leningrad. He was tracked on radar all the way, and dozens of Soviet interceptors tried in vain to reach him, but he made it back safely into Germany having flown for nearly nine hours. When I came to work after that holiday weekend, Kelly sent for several of us in the analytical section and briefed us in a somewhat limited fashion. “Well, boys, Ike got his first picture postcard. The first take is being processed right now. But goddam it, we were spotted almost as soon as we took off. I think we’ve badly underestimated their radar capabilities. We could tell from overhearing their ground chatter that they were way off in estimating our altitude, but we always figured they wouldn’t even see us at sixty-five thousand feet. And you know why? Because we gave them lend-lease early-warning radar during World War II and presumed that, like us, they wouldn’t do anything to improve it. Obviously they have. I want you guys to brainstorm what we can do to make us less visible or help us go even higher.”
The Soviets were launching half their damned air force to try to stop these flights, and the president was upset at how easily they were tracking the U-2. “Mr. B is trying to bunch these flights before Ike gets cold feet or the Russians get lucky,” Kelly sighed. “The president has given us ten good weather days for these missions. After that, who knows?”
Other Voices
Marty Knutson
I was the first pilot selected to fly in the U-2 program and made the third flight over the Soviet Union on the morning of July 8, 1956. I was a twenty-six-year-old with a thousand hours of fighter time, who had almost died of disappointment the first time I saw the U-2. I looked in the cockpit and saw that the damn thing had a yoke, or steering wheel. The last straw. Either you flew with a stick like a self-respecting fighter jock or you were a crappy bomber driver—a goddam disgrace—who steered with a yoke, like a damned truck driver at the steering wheel of a big rig.
I wound up flying that U-2 for the CIA for the next twenty-nine years. It was a bitch to land and easy to stall out, but I fell in love. I was just crazy enough to enjoy the danger.
Now here I was flying over Russia in a fragile little airplane with a wingspan as long as the damned Brooklyn Bridge—and below I could see three hundred miles in every direction. This was enemy territory, big time. In those days especially, I had a very basic attitude about the Soviet Union—man, it was an evil empire, a forbidding, alien place and I sure as hell didn’t want to crash-land in the middle of it. I had to pinch myself that I was actually flying over the Soviet Union.
I began the day by eating a high-protein breakfast, steak and eggs, then put on the bulky pressure suit and the heavy helmet and had to lie down in a contour chair for two hours before taking off and breathe pure oxygen. The object was to purge the nitrogen out of my system to avoid getting the bends if I had to come down quick from altitude.
I knew from being briefed by the two other guys who flew these missions ahead of me to expect a lot of Soviet air activity. Those bastards tracked me from the minute I took off, which was an unpleasant surprise. We thought we would be invisible to their radar at such heights. No dice. Through my drift sight I saw fifteen Russian MiGs following me from about fifteen thousand feet below. The day before, Carmen Vito had followed the railroad tracks right into Moscow and actually saw two MiGs collide and crash while attempting to climb to his altitude.
Vito had a close call. The ground crew had put his poison cyanide pill in the wrong pocket. We were issued the pill in case of capture and torture and all that good stuff, but given the option whether to use it or not. But Carmen didn’t know the cyanide was in the right breast pocket of his coveralls when he dropped in a fistful of lemon-flavored cough drops. The cyanide pill was supposed to be in an inside pocket. Vito felt his throat go dry as he approached Moscow for the first time—who could blame him? So he fished in his pocket for a cough drop and grabbed the cyanide pill instead and popped it into his mouth. He started to suck on it. Luckily he realized his mistake in a split second and spit it out in horror before it could take effect. Had he bit down he would have died instantly and crashed right into Red Square. Just imagine the international uproar!
I kept my cyanide pill in an inside pocket and prayed that I would not have an engine flameout. A flameout meant I had a pack of goddam problems on my hands that might well land me in a Russian morgue or in some goddam gulag.
I was all pumped up—like flying combat in Korea. Nothing in the cockpit was automated back then. We had to fly a precise line at seventy thousand feet, looking through the drift sight and using maps. I’d compare what I was seeing through the sight to what the map showed. Pretty damned primitive, like 1930s flying, by the seat of the pants. But we all grew very skilled at it.
I flew over Leningrad and it blew my mind because Leningrad was my target as a SAC pilot and I spent two years training with maps and films, and here I was, coming in from the same direction as in the SAC battle plan, looking down on it through my sights. Only this time I was lining up for photos, not a bomb drop. It was a crystal-clear day and about twenty minutes out of Leningrad I hit pay dirt. This was exactly what the president of the United States was waiting to see. I flew right over a bomber base called Engels Airfield and there, lined up and waiting for my cameras, were thirty Bison bombers. This would prove the worst, I thought. Because the powers that be back in Washington feared that we were facing a huge bomber gap. I proved the gap—or so I thought. As it turned out, my pictures were rushed by Allen Dulles to the Oval Office. For several weeks there was real consternation, but then the results of other flights began coming in and my thirty Bisons were the only ones spotted in that whole massive goddam country, so our people began to relax a little and we turned our attention to their missile production.
I flew hundreds of missions for the agency after that, but that moment over Engels Airfield I considered the most important of any ride I took. I was overflying the most secretive society on the face of the earth, about whom we knew little, and here arrayed below with no place to hide from my lens was a big chunk of their airpower. I remember mumbling, “Holy shit,” as those cameras whirred. I knew that this was an espionage coup second to none in importance and significance.
After those first flights the Russians went all out to stop the U-2. The Russian ambassador delivered a formal protest to the State Department, and the Kremlin privately threatened the Germans to either close us down or face a rocket attack on the base. KGB agents parked in big black cars just outside the fence, watching us take off and land. So we moved to a base in southern Turkey. Most of these Turkish flights monitored Soviet missile test sites on their southern border. Sputnik went up October 1957, the Russians putting the first object into space orbit, and they bragged about their ICBM capabilities to reach anywhere in the U.S., although they had no test launches from May 1958 to the following February. Ike was being roasted alive by the press for letting them get the jump on us. We covered Tyuratam, their missile test facility, nuclear test sites, and Kapustin Yar, their operational center for ABMs.
I flew on the eastern side of the Urals to observe their missile test launches. The CIA had spies on the ground who tipped us off whenever there would be a missile test. We usually had one day’s notice to get ready and needed the president’s approval to monitor the shot. By the fall of 1959, they were test-firing one missile a week. I made one or two of those observation flights and they were truly spectacular. I flew in the dead of night over some of the most remote terrain in the world. No lights down there. On a moonless night it was like flying through an ocean of ink. I flew with a big camera perched on my lap. The camera was hand-held and had special film that could determine from the flame shooting from the rocket’s nozzle what kind of fuel they were using and even how they were making their rock
ets. The U-2 also had special sniffers, installed on the outside fuselage, that would pick up chemical traces in the air after the firing for analysis back in Washington. Suddenly, the sky lit up and that big rocket roared off the pad. I snapped away, taking pictures of that plume for a matter of seconds before it disappeared into space. The Russians never even knew I was up there.
But the most exciting mission I ever flew was out of a small landing field at Peshawar in Pakistan, where we had a support unit set up in late 1958. The flight was so long range that there was no way for me to get back to the base. My main target was in Kazakhstan, a radar and missile test center, then on to a nuclear test site near Semipalatinsk and finally an overflight of a main ICBM launch test facility. By then I would have stretched the airplane’s range to the limit and would be nearly out of gas. The plan called for me to glide over the Urals to save fuel and land at a tiny World War II airstrip near Zahedan, in Iran, right in the triangle where Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan converge. The agency would send in a C-130 with agents armed with grenades and tommy guns to secure the base from mountain bandits who controlled that territory. If I made it across the border and saw a cloud of black smoke, it meant that the field was being attacked by the bandits. If that happened, I was supposed to eject and bail out. I crossed the Russian border with only a hundred gallons of fuel remaining. Really getting hairy. I didn’t see any smoke, so I came in and landed with less than twenty gallons left in the tank. One of the agents had a six pack of beer icing. They had an antenna set up and were supposed to send a coded message that I was safe. One of the guys came to me and said, “Our equipment is down. I know you’re a ham operator, do you, by any chance, know Morse code?” I’m sitting there under a blazing sun, still in my pressure suit, sipping a beer in one hand, and with the other tapping out the dots and dashes.