by Ben R Rich
About the start of 1959 we began seeing ominous activities going on inside Russia. Around their strategic bases were strange Star of David patterns. We learned quickly enough that that meant the construction of ground-to-air missile sites. We now had orders that if we saw any new Star of David patterns, we were to deviate from the flight plan and go film them. These first SAMs couldn’t reach us. The optimum use of their surface controls was lower—fifty-five thousand feet—to be used against our bombers. But we figured we were flying on borrowed time. Sooner or later, one of us would get nailed. I knew for sure it would be the other guy.
They tried to stop us by trying to ram us with their fighters like a ballistic missile. They stripped down some of their MiG-21s and flew straight up at top speed, arcing up to sixty-eight thousand feet before flaming out and falling back toward earth. Presumably they got a relight down around thirty-five thousand feet. I’m sure they lost some airplanes and pilots playing kamikaze missile. It was crazy, but it showed how angry and desperate they were becoming.
By the winter of 1960, we were getting intelligence briefings warning us about improvements in Soviet tracking and SAM capability. Their new SA-2 missile was an improved version of what they previously had, capable of reaching us and equipped with a powerful warhead that could be lethal if exploded within four hundred feet of an airplane. We gave the SA-2 a wide berth whenever possible. I have to admit we were all getting plenty worried. We had long since installed ejection seats. That was one item of added weight no one in his right mind would do without.
The CIA code-named the project Rainbow. The orders came directly from the Oval Office and had the highest priority. Every one of Kelly’s engineers and designers was put to work. The object: significantly lower the U-2’s radar signature or face a presidential cancellation of the entire program. These orders arrived just before the new year in 1956, after only seven or eight overflights of the Soviet Union. The Russians were using diplomatic channels to scream at us. They were too embarrassed by their own ineptitude in being able to stop the overflights to make their threats public, but that did not make these threats less ominous.
So the heat was on to find ways to reduce the airplane’s radar signature from approximately that of a Fifth Avenue bus to the size of a two-door coupe. But the U-2’s big tail, wings, and large inlets designed for its lift and thrust got in the way, acting like a circus spotlight on hostile radar scopes. Kelly flew to Cambridge, Massachusetts, seeking advice from a high-powered scientific group doing research on antiradar technology. He brought back with him two of their best radar experts, Dr. Frank Rogers and Ed Purcell, to help us brainstorm. I was involved analyzing various composites and paints that might be tried to absorb radar energy without adding too much weight to the airplane. The U-2 was painted a dull black to prevent it from glinting in the sun. We wanted to make it as difficult as possible to achieve human detection from the ground or from below in an interceptor trying to reach it. And we began experimenting with chromic paint that changed from different shades of blue to black at different temperatures like a chameleon. But paint added more weight than deception, as did the idea of painting the U-2 with polka dots to break up the silhouette against the sky. As for fooling radar, Rogers and Purcell suggested a radical fix: stringing piano wire of various dipole lengths along the entire fuselage in the hope of scattering as much radar energy in as many frequencies as possible in every direction. The wires made the U-2 draggy and we lost seven thousand feet in altitude.
The next thing we tried was something called a Salisbury screen, a metallic grid applied to the airplane’s undercarriage in the hope of deflecting incoming radar beams, but it worked only at some frequencies and altitudes and not at others.
Kelly thought it was more practical to try special iron ferrite paints that would absorb a radar ping rather than bounce it back to the sender. The paints were moderately effective but inhibited heat dissipation through the airframe’s outer skin and we experienced overheating engine problems. But the paint lowered the radar cross section by one order of magnitude, so we decided to give it a try. We called these specially painted airplanes “dirty birds” and shipped the first one out for flight testing in April 1957. Our test pilot, Bob Sieker, took the U-2 up to over seventy thousand feet and suddenly radioed that he was experiencing rapid airframe heat buildup. Moments later his engine blew out and the faceplate blew off Bob’s oxygen mask as his pressure suit instantly inflated. The U-2 dove straight down and crashed. It took us three days to locate the wreckage and Bob’s body. An autopsy revealed that above seventy thousand feet he had suffered acute hypoxia and lost consciousness in only ten seconds. The culprit that killed him was a defective faceplate clasp that cost fifty cents.
The CIA was so desperate to buy time for these Soviet overflights that Bissell got Kelly to sequester four of our test flight engineers and have them write a bogus flight manual for a U-2 twice as heavy as ours and with a maximum altitude of only fifty thousand feet that carried only scientific weather gear in its bay. The manual included phony instrument panel photos with altered markings for speed, altitude, and load factor limits. Four copies were produced and then artificially aged with grease, coffee stains, and cigarette burns. How or if the agency got them into Soviet hands only Mr. B knew, and he never told.
Other Voices
James Cherbonneaux
In July 1957, a cargo plane brought the first so-called dirty bird to our base in Turkey. It was covered with a plastic material and had two sets of piano wire strung from either side of its nose to a set of poles sticking out of the wings. The wires were to scatter radar beams while the paint was to absorb other frequencies. But I wasn’t thrilled. Part of my big paycheck was compensation for high-risk missions in a semi-experimental airplane, but I had never before risked flying an airplane wired like a guitar.
The Skunk Works engineer who flew out with the dirty bird admitted that its extra weight would cost us altitude and three thousand miles in diminished range. On July 7, 1956, I flew the dirty bird on an operational test of the whole Soviet defense net along the Black Sea, flying inside twelve miles of the coastline. The flight lasted eight hours, and I carried an array of special recording devices while deliberately trying to provoke responses from Soviet air defense along its entire southern flank. The plan was to see if they could detect our dirty bird. All in all, the coatings and wire worked well, but analysis of my recordings indicated that the bad guys were homing in on my cockpit and tailpipe, neither of which had been treated.
As it turned out, my most incredible overflight occurred only two weeks later in a mission specially cleared by President Eisenhower and involving a dirty bird. I took off in total secrecy from a field in Pakistan, flying a dirty bird for a flight deep inside Russia to photograph a missile site believed to be readying intercontinental missile tests. Because of the added “dirty” weight I could top out at only fifty-eight thousand feet. The missile site was a three-hour trip, but about seventy-five minutes into the mission I looked through my drift sight and saw a startling sight: the familiar circular graded contours that I had seen marking our own nuclear test site at Yucca Flats. My heart jumped! Could it really be? We had no idea that this test site even existed. I brought my drift sight up to its maximum four power magnification and focused on a large tower. I felt a chilling terror. That tower held a large object at the top, and there were signs of activity around a huge blockhouse about two miles away. And then a paralyzing thought slammed me: what if those bastards were getting set to let that nuclear weapon blow just as I was directly overhead? And in fact, that crazy thought took hold and I began to sweat and hyperventilate in panic. “Wait, goddam it. Wait, will you! Let me pass and then light your fire.” I was shouting into my faceplate.
I carried a three-camera system, one pointing straight down and the other two out at forty-five-degree angles so that each picture would overlap and provide a stereographic photo interpretation. I threw a switch and the cameras began to whir in s
equence. It seemed to take an eternity for my airplane to cross directly over that tower. My heart was pounding in my throat. I just knew I was going to be evaporated in the next seconds.
Five minutes later I was clear of the nuclear test site, laughing at myself for being so chicken. Three hours later I was over the city of Omsk, in central Russia, photographing a military-industrial complex of interest to SAC as a potential target; then I turned east to head for the missile test site—my principal target for the mission. I photographed the site, which bore evidence of a very recent test firing, then headed back to Pakistan.
I looked through the drift sight at the vastness of central Russia, a vastness almost unimaginable that made me feel achingly lost and alone. There were no telltale contrails of MiGs trying to get me, so I had to conclude that the Skunk Works had worked its magic and kept me hidden from the bad guy’s radar. If true, that meant that no one on earth knew where I was at that particular moment because I was also out of range of U.S. listening posts. Suddenly I became alert. My engine started making rough noises, but I knew from long experience that the roughness of an engine is in direct proportion to how far a pilot still has to go before he makes it safely across a hostile border.
Twenty minutes later I saw the shimmering snowy peak of the awesome mountain called K-2 illuminated against a dark blue sky. K-2 was my beacon back to Pakistan and a hot shower and sleep, and I calculated it was an hour away, about 450 miles, before I crossed the border. I was now eight hours plus into the mission and I became aware of the need to urinate. I cursed myself for forgetting to avoid any liquids the night before the flight, something I tried always to do because I was never able to pee out of my pressure suit. To do so, I had to unwork three layers and then pee uphill into a nozzle arrangement. I just couldn’t. But I began to ache. Real pain. Like knife thrusts down there. I was exhausted and in agony. I tried to pee into the nozzle, I tried to wet my pants, but I was having spasms and nothing came out. It was so bad I could barely focus my eyes, and K-2’s magnificent granite towers slipped by directly below and I barely noticed. Or cared a damn. By the time I made my landing approach the pain was searing to the point where I almost landed short of the field and crashed into a forest. I barely remember the mechanic opening my canopy at the top of his ladder and me pushing him aside like a maniac and vaulting down that ladder in a flash. Moments later, not heeding privacy, I set a new world record on that tarmac.
I expected to be received as a hero for having uncovered a Soviet nuclear test site with a bomb in the tower. Instead the team who debriefed me scoffed incredulously. “There is no atomic test facility in that part of central Russia,” one debriefer told me. But they passed on my observation by special wire to Washington, while another team began processing my film. CIA headquarters responded by coded cable in less than an hour. Their communication was stern, halfway between a personal rebuke and an official reprimand. My credibility was zero back home. But the next day over lunch, John Parangosky, the senior CIA agent in charge of our operation, took me aside with a sheepish grin. “Apologies, Jim. Collateral intelligence sources just reported that a nuclear bomb was detonated from that tower less than two hours after you flew over it.”
During the final winter of the U-2 overflights of Russia, Kelly Johnson came back from a visit to CIA headquarters looking profoundly gloomy. He couldn’t believe how easily the Russians were tracking our overflights and knew it was only a matter of time before their ground-to-air missile defenses caught up with their prowess in radar development and blew us out of the sky. “Putting fixes on this airplane won’t do any good. We need a fresh piece of paper,” Kelly told a group of us. His mind was already churning, thinking about the U-2’s successor that could survive flying above Moscow. He had asked our ace mathematician Bill Schroeder to predict how long it would take the Soviets to bring down a U-2 with their latest missile system. Schroeder gave the U-2 less than a year.
One of our engineers came back from a quick-fix visit to the secret U-2 base in Turkey to say that the morale among the pilots was sagging. The guys were worried about new SA-2 missile sites under construction around the Soviet Union’s main target areas. The president was very aware of the growing dangers and had cut back sharply on authorizing U-2 missions. And the trip our engineer made to Turkey indicated the growing concerns about pilot safety: he was on hand to supervise a new “black box” installed into the U-2’s tail section to electronically counter incoming radar beams and scatter them away. In the jargon of the trade, the box was called an ECM—electronic counter-measure—and would hopefully prevent a missile fired at a U-2 from locking on.
The word Kelly received from Dick Bissell was that the intelligence community was pushing hard for at least one more overflight over Tyuratam, the big Russian missile test center deep in the Urals, since a recent flight had revealed significant advances toward development of their first operational intercontinental missile. Eisenhower was ready to approve the follow-up flight, but the State Department heard about it and Secretary of State Christian Herter was strongly opposed. Herter had replaced John Foster Dulles, who had died of cancer earlier in the year, and was worried that any overflight might upset the delicate planning that had revolved around a summit in Paris between Ike and Khrushchev scheduled to start on May 14.
Bissell told Kelly that Allen Dulles had wrested one final flight out of the president, provided it took place two weeks before the Paris summit. The target date was May 1, 1960, the Soviet May Day, akin to our Fourth of July. We hoped to catch them with their defenses down, with only skeleton crews at work.
As it turned out, our black box and the route of the mission finally selected would seal the fate of that tragic last flight. Ike had signed off on two mission options and left the final decision to the CIA. The choices were missions code-named Time Step, which would overfly certain key nuclear and missile test sites, and Grand Slam, a marathon nine-hour mission from Pakistan clear across Russia to land at a base in Bodo, Norway. The heart of Grand Slam was overflying Tyuratam, then heading south to photograph the huge military-industrial complexes at Sverdlovsk and Plesetsk. All were heavily defended.
The two plans were sent for review to the Air Force chief of staff, General Nathan Twining, who quickly spotted a flaw in the Grand Slam mission and called Allen Dulles to personally urge changes. Twining had noticed that the proposed mission repeated the exact route into Sverdlovsk from the south used less than a month earlier by U-2 pilot Marty Knutson. “Allen, if you come in that way again, they’ll know exactly where you are heading and will just be lying in wait. You’ll get nailed.” Dulles obviously didn’t agree. He personally chose Grand Slam with no changes.
Because the mission would be so demanding and long, covering 3,700 miles from Pakistan to Norway, the agency chose its most experienced pilot and the best navigator of the group—thirty-four-year-old Francis Gary Powers. The pilot had twenty-seven U-2 missions logged, including several marathon-length flights across the eastern Mediterranean in 1956 to gather intelligence on the movements of British and French warships participating with Israel in attacking Egypt during the Suez crisis.
Powers took off at dawn from Peshawar, Pakistan, on Sunday, May 1, 1960. Flying across the Soviet border for the first time from Pakistan was another way to catch the Russians napping. And for the first three hours into the flight the plan worked perfectly. He flew over Tyuratam without difficulty then changed course and headed south toward Sverdlovsk, on the same flight plan as Knutson’s only weeks earlier. As he approached the Sverdlovsk complex, Powers was suddenly blinded by a brilliant orange flash and felt an explosion from behind. His right wing dropped and he began pitching down. His instincts told him his tail had been hit as the airplane began a steep nosedive. In horror he saw his wings rip off. His pressure suit inflated, squeezing him in a viselike grip, and his faceplate began to frost. He glanced at the altimeter, saw he was at thirty-four thousand feet and falling fast, and almost panicked realizing he was pinned by t
he centrifugal force up against the instrument panel. If he hit the ejection lever, he’d be blasted out of the cabin while leaving both his pinned legs behind. He struggled to push back in his seat and manually open the canopy. He unhitched his safety harness, and as the wingless fuselage spun upside down, Francis Gary Powers fell free.
As his chute opened, Powers was startled to see another chute opening in the distance. Whatever hit him had also hit a Soviet pilot as well. He landed hard in a farmer’s field. Several villagers came running to him. They weren’t unfriendly and had no idea he was an American because he was too stunned to even say a word while they conversed among themselves excitedly. They finally helped him to a truck and drove him off. He would later learn they were driving him to the local airport, assuming he was a Russian pilot and not knowing what else to do with him. At some point, though, the truck was stopped by the militia. The police grabbed Powers and took him away.