by Ben R Rich
It would later be determined that a Soviet missile battery had launched in shotgun fashion fourteen SA-2s at the approaching U-2—an indication that they were waiting for his arrival. One missile had knocked down a Russian fighter trying to intercept Powers, and the shock waves from the exploding missiles had knocked off the U-2’s tail.
Kelly received the call at home, well after midnight, and he grimly arrived at the Skunk Works that Monday morning and assembled a group of us. “We got nailed over Sverdlovsk by an SA-2. That’s that. We’re dead.”
It was the first time in history that a ground-to-air missile had shot down an airplane, and all of us assumed, knowing how fragile the U-2 was and at the height it was probably flying when it was hit, that the pilot had been killed. The CIA immediately had NASA launch a preplanned cover story that one of its weather research planes, flying out of Turkey, had strayed off course and was missing after the pilot indicated he was having oxygen problems. Cagey Khrushchev waited for Eisenhower to arrive in Paris for the summit before announcing that the Russians had shot down a U-2 spy plane. The administration called that a “fantastic allegation.” Eisenhower denied spy flights, and then on the eve of the summit Khrushchev announced that the pilot had been captured and confessed his spy mission. The pilot was named Francis Gary Powers.
Eisenhower was humiliated and forced to admit the U-2 spy operation, which he said was justified since Khrushchev had recently turned down his Open Skies proposal. To mollify the Russians and save the summit, Ike announced we would end the flights, which he had privately done anyway. But when Khrushchev demanded an apology, the summit collapsed and Eisenhower went back home.
Inside the Skunk Works we were no less stunned that Powers had survived than the CIA and the White House. The agency was livid at Powers for not dying in the hit or taking his own life, even though using the poison needle that had replaced the cyanide pill in a pilot’s kit was entirely optional. But some of the more macho patriots around the Skunk Works agreed with their opposite numbers thundering around at the CIA that Powers was a damned traitor for not self-destructing. And they meant it! Because he was chicken, the president endured a terrible international humiliation. Power’s survival also embarrassed Dulles and Bissell, who had assured the president, presumably in good faith, that not much would be left of a U-2 or a pilot if shot down by a missile. Powers was also faulted for not pulling a seventy-second delayed explosive charge before bailing out that would have destroyed the film and cameras and kept them out of the hands of the KGB.
There was little sympathy for Powers, who was kept incommunicado inside the notorious Lubianka prison for months before enduring a propaganda show trial that heaped embarrassment on the agency and the administration for more than three weeks. Powers was sentenced harshly to ten years at hard labor and served nearly two years before being exchanged in February 1962, for the captured Russian master spy Rudolph Abel, a decision that only enraged many at the CIA even more. “That’s like trading Mickey Mantle for a goddam bullpen catcher,” one of the agency guys exploded when hearing the news.
Had Powers killed himself or not survived the missile hit, he would have come home a hero in a flag-draped wooden box. But coming home haggard and alive, he was greeted like a traitor and was whisked off in great secrecy to a CIA safe house in Virginia to be grilled unmercifully for days about his experiences over and inside Russia. Kelly was summoned to the debriefing to hear the part about the shoot-down and was satisfied that Powers was telling the truth.
Kelly had long ago analyzed photographs of the U-2 wreckage released by the Russians and reported to Bissell his conviction that the airplane had been hit from the rear. “It looks like they knocked off his tail.” At the debriefing, Powers confirmed that fact. Kelly felt sorry for the guy and offered him a job as a U-2 flight test engineer at the Skunk Works. He gratefully accepted and worked for us for eight years, until the mid-1970s, when he went to work for a local TV station as a helicopter traffic reporter. He was killed in a helicopter crash on August 1, 1977. Ten years later the Air Force awarded the former captain a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross, a medal well earned if sadly late in arriving.
Kelly long suspected that the electronic counter-measure black box we installed on the tail section of Power’s U-2 may have acted in an opposite way from the one we intended. The box was code-named Granger, and we provided the frequencies used to jam and confuse the enemy missile. These were the same frequencies the Russians used on their defensive radar. But it was possible that the Russians had changed these frequencies by the time we incorporated them into our missile spoofer, so that the incoming missile’s seeker head was on the same frequency as the beams transmitted off our tail and acted as a homing device. A few years later a similar black box was installed in the tails of CIA U-2s piloted by Taiwanese flying highly dangerous missions over the Chinese mainland. One day three of four U-2s were shot down, and the sole survivor told CIA debriefers that he was amazed to be alive because he forgot to turn on his black box. To Kelly, that clinched the case. But we’ll never really know.
Other Voices
Richard Helms
(Director of the CIA from 1966 to 1973)
The U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union provided us with the greatest intelligence breakthrough of the twentieth century. For the first time, American policymakers had accurate, credible information on Soviet strategic assets. We could evaluate in real time the other side’s strengths and weaknesses, keep current on their state of preparedness, their research and development, their priorities in defense spending, the state of their infrastructure, and the disposition of their most important military units. It was as if the scales had been lifted from our eyes and we could now see with clarity exactly what it was we were up against. It really was as if we in the intelligence community had cataracts removed, because previous to those splendid U-2 missions our ability to pierce the Iron Curtain was uncertain and the results were often murky. We were forced to use defector information and other unreliable means to sift for clues about what the other side was up to. Given how little solid information actually filtered out to the West, we did a credible job, but the U-2’s cameras leapfrogged us into another dimension altogether. For example, those overflights eliminated almost entirely the ability of the Kremlin ever to launch a surprise preemptive strike against the West. There was no way they could secretly prepare for war without our cameras revealing the size and scope of those activities.
Building the U-2 was absolutely the smartest decision ever made by the CIA. It was the greatest bargain and the greatest triumph of the cold war. And that airplane is still flying and is still tremendously effective. In my opinion, the national security demands that we keep supplying new generations of surveillance aircraft to our policymakers. There is no way to replace the vital data provided by piloted airplanes. Satellites lack the flexibility and the immediacy that only a spy plane like the U-2 can provide. No president or intelligence agency should have to operate with only one eye in such an uncertain and dangerous world.
Richard Bissell
I have no doubt that the U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union made up the most important intelligence-gathering operation ever launched by the West. Until those flights, our side had to be content with some ingenious analysis on our part about their nuclear program, for instance, that later U-2 overflights would confirm as being remarkably correct. We were much less correct about their missile development because we had assumed—quite incorrectly—that they would continue to develop liquid-fuel missiles, while very secretly they dropped that concept and embarked on more sophisticated, solid-state missiles. That caught us by surprise and generated the so-called missile gap.
There was also a profound worry about the size of their long-range bomber fleet. President Eisenhower told Allen Dulles that obtaining a hard count of their bombers was the urgent priority of the intelligence community. And by the time Allen chose me to head the U-2 project, the president told me that he regarded
hard intelligence on Russian bombers as the number one item on his national security agenda. He told me that the minute I flashed the signal to him that Kelly Johnson was ready to deliver that airplane, he was ready to give me permission to start those flights.
I told the president that we would probably have two years before the Russians would find a way to bring us down. As it turned out, we had a fruitful four years.
The first flights I decided to bunch. My reasoning was that the first would be the safest, catching them by surprise, so we’d overfly all the highest-priority targets. The first flight was to be over Leningrad, picking up important missile test sites and air bases along the route, then fly the length of the Baltic coast. I stopped by Allen Dulles’s office and told him, “Well, we have an Oval Office green light and we’re off and running.” When I told him the flight plan, he turned deathly pale. A few hours later I was able to inform him that all went well. The next day we scheduled two separate flights, one into the Ukraine and the other well north of that. We were looking for military airfields—our primary target. Only in later months did the location of hardened missile silos take precedence.
It took us four days to get our hands on the photographs from that first mission. I remember vividly standing around a long table with Dulles next to me, both of us chuckling with amazement at the clarity of those incredible black-and-white photos. From seventy thousand feet you could not only count the airplanes lined up at ramps, but tell what they were without a magnifying glass. We were astounded. We had finally pried open the oyster shell of Russian secrecy and discovered a giant pearl. Allen rushed with the first samples over to the Oval Office. He told me that Eisenhower was so excited he spread out the entire batch on the floor and he and Allen viewed the photos like two kids running a model train.
We never knew what we’d find from one mission to the next. Every airfield discovered increased our knowledge dramatically. On one flight a pilot saw a railroad track in the middle of nowhere and followed it and brought back stunning pictures of a Soviet missile launcher at a site we never knew existed. Many other photos were confirmations of locations of important military bases that we had received from our spy network on the inside. We would get a tip about a new plant somewhere, but the informant was uncertain about whether they were manufacturing tanks or missiles, so we would schedule a look. Our first missions out of Pakistan were staged so that we could overfly central Siberia and observe the Trans-Siberian railroad, mainly because we had very sketchy inferential information that atomic facilities were being built there. We brought back very revealing photos indicating that a nuclear test facility was nearly completed on the site.
After only four or five flights our analysts were able to make much firmer estimates of the Soviet bomber strength by types. We had a count on how many planes of each type were photographed sitting out on their ramps. Of course, it was not watertight because airplanes seldom stayed put at one base or another, and it was hard to tell if we were counting the same airplanes seen at base A that now appeared at base B, or if these were additional ones. But the accumulated weight of evidence from these flights caused the president of the United States to draw in a deep breath, smile, and relax a bit. I was able to assure him that the so-called bomber gap seemed to be nonexistent.
By six months into the overflights we turned our attention to their missile development. We found big research and development bases at the head of the Caspian Sea and just east of the Volga, and saw hard evidence of a number of experimental launches that had taken place there. We found a big radar installation at Sari Sagan, between Turkistan and Siberia, and also a down-range site under construction near there, so we began to monitor this particular section very closely.
Our estimates of their SAM missiles was that they could reach the altitude of the U-2 but that their surface controls were effective only up to fifty-five thousand feet and any higher than that they couldn’t control a missile and bring it home for a kill against our spy plane.
But the very unpleasant surprise was the ease with which they tracked every single one of our flights—almost from takeoff. Yet, until the Powers flight, they had never come close to hitting us. On one night flight out of Turkey they had actually scrambled fifty-seven fighters against one U-2. And on many occasions they were flying squadrons fifteen thousand feet underneath the U-2, trying to block the view. Kelly Johnson called that “aluminum clouds.”
After the first few flights they tracked, they could infer the U-2’s range, speed, altitude, and radar cross section, so they knew all the important essentials about the airplane which we cloaked under the deepest secrecy.
Ironically, the two governments, in their abiding hostility, were collaborating to keep these flights secret from the public. Because if they were ever revealed, the Russians would have to present us with an ultimatum and admit that they were impotent in stopping these flights over their territory. It must have been terribly upsetting inside the Kremlin knowing that the enemy could overfly with impunity. So I was constantly pressing Eisenhower for more flights and he was constantly resisting me. I had to go to the mat on nearly every authorization because he was following the advice of the other Dulles brother, John Foster, our secretary of state, who was wringing his hands over the spy flights right from the beginning.
We flew fewer than thirty missions over those four years, but each of them was a remarkable success. We accumulated about one million two hundred thousand feet of film—a strip almost two hundred and fifty miles long, that covered more than a million square miles of the Soviet Union. The flights provided vital data on the Soviet atomic energy program, their development of fissionable materials, their weapons development and testing, and the location and size of their nuclear stockpile. It also gave us precise information on the location of their air defense systems, air bases, and missile sites; submarine pens and naval installations; their order of battle, operational techniques, and transportation and communications networks. By the Pentagon’s own estimate, 90 percent of all hard data on Soviet military development came directly from the cameras on board the U-2.
As early as three years before Powers was shot down, I flew out to Burbank with my deputy, Colonel Jack Gibbs, to meet with Kelly about the future. We estimated that the U-2 was operating on borrowed time after the two-year mark. I said to Kelly, “We’ve got to begin now to design a successor.” He told me he had already begun thinking about a liquid hydrogen-powered airplane and was looking at ways to make his own liquid hydrogen fuel and build his own tank farm. A hydrogen-powered airplane was certainly ambitious, and in those days Kelly seemed entirely capable of moving the world.
8
BLOWING UP BURBANK
IN THE EARLY WINTER of 1956, Kelly sent for me, and I walked down the hall to his office with my heart in my throat. I feared he was sending me back to the main plant with a handshake and goodbye. “Close the door,” he said.
I sat down opposite his desk like a condemned man sensing the verdict.
“Rich,” he asked, “what do you know about cryogenics?”
I shrugged. “Not much since college chemistry days.”
“I want you to read up thoroughly on all those exotic fuels, especially on liquid hydrogen, and then get back to me and we’ll talk some more. Keep your damn mouth shut about this. Tell no one.”
When Kelly had tapped me for this assignment, the first thing I had done was to check the reference to liquid hydrogen in my copy of Mark’s Mechanical Engineering Handbook, the engineer’s bible, which told me what I already thought I knew—liquid hydrogen had no real practical application because it was so dangerous to store and handle. It was a mere laboratory curiosity. I read that definition to Kelly Johnson and told him that I happened to agree. Kelly’s face reddened—a storm was rising. “Goddam it, Rich, I don’t care what in hell that book says or what you happen to think. Liquid hydrogen is the same as steam. What is steam? Condensed water. Hydrogen plus oxygen produces water. That’s all that liquid hydro
gen really is. Now, get out there and do the job for me.”
Over the next few weeks I was living a boyhood fantasy and traveling around the country pretending to be a secret agent, using my Skunk Works alias of “Ben Dover,” in the best traditions of trench-coated operatives. Kelly had warned me not to reveal that I worked at the Skunk Works to anyone I visited. I pretended to be a self-employed thermodynamicist trying to learn as much as I could about liquid hydrogen for an investment group studying the possibilities of a hydrogen airplane engine. I was consulting with hydrogen experts around the country to find out how we could make our own liquid hydrogen safely and cheaply in large batches to fuel Kelly’s latest dream. He was thinking about building a liquid hydrogen-powered spy plane as the successor to the U-2, giving us twenty times the thrust and power of a conventionally powered airplane. We’d be practically a space vehicle, whisking above 100,000 feet across the sky at more than twice the speed of sound. The entire Russian defense system would fall into a state of catatonic disbelief, mistaking us for a streaking comet. “I want answers, not excuses about why we can’t do this,” Kelly told me and shoved me out the door.
Which is why I showed up as Mr. Ben Dover at Boulder, Colorado, where the U.S. Bureau of Standards maintained a cryogenic laboratory under the direction of Dr. Russell Scott, recognized as the world’s expert on handling and storing liquid hydrogen. When I told him I wanted to learn how to handle liquid hydrogen in large amounts—like maybe running my own tank farm—the blood drained from Scott’s face. “Mr. Dover,” he said, “this stuff is volatile. One tank car could blow up an entire shopping mall. Do you have any notion of the risks?”