Secretary Dulles responded, disingenuously, that no U.S. “military” plane had violated Soviet airspace on July 4. Technically this was true, since the U-2 was a CIA operation. But it was also true that American military aircraft had been probing Soviet air defenses ever since the end of the Second World War. The forays, or “ferret” missions as they were known, used a series of converted bombers—initially propeller-driven RB-29s, then the bigger jet-powered RB-47s—to search for gaps in Russia’s radar coverage and to determine how quickly the Soviets could scramble interceptors in response. Invariably, American planes would only brush up against Soviet airspace, making quick dashes across the frontier. Usually “ferret” pilots skirted the twelve-mile offshore territorial limit claimed by Moscow. Very occasionally, as in the case of LeMay’s Operation Home Run, they penetrated the deeper three-mile limit set by international law. And always they fled at the first sign of an answering plane. It was a cat-and-mouse game that could at times turn deadly. (The fate of 138 U.S. airmen shot down during the border overflights remains unknown to this day because Washington never inquired as to their whereabouts, and their families would not be told for forty years. “Representations and recommendations have been made to me by intelligence authorities,” wrote one State Department official after a C-118 with nine crew members aboard was shot down over the Baltic on June 18, 1957, “that no legal action be pursued.”)
The sheer volume of ferret missions, several thousand a year in the mid-1950s, annoyed the Kremlin. But as long as the American planes stayed close to the borders, and the White House stayed silent if any of its planes were hit, the game was played within the acceptable limits of superpower rivalry. Of course, Washington might have had a different view of permissible cold-war norms if the situation had been reversed, and Soviet planes patrolled the American coastline, buzzing over New York or Los Angeles. “It would have meant war,” Khrushchev told his son.
The U-2, however, raised the intrusions to a different order of magnitude. With the maiden Independence Day flight, the United States had abandoned any pretense of respecting the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union. U-2s didn’t take tentative steps along frontiers. They flew border to border in brazen 4,000-mile north-south sweeps. Khrushchev, naturally, was livid at the sudden change of rules. To add insult to injury, the CIA repeated the July 4 overflight the very next day and followed up with four more flights over the next six days. To the Soviets, the seemingly ceaseless parade of American planes over their two largest cities was a humiliating signal that the hard-line hawks in Eisenhower’s administration now intended to harass the USSR on a weekly basis.
“The notion that we could overfly them at will must have been deeply unsettling,” Bissell acknowledged. But the information the U-2s were bringing back was worth the risk, as a jubilant July 17 CIA memo indicated. “For the first time we are really able to say that we have an understanding of what was going on in the Soviet Union on July 4, 1956,” wrote the analyst Herbert I. Miller.
Broad coverage of the order of 400,000 square miles was obtained. Many new discoveries have come to light. Airfields previously unknown, army training bases previously unknown, industrial complexes of a size heretofore unsuspected were revealed. We know that even though innumerable radar signals were detected and recorded by the electronic system carried on the mission, fighter aircraft at the five most important bases covered were drawn up in orderly rows as if for formal inspection on parade. The medium jet bombers were also neatly aligned and not even dispersed to on-field dispersal areas. We know that the guns in the anti-aircraft batteries sighted were in a horizontal position rather than pointed upwards and “on the ready.” We know that some harvests were being brought in, and that small truck gardens were being worked. These are but a few of the examples of the many things which tend to spell out the real intentions, objectives and qualities of the Soviet Union.
The “bomber gap,” the reconnaissance flights soon showed, was bogus. There were no new armadas of Bears and Bisons lining Russian runway, just row after row of smaller shorter-range Tupolevs that could never reach American soil. But Ike couldn’t confront Senator Symington with this information; it would mean blowing the U-2’s cover.
Aside from the treasure trove of data it produced, the beauty of the U-2 lay in its deniability. As long as the Russians couldn’t produce hard physical evidence of the incursions, or were too ashamed to make a public fuss, the planes could operate with impunity. As a result, as Miller’s memo underscored, the CIA for the first time could eliminate much of the guesswork about Soviet weapons development programs and arms buildups. Craters at nuclear test sites could be photographed and measured to determine the size of the blasts. Missile launch sites could be examined for clues as to the capabilities of Russian rockets. Submarine pens could reveal the secrets of the Soviet underwater flotilla. Air base photographs could give an accurate picture of the number, strength, and battle readiness of bomber fleets. In a society so closed that it took six weeks for the CIA to get wind of Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech (despite the mass protests that it set off in Tbilisi), the best way to peer past the Iron Curtain was from above. A lone U-2 could produce infinitely more useful data than all the previous reconnaissance missions combined. What’s more, the information could be targeted, aimed at a particular site the CIA wanted to know about. And on August 28, 1957, the highest-value target in the Soviet Union was Tyura-Tam.
• • •
If the R-7 was no longer a secret, it was partly Nikita Khrushchev’s fault. He had been unable to resist trumpeting the achievement, thumbing his own nose at the Americans a little, and had ordered TASS, the official Soviet news agency, to issue a vague but suitably ominous announcement on August 26 heralding the triumphant test flight.
A few days ago a super-long-range, intercontinental multistage ballistic missile was launched. The tests of the missile were successful; they fully confirmed the correctness of the calculations and the selected design. The flight of the missile took place at a very great, hereto unattained, altitude. Covering an enormous distance in a short time, the missile hit the assigned region. The results obtained show that there is a possibility of launching missiles into any region of the terrestrial globe. The solution of the problem of creating intercontinental ballistic missiles will make it possible to reach remote regions without resorting to strategic aviation, which at the present time is vulnerable to modern means of anti-aircraft defense.
After the humiliations of the U-2, Khrushchev had been only too happy to rattle his own saber for a change. But even if he had not wanted the Americans and the British to tremble at news of his new superweapon, the United States would have known about it anyway. The new National Security Agency, the sister organization to the CIA for signals intelligence gathering, had encircled the Soviet Union with an electronic moat. Huge dish and phased-array radar networks in Norway, Britain, Greenland, Germany, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Japan, and Alaska intercepted Soviet communications and tracked weapons tests. An American installation in northern Iran, Tacksman 1, had been monitoring the R-7 trials from the beginning and had been able to triangulate the general vicinity of the launchpad at Tyura-Tam.
From its dish network atop a 6,800-foot peak in Iran’s Mashad mountains, the NSA had been able to follow the initial failures at Tyura-Tam on its radar screens, but the success of Korolev’s fourth attempt had caused serious consternation in military circles. The R-7’s maiden flight had coincided, almost to the day, with the fourth consecutive launch failure of the U.S. Air Force’s intermediate-range Thor missile. The American equivalent of the R-7, the three-engine Atlas ICBM, was still a year away from a full flight test. To date, the Atlas had flown only under partial power, with only two of its three engines firing. That left Wernher von Braun’s modified Redstone, a research rocket known as the Jupiter C (though it had nothing to do with the endangered Jupiter IRBM program), as the closest operational American response to the Soviets’ ICBM breakthrough. But the Jupiter
C, which had covered a 1,200-mile trajectory several weeks earlier during an August 8, 1957, trial, was not a missile, and hence it was not bound by the 200-mile limit imposed on the army by Charlie Wilson. Medaris had simply chosen its now ill-fated name before Wilson’s “roles and missions” edict, as a way to gain access to overcrowded launch sites, which gave preference to military missiles over research projects, by making the test rocket sound as if it were part of the Jupiter program. In reality, it was solely a test vehicle with no deadly payload, designed to determine whether the new heat-resistant nose cone materials could withstand the pressures of high-speed atmospheric reentry.
Like the Soviets, American rocket scientists were grappling with the problem of warheads being incinerated on reentry, but, unlike Korolev, they had decided to test their thermal nose cone shield before perfecting the missiles that would carry the warhead. The Pentagon did not know that Korolev had put the cart before the horse, and that the Chief Designer did not yet have a working nose cone. The American military planners knew only that the Soviet Union claimed to have an operational ICBM, while the United States was still struggling to get a working IRBM.
This alarming imbalance was why Jones was flying over the Kazakh desert in search of Tyura-Tam. He was following the thin outlines of rail spurs, since the CIA believed that the Soviets could move their big missiles only on trains. And he was using old World War II German maps to guide him, since much of the Soviet landmass beyond the Urals was a mystery to American cartographers. His was only the fourteenth U-2 overflight into the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had twice ordered the flights stopped: first after the Kremlin had filed its initial diplomatic protest, and then again after the sixth mission in November 1956, when the pilot Francis Gary Powers had experienced electrical problems over the Caucasus with MiGs hot on his tail. The scare had sobered some U-2 enthusiasts in Washington, who feared an international incident. Despite the wealth of intelligence gleaned from the U-2s, the superpower tensions they provoked frightened Eisenhower. Put simply, they were driving Khrushchev insane with anger. “Stop sending intruders into our air space,” the Soviet leader had railed at a stunned delegation of visiting U.S. Air Force generals in the summer of 1956. “We will shoot down uninvited guests…. They are flying coffins.”
“At that moment,” recalled a Soviet participant, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Orlov, “Khrushchev noticed that a U.S. military attaché was pouring the contents of his glass under a bush. Turning to U.S. Ambassador Charles Bohlen, the Soviet leader said, ‘Here I am speaking about peace and friendship, but what does your attaché do?’ The attaché was then pressured into demonstratively drinking an enormous penalty toast, after which he quickly departed.”
Juvenile drinking antics aside, Khrushchev had been dead serious about shooting down American intruders and closing the technology gap that allowed the U-2 to range over Soviet soil with such arrogance. “Father thirsted for revenge,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. Immediately, he had ordered that development of the SU-9 supersonic high-altitude fighter jet be fast-tracked, and Soviet rocket scientists were given top priority to push ahead with the new SA-2 surface-to-air missile, which would raise the strike ceiling from 50,000 feet to 82,000 feet.
The CIA knew that it was only a matter of time before the American height advantage was lost. But after Moscow’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising, the Dulles brothers pushed Eisenhower to resume the suspended flights. They felt guilty about not having come to Hungary’s aid and wanted, perhaps, to lash out at Khrushchev—the “Butcher of Budapest,” as Vice President Nixon had taken to calling him. On the secretary of state’s advice Nixon had been dispatched to the teeming refugee camps in Austria, where over one hundred thousand Hungarians wallowed in resentment. “They blamed us for first encouraging them to revolt, and then sitting back while the Soviets cut them down,” the vice president reported on his return. That had settled it. If the flights irked the Butcher, so much the better.
• • •
The grainy black-and-white photographs of Tyura-Tam taken by E. K. Jones on August 28 were flown to Washington the following day. There, in another nondescript office that Bissell had rented—this one above a Ford repair shop at Fifth and K streets—a team of optical experts with large magnifying glasses pored over the 12,000 feet of negatives. The Tyura-Tam shots showed a deep triangular fire pit that looked like a large terraced rock quarry. This excavation absorbed some of the R-7’s considerable exhaust blast at liftoff, and its sheer magnitude had given the CIA analysts pause. Perched over the pit was the near football-field-sized launch table with its towering Tulip jaws. Once again, the proportions appeared staggering compared to American launch stands of the period. From the Tulip, a gigantic berm with wide-gauge rail tracks ran toward an imposing assembly building about a mile away. The CIA could have drawn only one conclusion from the images: the R-7 was a monster.
Once more, the U-2 had proved its worth. Only this time it had also proved Stuart Symington right. Having exposed the “bomber gap,” the Missouri senator had turned his attentions (and his presidential ambitions) increasingly toward rocketry. In early 1957 he had begun advocating increases in missile outlays, warning about Soviet advances. “I don’t ‘believe’ that the Soviets are ahead,” he said in a February appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I state that they are ahead of us.”
Nonsense, scoffed his fellow panelist Donald Quarles, puffing up his small frame in a swell of indignation to challenge the tall and imposing senator. The United States “is probably well ahead of Russia in the guided missile race,” he countered, with equal confidence.
The argument had spilled over onto the pages of national newspapers, where Symington accused the Eisenhower administration of misleading the American people. Threatening that Congress would launch a “searching inquiry,” he asserted that the air force’s missile budget needed to be doubled to keep pace with Russia. “Every day we don’t reverse our policy is a bad day for the Free World,” he thundered. By late summer, when Charlie Wilson announced his $200 million missile cuts, Symington had emerged as the administration’s leading critic on matters of national security, the Democratic Party’s preeminent cold warrior. Eisenhower, he groused, was engaging in “unilateral disarmament,” endangering the nation with his obsession for balanced budgets. The Soviets were going to overtake America, he warned, and then all those new highways Ike was pouring billions into would serve only as evacuation routes.
Unbeknownst to Symington, he had a covert ally in Richard Bissell, who understood that it was only a matter of time before the U-2’s luck ran out. The intelligence data it produced were invaluable, but the political costs were simply too high. Sooner or later a less risky means of collecting intelligence would need to be found. And Bissell already knew what that was.
The same 1954 Land report that had urged the creation of the U-2 had also made a recommendation for the development of another type of high-altitude reconnaissance craft, a satellite. The idea, at the time, had been met with skepticism by the National Security Council, owing to its technological complexity, though it was hardly revolutionary.
The notion of using the cosmos as a surveillance platform had long stirred the imagination of rocket scientists and spies on both sides of the cold war divide. As early as 1946, a West Coast military think tank, the RAND Corporation, had envisioned successors of von Braun’s V-2 rockets one day carrying cameras beyond the stratosphere. Von Braun himself had made a similar pitch to the army brass in 1954. “Gone was the folksy fellow with rolled-up sleeves and Disneyesque props,” wrote the historian William Burrows of the meeting. “He was replaced by a grim-faced individual with a dark suit who puffed on cigarettes from behind a desk. This von Braun explained that a satellite in polar orbit would pass over every place on Earth every twenty-four hours, a perfect route for robotic espionage. He noted that maps of Eurasia were five hundred yards off, and added that the error could be reduced to twenty-five yards. The implication was wasted on no o
ne in the room: taking photographs of Earth from space not only would create an intelligence bonanza but would vastly improve targeting accuracy.”
Neither von Braun’s pitch nor Land’s recommendation to the NSC had received much traction in 1954 because American rockets were still too small and underpowered to contemplate sending up heavy spy satellites. By 1957, however, missile development had progressed sufficiently that the notion no longer seemed far-fetched. Though Bissell was working on a successor to the U-2—a new plane made entirely of titanium that could fly at 80,000 feet at a speed of 2,600 miles per hour, nearly five times faster than the U-2—he was also thinking that satellites might offer a simpler long-term solution. The SR-71 Blackbird supersonic spy jet that he was developing with Kelly Johnson might prolong America’s ability to sneak into Soviet airspace, but its invulnerability would also be only temporary. Eventually the Soviets would find a way of bringing it down, too. A satellite, on the other hand, could not be shot down.
Bissell had a problem, though. The CIA was not in charge of the satellite mission; the air force was—but the project was languishing on the shelf. Bissell was alarmed that it was not even at the blueprint stage. Worse, it apparently had received such a low security classification that articles were appearing on it in the aviation press—a death knell to any covert program. Compared to the secrecy that surrounded the U-2, it seemed to Bissell as if the air force was advertising its lack of interest in spy satellites, and in the process blowing the cover of what could potentially prove to be the intelligence community’s premier surveillance tool.
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