The Wizards of Langley

by Jeffrey T Richelson

  OVERFLIGHTS

  Seven years to the day after Harry Truman signed legislation establishing the CIA, Dr. James R. Killian Jr., president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received a letter from Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower. The president wrote that he understood Killian had been asked by the Office of Defense Mobilization “to direct a study of the country’s technological capabilities to meet some of its current problems”—a project that was most directly prompted by a meeting the committee had with Eisenhower in late March. He went on to express his hope that “you will find it possible to free yourself of your many other heavy responsibilities . . . long enough to undertake this important assignment.”49

  Two CIA historians would subsequently write that “when the Central Intelligence Agency came into existence in 1947, no one foresaw that, in less than a decade, it would undertake a major program of overhead reconnaissance, whose principal purpose would be to overfly the Soviet Union.”50 But the assignment Eisenhower asked Killian to undertake would lead to precisely that outcome.

  The panel was designated the Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP) and Killian would serve as its chairman. The TCP’s Project One focused on offensive capabilities, Project Two on the application of technology to defense, and Project Three on intelligence. The intelligence panel’s membership consisted of Edwin Land and Allan Latham Jr. of Polaroid; lens designer James G. Baker and physicist Edward Purcell, both of Harvard; Washington University chemist Joseph W. Kennedy, who had helped isolate plutonium; and John W. Tukey of Princeton and Bell Telephone. Land served as chairman.51

  The TCP presented its report to Eisenhower on February 14, 1955. “We must find ways,” it asserted, “to increase the number of hard facts upon which our intelligence estimates are based.” The panel recommended “a vigorous program for the extensive use, in many intelligence procedures, of the most advanced knowledge in science and technology.” One recommendation involving a specific application of technology had been conveyed to Dulles and Eisenhower several months earlier, and was omitted from the official TCP report due to its sensitivity.52

  The proposal the panel had made in late October and early November 1954 was that the CIA proceed with a project that had already come to its attention—a specially designed photographic reconnaissance aircraft intended to fly above Soviet radar, fighters, and surface-to-air missiles, a plane that would effectively be invisible and immune to hostile action. In the brief written material transmitted to Dulles, the intelligence panel noted that “for many years it has been clear that aerial photography of Russia would provide direct knowledge of her growth, of new centers of activity in obscure regions, and of military targets.”53

  The plane Land and his colleagues had in mind had been proposed to the Air Force by Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, head of the Lockheed “Skunk Works,” who had designed the P-38 fighter-bomber and F-104 Starfighter.54 But the Air Force was not interested in the specially powered glider, designated the CL-282, which would fly at 70,000 feet, at a speed of 500 knots, to a range of 3,000 nautical miles, with a pilot as the lone crew member. It would carry a special long focal-length camera to photograph objects as small as a man, and bring back images of roads, railroads, industrial plants, nuclear facilities, aircraft, and missile sites within a strip 200 miles wide by 2,500 miles long.55

  The panel was suggesting that the CIA combine the technological vision of Johnson with the strategic vision of Richard Leghorn, an MIT graduate who had commanded the Army Air Forces’ 67th Reconnaissance Group in Europe during World War II. After returning to civilian life, Leghorn began promoting the view, in a variety of venues, that the United States needed to develop a capability for peacetime reconnaissance, which would require high-altitude aircraft with high-resolution cameras.56

  In a letter to Dulles, Land spelled out a vision for the CIA that went beyond one reconnaissance plane:

  This seems to us the kind of action and technique that is right for the contemporary version of CIA; a modern and scientific way for an Agency that is always supposed to be looking, to do its looking. Quite strongly, we feel that you must always assert your first right to pioneer in scientific techniques for collecting intelligence. . . . This present opportunity for aerial photography seems to us a fine place to start.57 (Emphasis added.)

  The letter was an attempt to eliminate the reluctance Dulles had projected when the panel proposed the CL-282 to him in late October 1954. The DCI, faced with the strong advocacy of the project by Killian and other scientific advisers, as well as Eisenhower’s desire to go forward, could only accept the inevitable. On November 24, Eisenhower approved a program to build twenty of the spy aircraft for about $35 million and placed the CIA in charge. On December 9, 1954, the CIA and Lockheed signed a contract that allowed work to begin officially on the project, which the CIA code-named AQUATONE. The third key player in the program was the Air Force, which had been enlisted as a cosponsor; it would provide the pilots and train them after their military connection had been suitably obscured.58

  The CIA official assigned to run the program was Richard Bissell Jr., who had joined the agency that February as a special assistant for planning and coordination and had been briefed on the CL-282 proposal by Land in late August. A graduate of Groton and Yale, he had also studied at the London School of Economics and then taught economics at Yale and MIT. During World War II, he had managed U.S. shipping and then served as deputy director of the Marshall Plan from 1948 to 1951, when he became a staff member of the Ford Foundation. His first contact with the CIA came in late 1953, when he undertook a study of possible U.S. responses to another uprising in East Berlin.59

  Bissell came to the CIA with a reputation for brilliance. According to former student and Kennedy administration off icial William P. Bundy, Bissell was “the real mental center and engine room of the Marshall Plan.” In his appearances before congressional committees, he inspired sufficient confidence in the value of the revolutionary foreign-aid program for the committees to vote billions of dollars to implement it.60

  The impression he made on his colleagues in the intelligence world was no different. Robert Amory, whose tenure as DDI overlapped Bissell’s years in the agency, remembered him as a “human computer.” Arthur Lundahl, the CIA’s top photointerpreter for many years, concluded that Bissell “could outwit, outspeak, out-think most of the people around him that I was aware of.”61

  In order to preserve the secrecy that Eisenhower and Dulles insisted on, Bissell suggested locating the project in a “stand-alone” organization, rather than as part of an existing CIA directorate. The resulting Development Projects Staff was the only CIA component with its own communications office and operational cable traffic. Headquarters for the project were also moved to a suite of offices in the Matomic Building at 1717 H Street, in part because of the decrepit condition of the aging office building near E Street where the project began its life.62

  Bissell’s passion for secrecy also extended to his visits to Lockheed. Ben Rich, who succeeded Kelly Johnson as head of the Skunk Works, recalled that “every few weeks I would catch a glimpse of a tall, patrician gentleman dressed improbably in tennis shoes, freshly pressed gray trousers, and a garish big-checked sports jacket. . . . Many months went by before I heard someone refer to him as ‘Mr. B.’ No one besides Kelly knew his name. ‘Mr. B.’ was Richard Bissell.”63

  On July 25, 1955, less than eight months after Lockheed had been given official approval to begin the project, Kelly Johnson was ready to deliver the first AQUATONE aircraft to the secret Nevada test site that would subsequently become well-known as Area 51, the world’s most famous top-secret base. To hide the aircraft’s mission, the plane was put on the Air Force’s books as a Utility aircraft. With the U-1 and U-3 designations already taken, it became the U-2.64

  In the interim, the CIA had beaten back an Air Force attempt to take over the project that it had originally rejected. In March, Air Force chief of staff Nathan Twining proposed t
hat the Strategic Air Command (SAC), headed by Curtis LeMay, run the project once the planes and pilots were ready to fly, but Dulles opposed such an arrangement. The issue was finally resolved, after several months of discussion, by Eisenhower, who wrote that “I want this whole thing to be a civilian operation.” He was particularly concerned that “if uniformed personnel of the armed services of the United States fly over Russia, it is an act of war—legally—and I don’t want any part of it.”65

  Between April 10 and 14, 1956, U-2s made eight overflights of the United States to test assorted flight and camera systems. Accompanying the heavy camera, which was carried in the equipment (or Q-) bay behind the cockpit, was a mile of ultrathin film, weighing about 300 pounds. On June 20, a U-2 conducted the first operational mission, overflying East Germany and Poland. The plane was ostensibly for weather reconnaissance, belonging to the fictional “1st Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Provisional” at Wiesbaden, Federal Republic of Germany. The actual designation for the unit was Detachment A. An Air Force colonel served as the commanding officer, with a CIA representative serving as his executive officer.66

  The following day, Eisenhower granted approval to overfly the Soviet Union, although a number of factors, including the weather, delayed the first flight by almost two weeks. On July 2, two U-2s conducted overflights that covered seven East European nations. Then, late on the evening of July 3, Bissell went to AQUATONE headquarters, where he made the “go” decision.67

  As a result, on July 4, Hervey Stockman took off from Wiesbaden and guided his U-2 over Poznan, Poland, then headed for Belorussia where he turned north toward Leningrad, whose naval shipyards were home to part of the Soviet submarine construction program and were the mission’s main target. Also of interest were several major military airfields, coverage of which would permit the CIA to produce an inventory of new Bison heavy bombers. The final leg of the mission took the spy plane over the Soviet Baltic states on its way back to Germany.68

  The search for Bison bombers was one element of the next day’s overflight, which also covered Moscow. Although the city was almost completely blanketed by clouds, the U-2’s cameras, equipped with haze filters, produced some usable images of the Soviet capital. More important, the U-2, piloted by Carmen Vito, known as the “Lemon-Drop Kid” due to his habit of carrying a supply of hard lemon candies in his flight suit, brought back pictures of the Fili airframe plant where Bisons were being built, the bomber test facility at Ramenskoye airfield outside of Moscow, the Kaliningrad missile plant, and the Khimki rocket-engine plant.69

  Another three overflights would be conducted on July 9 and 10, covering much of Eastern Europe, the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Crimean Peninsula. It came as an unpleasant surprise to the CIA that the Soviets had managed to detect and track the initial intrusions, as illustrated by the attempt of Soviet MiGs to intercept Vito on July 5.70 On July 10, a Soviet protest note arrived specifying, for the first two missions, the route flown, the depth into Soviet territory the plane penetrated, and the time spent overflying Soviet air space. The note concluded that the “violation of the air frontiers of the Soviet Union by American aircraft cannot be interpreted as other than intentional and conducted for the purposes of reconnaissance.” Later that day, presidential aide Brig. Gen. Andrew Goodpaster instructed Bissell, on Eisenhower’s orders, to halt all overflights until further notice.71

  An apparent response to Eisenhower’s order was a July 17, 1956, CIA memo that noted “there can be no doubt of the value in terms of our national security of the photographic coverage obtained on 4 July 1956 of five of the seven highest priority targets specified by the USAF.” It also suggested that of even greater significance was that “for the first time we are really able to say that we have an understanding of much that was going on in the Soviet Union on 4 July 1956. . . . We now have a cross-section of a part of the entire Soviet way of life for that date.” The memo concluded with the observation that “to bar the United States from reaching this understanding through overflights of the critical regions of the Urals and eastward could well be tragic. Five operational missions have already proven that many of our guesses on important subjects can be seriously wrong.” To permit such wrong guesses to guide policy would endanger U.S. foreign relations to a much greater extent than carrying out the AQUATONE plan would, the memo asserted.72

  U-2 overflights of Soviet territory would continue, but sporadically due to Eisenhower’s concern about the possible Soviet reaction. The next overflight occurred in late November, and Eisenhower ordered that the plane “stay as close to the border as possible.” But by that time, the images from the initial flights had undergone lengthy analysis, and the results led the CIA to conclude that the Air Force claim that the Soviet arsenal contained almost 100 Bison heavy bombers was a significant overestimate.73

  The missions conducted during the second half of 1957, almost all by aircraft from Detachment B (which would absorb Detachment A in late 1957) at Incrilik Air Base near Adana, Turkey, or Detachment C at Atsugi, Japan, substantially added to the U.S. intelligence community’s knowledge of Soviet military forces and industrial capability. During a 23-day period in August, U-2s conducted Operation SOFT TOUCH—seven overflights of the Soviet Union and two of the People’s Republic of China.74

  Targets included the Soviet space launch facility that would become known as Tyuratam; the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing facility; a uranium processing installation at Berezovskiy; and Sary Shagan, where radars were tested against missiles fired from Kapustin Yar, which itself would be photographed in September. In December, Detachment C photographed the ICBM impact site at Klyuchi in the Soviet Far East. Essential to planning the missions targeted on nuclear facilities was the guidance of OSI’s Henry Lowenhaupt, who spent much of July 1957 preparing “target briefs, by order of priority, for all atomic targets in the enormous geographical area of central Asia and Siberia.”75

  After 1957, as Eisenhower grew increasingly concerned about the risks involved, overflights of Soviet territory dwindled dramatically—although flights over other areas of the world continued and flights along the Soviet border were authorized. A single overflight was conducted in 1958, and only two took place the following year.76

  By 1960, the most important national security issue facing the United States was the status of the Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) program. In Senate testimony in January 1960, Dulles painted a less alarmist picture of Soviet ICBM developments than did the Air Force—which resulted in sharp questioning from some legislators. He did not reveal that U-2 imagery had produced no evidence of deployment of the Soviet’s SS-6 ICBM outside of the Tyuratam test facility.77

  Analysts predicted that deployment areas would be located near railroad tracks, given the large size of the missile. A February 2 mission revealed no missile sites, but the Air Force continued to insist that the Soviets had deployed up to 100 missiles. More U-2 flights would be necessary to settle the issue.

  Within the CIA there was optimism that such flights, if they entered the Soviet Union in the vicinity of the Soviet-Afghanistan-Pakistan border, could complete their missions unscathed. A March 14 memo noted three penetrations from that area between July 1959 and the February flight that were “accomplished without, to our knowledge, detection by the Soviet Air Defense system.” As a result, it was tentatively concluded that “if penetration can be made without detection, there is an excellent chance that the entire mission can be completed without recognition by the air defense system.”78

  And the second U-2 mission of 1960, Operation SQUARE DEAL of April 9, which took off from Peshawar, Pakistan, successfully crisscrossed the railroad network at Sary Shagan. It also photographed Tyuratam, where a new launch area suggested that a new missile was about to appear.79

  Even before the April 9 mission, Eisenhower had authorized another overflight. On May 1, Francis Gary Powers, the most experienced U-2 pilot with twenty-seven completed missions, including overflights of the Soviet Union a
nd China, departed from Peshawar to carry out Operation GRAND SLAM—the twenty-fourth and most ambitious deep-penetration flight in the U-2 program—which was planned to fly across the Soviet Union from south to north. After overflying Tyuratam, Powers headed for Chelyabinsk, just south of Sverdlovsk. The primary target, Plesetsk, which communications intelligence suggested might be an operational ICBM facility, would come later.80

  But Powers never made it to Plesetsk. On the morning of May 1, Bob King, Bissell’s special assistant, was woken by a phone call from a distressed duty officer repeating the message “Bill Bailey didn’t come home.” Four and a half hours into the mission, while Powers was above Sverdlovsk, an SA-2 antiaircraft missile had detonated at 70,500 feet and just behind Powers’s aircraft, disabling it. During a 1962 debriefing, he recalled feeling a sensation and looking up to see an orange flash and the plane seeming to disintegrate in the air.81 He ejected, and the Soviet recovery of pilot and plane forced Eisenhower to terminate overflights of the USSR.

  In testimony shortly afterward, Dulles told a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U-2 program had established that the Soviet Union had developed a new medium-range bomber with supersonic capabilities, but “that only a greatly reduced long-range bomber production program is continuing in the Soviet Union.” The DCI also noted that the U-2 overflights had produced imagery of a number of long-range bomber airfields and confirmed the location of bases as well as the deployment of bombers. In addition, it provided photographs of the nuclear weapons storage facilities associated with the bombers.82

  Ground facilities associated with Soviet missile programs had also been a target of U-2 flights. The program also “provided us valuable insight into the problem of Soviet doctrine concerning ICBM deployment,” Dulles told his select audience. Aspects of the Soviet atomic energy program that were illuminated by U-2 photography included “the production of fissionable materials, weapons development and test activities,” as well as “the location, type, and size of many stockpile sites.” In addition, “the Soviet nuclear testing ground has been photographed with extremely interesting results more than once.”83