The Cold War (26 page)

Unbelievably, miraculously, until the missile hit Powers's U-2, not a single plane that penetrated Soviet airspace was brought down. But spy missions that were technically not overflights were not always so fortunate. All through the Cold War, aircraft of the Peacetime Airborne Reconnaissance Program (PARPRO) flew along the dangerous margins of the Soviet and Chinese empires, taking photographs of air and naval bases, as well as other military installations and radar and communications equipment. From the beginning, those so-called ferrets took losses. Sometimes, in the predictably foul weather, they would stray too close to the Soviet coast—or MiGs brought them down beyond the forty-mile limit that the Soviets had established. Hall estimates here that between 1946 and 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, some 170 aircrewmen died or disappeared into Soviet prisons, where they were interrogated and then apparently executed. As he makes clear, their missions should not be confused with actual overflights, which in every case had to receive presidential authorization. Unlike the ferrets, there was nothing routine about overflights.

It is not surprising that the Soviets had ferrets of their own, including the giant four-engine Tu-95 turboprop, nicknamed “the Bear,” which had a range of four thousand miles and could stay aloft for twenty-four hours. Bears regularly flew along both coasts, though they were careful
to stay beyond a fifty-mile limit. American jets took to escorting them, and aircrewmen would jovially wave to one another. No Soviet spy plane was ever shot down, as well they might have been if they had ventured too close to the continental U.S. As far as is known, the Soviets never attempted overflights, and perhaps with good reason. President Eisenhower once said that nothing would cause him to “request authority to declare war” sooner “than violation of our air space by Soviet aircraft.”

Until Powers's ill-fated mission, all the overflights may have gotten through, but it was a tale of increasingly close calls. Firefights actually took place. This is another case in which Soviets traded shots in anger with American and British pilots. (One overflight veteran kept a chunk of fuselage holed by a cannon shell and had it framed: It now hangs in his California home like a piece of nonobjective art.) After Hall's article appeared, a former RAF pilot, Squadron Leader John Crampton, fleshed out in a letter the account of his hair-raising experience flying over Kiev in the spring of 1954:

Crampton got away—somehow—and as he escaped across the Ukraine, he was able to photograph many of his remaining targets. The U-2, which could reach an altitude of seventy thousand feet, was harder to bring down, and it would take the Russians almost four years to do so. The plane would get the credit for revealing many of the military secrets of the Soviet Union. The earlier overflights were totally forgotten—on purpose. But their accomplishments had been considerable. They allowed the West, in the words of the eminent Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis, “to shift reconnaissance out of the realm of espionage altogether.”
What they learned about Soviet offensive and defensive capabilities would have a profound effect on the conduct of the Cold War.

R. CARGILL HALLis chief historian (emeritus) of the National Reconnaissance Office in Washington, D.C.

D
URING THE FIRST HALF
of the 1950s, before the introduction of the U-2, the United States and its allies sent military aircraft on secret reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union. They flew over Siberia and behind the Ural Mountains; photographed cities such as Stalingrad, Murmansk, and Vladivostok; and on occasion were engaged by Soviet interceptors. Not a single plane was lost. These were never rogue operations. Between 1951 and 1956, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and Prime Minister Churchill periodically and on a case-by-case basis authorized these military overflights of the U.S.S.R. and other “denied territory.” The risks were great, but so were the intelligence payoffs.

Even today many of the men who took part in the missions (and who were sworn to secrecy) are reluctant to talk about them. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, fragmentary accounts have appeared. Too frequently, however, they have turned on misperceptions and questionable interpretations. Armed with a few interviews and still fewer archival records from the Cold War, authors have provided Oliver Stone–like conspiracies. Some have alleged that the missions were the sole responsibility of the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, General Curtis LeMay—who, they charge, sought through overflights to blackmail the Soviet Union or provoke it into starting World War III. To quote one account, he “had apparently begun raising the ante with the Soviet Union on his own, covertly and extralegally.”

Other writers have confused presidentially authorized overflight missions with a related aerial reconnaissance effort that operated near Soviet territory but without overflight authorization. The latter missions, which began before 1950 and continued throughout the Cold War, were known as the Peacetime Airborne Reconnaissance Program, or PARPRO. By combining the two different
activities, Richard Rhodes could claim in
Dark Sun,
his history of the making of the hydrogen bomb, that “the Soviet Union shot down at least twenty planes during overflights with the loss of an estimated one to two hundred U.S. airmen.”

A few words of definition are necessary here. In using the term “overflight,” I mean a flight by a government aircraft that, expressly on the direction of the head of state, traverses the territory of another state in peacetime without that other state's permission. PARPRO aircraft did not possess overflight authorization, although a few of them did stray into Soviet territory or over the Soviet Union's territorial waters; some were shot down. Even today almost all of the pertinent records about overflights remain unexhumed, but those already found, as well as the recollections of surviving participants, do provide a broad outline of this most clandestine Cold War enterprise. The true story, so far as it can now be determined, is more dramatic and its dimensions larger than anything recently alleged. The only conspiracy that exists is the conspiracy of silence.

The Cold War began in 1946–47 with the unraveling of the World War II alliance against the Axis powers. Anxious to preserve the independence of Western Europe in the face of a perceived military threat, Western leaders sought to determine the size, composition, and disposition of Soviet forces arrayed behind the Iron Curtain. Late in 1946, Army Air Forces aircraft began flights along the borders of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. These PARPRO missions collected electronic and photographic intelligence, but their intelligence coverage was limited to peripheral regions. Before long, commanders of the new United States Air Force (USAF), formed by the National Security Act of 1947, sought permission to conduct direct overflights of Soviet territory, especially those regions in Siberia closest to Alaska.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), however, after consulting with the director of Central Intelligence and the secretaries of defense and state, consistently denied these requests. Indeed, in 1948, after the Soviet foreign ministry vigorously protested the intrusion of American “bombers” over Soviet territorial waters, the Department of State restricted PARPRO missions approaching Soviet borders to standoff distances of no closer than forty miles. Overflights remained out of the question. In receipt of one request for such a mission from Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, in October 1950, the
USAF director of intelligence, Major General Charles P. Cabell, replied that he would have to recommend against it. But, Cabell added, “[I am] looking forward to a day when it becomes either more essential or less objectionable.”

That day, in fact, was close at hand. International tensions had increased significantly in late 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear device and Communist forces swept to victory in China. But perhaps the greatest shock for Western leaders occurred in June 1950, when North Korea launched a surprise attack on South Korea. In November 1950, a few weeks after Cabell wrote to SAC headquarters, Chinese military forces joined the Korean War. The sequence and pace of these events caused American political and military leaders to believe that their Soviet counterparts might launch an attack against Western Europe, possibly along with a surprise aerial attack on the United States.

With United Nations forces in North Korea in full retreat, President Truman issued a proclamation of national emergency on December 16, 1950, and called numerous National Guard units to active duty. A short time later, in an unannounced decision made after a review conducted by the JCS, the president approved selected overflights of the Soviet Union to determine the status of its air forces in those regions of Siberia closest to this country, as well as in the maritime provinces closest to Korea.

The Soviet region of greatest military concern was the Chukotskiy Peninsula, directly across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Russian Tu-4 bombers, essentially carbon copies of the B-29, equipped with nuclear weapons and massed on airfields on the peninsula, could make devastating one-way flights to attack American cities. In December 1950, Truman authorized two deeppenetration overflights of this region; to accomplish them, the JCS and USAF headquarters selected for modification the fourth B-47B off the Boeing assembly line. This newest of SAC bombers, an air-refuelable swept-wing aircraft powered by six jet turbine engines, would be equipped with special compasses, autopilot equipment, a high-latitude directional gyro system for flight in the Arctic, and a special pod for installation in the bomb bay that contained a number of cameras. The B-47B “Stratojet,” which carried a crew of three (pilot, copilot, and bombardier-navigator), could reach a full speed of 448 knots (516 mph) and a ceiling of about 41,000 feet.

The command pilot that SAC selected for this mission was Colonel Richard C. Neeley, a B-47 test pilot. Late in July 1951, Neeley and his crew flew the aircraft to Eielson AFB near Fairbanks, Alaska. On August 15, while awaiting
clear weather in Siberia and authorization to proceed, Neeley was awakened from a nap in the barracks by a telephone call: His aircraft was burning on the ramp. He stepped outside to see a pillar of smoke and flame in the direction of the runway. Boeing technical representatives had been practicing a singlepoint fueling of the tanks over the bomb bay when a float valve stuck. Fuel rushed through an overflow vent onto a wing and swirled down onto a power cart below; an electric spark ignited the spill. While the wreckage still smoldered, orders to conduct the overflight mission arrived. Neeley notified SAC headquarters of the disaster; forty years later, he still remembered the four-word return telex message: fix responsibility and court-martial! (Since a mechanical malfunction was involved, there was no court-martial.) It was a year before a U.S. aircrew would make an attempt to overfly the eastern U.S.S.R.

Meanwhile, Truman had initiated talks with British Labour prime minister Clement R. Atlee and his foreign minister, Ernest Bevin. Concerned that the United States might use atomic weapons in the Korean conflict, Atlee had visited Truman in Washington at the end of 1950. At that time or shortly thereafter, the two leaders had apparently agreed on a joint aerial reconnaissance program to overfly the European U.S.S.R.; it is not clear whether Truman made concessions on the use of atomic weapons, but it seems likely. Whether Atlee actually intended to approve any overflights is not known; in any event, he would not be around to make the decision. In October 1951 the British reelected as prime minister their wartime leader, the Conservative Winston Churchill.

In the spring of 1951, the RAF formed a secret “Special Duty Flight” of three aircrews to fly North American Aviation RB-45C reconnaissance aircraft. Led by RAF squadron leader John Crampton and his navigator, Flight Lieutenant Rex Sanders, the British airmen flew from England to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana to begin formal flying training in the RB-45C, under the presumed disguise of British-American air refueling trials. Late in the fall of 1951, the RAF aircrews returned with four American aircraft (one acting as a spare) to Sculthorpe Royal Air Force Base in Norfolk, where a detachment of SAC RB-45Cs was already stationed. Lieutenant Colonel Marion C. (“Hack”) Mixson arrived in March 1952 to command the SAC detachment, to which Crampton's Special Duty Flight was attached. In the weeks that followed, Mixson, Crampton, and Sanders dealt with the British Air Ministry at the highest levels. In approving the mission, Churchill took a breathtaking political risk. In the 1950s the House of Commons was divided in its attitude toward the Soviet Union: Many in the
Labour Party were sympathetic in varying degrees to Britain's former ally. If any of the RB-45Cs had been brought down, the resulting outcry probably would have led to Churchill's unseating as prime minister. But balanced against this was the need of Western intelligence to acquire radar-scope photographs of specific military installations.

After a trial nighttime flight to the east of Berlin on March 21 to measure the state of Soviet air defense, the first overflight mission was approved and briefed. On the night of April 17–18, 1952, in absolute radio silence, three RB-45Cs repainted in RAF colors took off from Sculthorpe, were air-refueled, and entered the Soviet Union simultaneously at different locations. Flying at about thirtyfive thousand feet, the planes proceeded on separate tracks. As each RB-45C crossed the border—into the Baltic states in the north, Belorussia in the center, and the Ukraine in the south (the mission Crampton and Sanders flew)—the Soviet air defense system sprang into action, and Allied intelligence listened in. For all of the fighters that scrambled into the night sky, however, none found the British in the dark, and they returned safely to base. The information they brought back was crucial. In the event of war—which, in the 1950s, seemed likely—SAC had to destroy the U.S.S.R.'s Long-Range Air Force at the outset to prevent it from striking targets in Western Europe and the United States. All three overflights photographed LRAF bases, as well as nearby air defense bases.