Ike's Spies (47 page)

Critics on one side blamed the President for admitting that the United States had spy planes. Critics on the other side blasted him for not being in command of his own military. Whichever way one examined it, the President looked terrible. The statement only made a bad situation worse.

In his memoirs, Eisenhower passed over that part of the statement that denied any authorization from Washington. He simply did not mention it. He did explain the “unprecedented” acknowledgment of espionage activities by pointing out that since the Russians had the plane in hand, he could hardly deny its existence.

Eisenhower also pointed out that the Soviets were notorious for spying on the United States, that their activities in espionage “dwarfed” those of the Americans, and that to charge that flying over a nation in an airplane carrying only a camera was “warmongering” was “just plain silly.”
²⁴

Nevertheless, as Reston reported from Washington in the
Times
of May 9, “This was a sad and perplexed capital tonight, caught in a swirl of charges of clumsy administration, bad judgment and bad faith.

“It was depressed and humiliated by the United States having been caught spying over the Soviet Union and trying to cover up its activities in a series of misleading official announcements.”
²⁵

Over the next few days, humiliation gave way to fright, as the headlines became more and more alarmist, “
KHRUSHCHEV WARNS OF ROCKET ATTACK ON BASES USED BY U.S. SPYING PLANES
,” the
Times
announced on May 10. The following morning, the headline read, “
U.S. VOWS TO DEFEND ALLIES IF RUSSIANS ATTACK BASES
.”

Ike, meanwhile, indicated that he would not make a trip to Russia after the Paris Summit Conference. Khrushchev replied that he would not be welcome anyway. The fate of the conference itself was in doubt. Khrushchev told an impromptu news conference in Moscow that he was putting Powers on trial and added, “You understand
that if such aggressive actions continue this might lead to

Eisenhower held his own news conference. He read a carefully worded statement, saying that the Soviet “fetish of secrecy and concealment was a major cause of international tension and uneasiness.” In firm, measured tones, without a hint of regret or apology, Ike said Khrushchev's antics over the “flight of an unarmed non-military plane can only reflect a fetish of secrecy.” The President then declared that he was assuming personal responsibility for the flights. He said they were necessary to protect the United States from surprise attacks.
²⁷

Although Ike defended America's right to find out all that it could about Russian military dispositions, and cited the need for the U-2 program, he also indicated that no more flights would go forth in the immediate future. There were two good reasons for this suspension. First, the obvious one—the Soviets had demonstrated a capacity to shoot down the aircraft. Second, the United States was making progress in photography of the earth from satellites, so the U-2s were not as crucial as they had been.
²⁸

That fact deepens the mystery as to what Khrushchev was up to, with his histrionics, wild charges, and pretended outrage. Soviet satellites were flying over America daily by 1960, and Russian newspapers had even published photographs of the United States taken by cameras aboard such satellites.
²⁹

Reston guessed in the
Times
that Khrushchev was pretending to be shocked and outraged because he realized that Eisenhower was not going to pull out of Berlin, so he was using the U-2 “to blame the United States for the breakdown of the Paris meeting.”
³⁰

Charles de Gaulle later told Ike he thought the reason Khrushchev made such a fuss about the U-2 was that he feared a presidential visit to Russia, and used the U-2 incident as a way of preventing it. In de Gaulle's interpretation, Khrushchev did not want to give Ike the opportunity—as Ike had given to Khrushchev when he visited the United States—to speak directly to the Russian people over Soviet television.
³¹

Whatever his motives, in the week before the Paris meeting Khrushchev kept saying that he doubted that Eisenhower personally knew about the flights. At one point, he even said that the
KGB
often carried on activities that he did not know about. Several of
Ike's associates, and some members of Congress, urged him to take advantage of this interpretation by dismissing Bissell and/or Allen Dulles, with the thought that this would show that the President had been a “victim of overzealous subordinates.”

Ike refused, first because it was untrue, second because it would indicate that the
CIA
was operating irresponsibly, was even out of control, and third because it would allow Khrushchev to say that Eisenhower could not speak for his country since he could not control his own government. Thus, Ike recorded, “I rejected the whole notion out of hand.”
³²

On May 14, 1960, Ike flew to Paris. De Gaulle, as host, had already checked with Khrushchev to make certain the Russian leader wanted to go ahead with the meeting. Khrushchev had said that he was ready. When Ike called on de Gaulle on May 15, however, de Gaulle reported that Khrushchev was now making trouble. He had been to see de Gaulle and indicated that he was highly agitated about the U-2 flights. He could not understand why Eisenhower had admitted publicly that he knew about the missions. By Khrushchev's standards this indicated not American truthfulness, but rather contempt for the Soviets. De Gaulle told Khrushchev that he could not seriously expect Ike to apologize.

De Gaulle discussed these matters, according to Ike's interpreter, General Vernon Walters, “with a sort of Olympian detachment.… He did not think that the peccadilloes of intelligence services were appropriate matters to be discussed at meetings of chiefs of government.”
³³

The following morning, de Gaulle, presiding, had not even finished calling the initial meeting to order when Khrushchev was on his feet, red-faced, loudly demanding the right to speak. De Gaulle nodded, and Khrushchev launched into a tirade against the United States. Soon he was shouting.

De Gaulle interrupted, turned to the Soviet interpreter, and said, “The acoustics in this room are excellent. We can all hear the chairman. There is no need for him to raise his voice.” The interpreter blanched, turned to Khrushchev, and began to translate. De Gaulle cut him off and motioned to his own interpreter, who unfalteringly translated into Russian. Khrushchev cast a furious glance at de Gaulle, then continued to read in a lower voice.

He soon lashed himself into an even greater frenzy. He pointed overhead and shouted, “I have been overflown.”

De Gaulle interrupted again. He said that he, too, had been overflown.

“By your American allies?” asked Khrushchev, incredulous.

“No,” replied General de Gaulle, “by you. Yesterday that satellite you launched just before you left Moscow to impress us overflew the sky of France eighteen times without my permission. How do I know you do not have cameras aboard which are taking pictures of my country?”

Khrushchev's jaw dropped. Then he smiled. He raised both hands above his head and said, “God sees me. My hands are clean. You don't think I would do a thing like that?”

De Gaulle grunted.

Khrushchev returned to reading his speech. Soon he exclaimed, “What devil made the Americans do this?” De Gaulle observed that there were devils on both sides and that this matter was not worthy of the consideration of chiefs of government to whom the world was looking for signs of peace.

Khrushchev then announced that unless Eisenhower would apologize he would walk out of the conference. Ike refused to apologize. Khrushchev repeated his threat to walk out.

De Gaulle looked at Khrushchev, according to translator Walters, “as one would look at a naughty child.” He adjourned the meeting. As Eisenhower started to leave the room, de Gaulle caught him by the elbow and drew him aside, with Walters to interpret. He then said to the President, “I do not know what Khrushchev is going to do nor what is going to happen, but whatever he does, or whatever happens, I want you to know that I am with you to the end.”
³⁴

The next day Khrushchev returned to Moscow. The Paris Summit Conference was over.

In summing up the event in his memoirs, Eisenhower admitted that “the big error we made was, of course, in the issuance of a premature and erroneous cover story. Allowing myself to be persuaded on this score is my principal personal regret.”
³⁵

THERE HAVE BEEN
many interpretations of the Powers incident and the failure of the summit conference. A prominent one is that the
CIA
deliberately sabotaged Powers' plane in order to prevent an outbreak of peace. This conspiracy theory reached such respectability that in October
1975
the professional quarterly journal
Military Affairs
published an article on the subject that concluded, “The anomalies in the Powers case suggest that the U-2 ‘incident' may have been staged. Moreover, the management of the crisis gives further warrant to the hypothesis that the U-2 was a device deliberately chosen to destroy an emerging détente.”
³⁶

Powers was eventually exchanged for Colonel Rudolf Abel, a master Soviet spy caught in Brooklyn. Powers worked for Lockheed as a test pilot for a few years, then became a pilot of a helicopter that watched rush-hour traffic for a television station in Los Angeles. In August 1977 he crashed and died in an accident. Inevitably, it was suggested that his crash was no accident—that the
CIA
had done him in, presumably because he was about to “talk.”
³⁷

Powers in fact had already “talked,” in his memoirs, entitled
Operation Overflight
, which he published in 1970. He had his own conspiracy thesis. It was based on the following facts: In 1957 the U-2s were based in a new location, Atsugi, Japan. In September 1957 a seventeen-year-old Marine private was assigned to a radar unit at Atsugi. After two years of extensive radar work for the Marines, he was discharged from the Corps. In October 1959 he defected to the Soviet Union, where he presumably told the Soviets everything he knew about American radar operations, and what he had learned, including—perhaps—the supposedly crucial information about the flying altitude of the U-2s.

The name of that Marine was Lee Harvey Oswald.
³⁸

One of Powers' “proofs” of Oswald's involvement was the fact that the Warren Commission had refused to release a top-secret
CIA
memorandum of May 13, 1964 (prepared by Richard Helms) to J. Edgar Hoover on the subject of “Lee Harvey Oswald's Access to Classified Information About the U-2.” Powers complained that the document was still classified and he had been refused access to it.

In 1979, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, this writer obtained the document. It recorded that the U-2 station at Atsugi was a “closed” base, with restricted flight lines and hangar areas. Oswald “
did not have access
to this area.” Helms's conclusion was that “there is no evidence or indication that Oswald had any association with, or access to, the U-2 operation or its program in Japan.” He may have seen the airplane but if he did “it is most unlikely that Oswald had the necessary prerequisites to differentiate
between the U-2 and other aircraft engaged in classified missions which were similarly visible at Atsugi at the same time.”
³⁹

When Richard Immerman asked Bissell about the possible Oswald connection, Bissell scoffed at it. There was no way that Oswald could have known the date of the flight, obviously, and Soviet radar had long since been tracking U-2 flights, so the Russians already knew how high the planes were flying. Bissell agreed with Goodpaster, John Eisenhower, and Kelly Johnson (the man who designed the U-2) that Powers was downed by a near-miss explosion from a
SAM
.
⁴⁰

The
Military Affairs
article made the point that because satellites were in operation by May 1960 further U-2 flights were unnecessary. Therefore, Powers must have been sent out by the
CIA
in order to be shot down.

Bissell's response to this charge is that “the first U.S. reconnaissance satellite did not occur until late August of 1960. Prior to that flight there had been some thirteen unsuccessful launches of the reconnaissance satellite, no one of which yielded usable photography, by reason either of vehicle or camera malfunction.”

A second reason for using the U-2 was that “an aircraft mission can be programmed, as to choice of targets and timing over targets, so a mission could be laid out and timed in such a way as to achieve coverage of selected targets at specified times when it was expected that they would be visible.” By contrast, satellite missions “had to be planned and prepared days in advance before reliable weather predictions were available. They could of course be aborted up to the last minute but they could not be greatly modified.”

Finally, “the resolution of U-2 photographs was considerably higher than that of satellite photography. (That situation has changed in the intervening years.) Since the purpose of Powers' flight was to verify or disprove the existence of a number of
ICBM
sites in East Central Russia, and to obtain high resolution photography of them if discovered, a case could have been made for the use of the U-2 even if a satellite capability had been in existence.”
⁴¹

THE CHARGE THAT BISSELL
, Allen Dulles, and others in the
CIA
deliberately sabotaged the Powers flight in order to wreck the summit conference and thus prevent détente is absurd. It ignores
the obvious fact that it was Khrushchev who took the initiative. He was the one who made the Powers incident public, not Ike or Dulles or Bissell. He was the one who made a fuss, not the Americans. He was the one who wanted to wreck the summit, for whatever reason, and he succeeded.