The Cold War (28 page)

Morrison's detachment of eight pilots received overflight orders exclusively from officers at FEAF headquarters. There, only four commanding officers and an intelligence officer knew of these missions. Morrison and his squadron conducted nine overflights between April 1954 and February 1955. Normally, four aircraft would take part in daytime missions; they flew at altitudes of 45,000 to 48,000 feet, and always when atmospheric conditions precluded telltale contrails. (Though radar tracked the American fighters, Soviet interceptors could not “see” them to attack. By this time, the old gentleman's agreement had long since faded.) Airfields represented the principal reconnaissance targets, and Morrison and his compatriots overflew Vladivostok, Sakhalin Island, and Sovetskaya Gavan, Dairen, and Shanghai.

The last and longest of these missions, a two-ship flight with Morrison in command, occurred on February 19, 1955. Instead of a shallow horseshoe route over a coastal target, it was directed well into the Soviet mainland to photograph the airfield in Khabarovsk, a city located alongside the Amur River on the border of the U.S.S.R. and Manchuria. As the two aircraft climbed to altitude over the Sea of Japan, Morrison's wingman signaled mechanical problems and turned back. The flight leader pressed on, releasing the last two of his wing tanks as he approached altitude at the Soviet coast. But one of the two tanks did not separate, and the additional weight and drag prevented the aircraft from reaching its peak altitude. To complicate matters further, the preflight weather briefing had estimated winds aloft that did not match those encountered, and at the appointed navigational moment, Morrison looked out to find no target in sight.

Fortunately, the Amur River could be seen, and as he flew along it, Morrison homed on a broadcast from the Khabarovsk radio station. With the city in view,
he performed a maneuver well known to World War II tactical reconnaissance pilots: he first rolled 90 degrees to port, then reversed the process and rolled in similar fashion to starboard, thereby obtaining a clear view of the earth beneath and ahead of his aircraft, permitting adjustment in the line of flight that would bring the RF-86 directly over the airfield. As he completed these maneuvers and turned on the cameras, the airplane shuddered. The last drop tank, its markings of origin carefully filed off, separated from the wing and whistled downward over Khabarovsk. Though short on fuel, Morrison returned safely to Chitose Air Base on Hokkaido, plunged through a break in the overcast, and landed. The airplane was so light, he recalled, he had difficulty forcing it down onto the runway. As his RF-86 turned off Chitose's concrete ribbon and onto the asphalt apron, its fuel expired and the engine flamed out.

Back on the other side of the world in the spring of 1953, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had reconsidered strategic overflight reconnaissance after word reached Western intelligence of a formidable Soviet missile program under way at a base called Kapustin Yar, near Stalingrad. Once again, Churchill approved an overflight. This time the RAF and the USAF collaborated to squeeze a large, oblique-looking camera into the aft fuselage of a standard RAF B-2 twin-engine Canberra bomber. This bomber could not be air-refueled; but, stripped of all excess weight and with its bomb bay filled with fuel tanks, the aircraft possessed a range sufficient for it to fly at high altitude from Germany across the southern U.S.S.R., and then swing south to Iran.

The British assigned the name Project ROBIN to this effort, which consisted of two or three shallow-penetration missions over the Eastern bloc satellite states preparatory to the main event. Approved by the prime minister, the key mission was flown in late August 1953 from Giebelstadt in West Germany, near the East German border. The Canberra was tracked by Soviet radar almost from the moment of takeoff. Happily for an RAF aircrew flying in broad daylight, accurate radar tracking did not prevent various elements of the Soviet air defense system from performing a Three Stooges routine for Stalin's heirs in the Kremlin. In the face of an air defense system on full alert, the “unidentified” aircraft, operating at 46,000 to 48,000 feet altitude, remained untouched. With its hundredinch focal-length camera peering obliquely out the port side, it flew doggedly east past Kiev, Kharkov, and Stalingrad to its target, Kapustin Yar.

In spite of frantic commands and radar vectoring, Soviet fighter aircraft could not see the airplane above them and did not successfully intercept the plane until it approached Kapustin Yar. Though they managed to hit the British
machine, it flew on, and the fighters lost sight of it again. Damage to the aircraft, however, introduced vibration, which adversely affected the optics performance of the camera. Pictures of Kapustin Yar furnished to the USAF and CIA were blurred and of poor quality; they apparently revealed little. The Canberra turned southeast to follow the Volga River. It escaped and managed to land safely in Iran. Its near-loss ended any further British thoughts of daytime strategic reconnaissance overflights of the western U.S.S.R.

But the flight had unexpected results. Seven years later, on August 5, 1960,
The Philadelphia Inquirer
carried an account of the mission by a Soviet defector who had served in 1953 as an air defense radar officer: “During the [Canberra] flight all sorts of unbelievable things happened…. In one region, theoperator accidentally sent the Soviet flights west instead of east; in Kharkov, the pilots confused the planes [aloft] and found themselves firing at each other.”

The result was a major purge. Many generals and officers were removed from their posts. One general was demoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel and committed suicide. Other personnel were sent to punishment battalions.

However discouraging the outcome of the Canberra's daytime flight to Kapustin Yar, the British and Americans soon agreed on another group of nighttime strategic reconnaissance overflights of the western U.S.S.R. (By this time the USAF had transferred its RB-45Cs from SAC to the Tactical Air Command [TAC], and General LeMay no longer played a direct role in the missions.) At Sculthorpe RAFB, the RAF's Special Duty Flight re-formed with most of the same crews from the 1952 overflight missions; they were once again led by Squadron Leader John Crampton and Squadron Leader Rex Sanders. RAF Bomber Command's chief scientist, “Lew” Llewelyn, worked to improve the pictures produced by the cameras that filmed images on the radar scopes. In late April the RAF aircrews learned that the mission plan was virtually identical to the one flown in 1952, except that the third aircraft would make a deeper penetration of southern Russia.

The Special Duty Flight executed the mission on the night of April 28–29, 1954. The primary targets again involved bases of the Soviet Long-Range Air Force. The RB-45Cs again were repainted in RAF colors, and Crampton and Sanders again took the southern run, but it did not go so easily for them this time. As their airplane approached Kiev—and while Sanders tended the radar—Crampton was startled to see a highway of bursting flak about 200 yards before him at exactly his own altitude, 36,000 feet. Briefed to return if the security of the flight was compromised, he hauled the airplane around on its starboard

wing tip, until its gyro compass pointed west, and descended to thirtyfour thousand feet to avoid the flak, which was set to explode at a fixed altitude. He cut short the mission. Nonetheless, the return track took the aircraft close to many of the remaining targets, which Sanders photographed as they passed. When the RB-45C met up with its tanker over West Germany, the refueling boom refused to stay in the aircraft receptacle. Fearing that it might have been damaged by the flak over Kiev, Crampton landed near Munich to refuel. Meanwhile, the other two flights covered their routes without misadventure, though numerous fighters were sent up after them. A few weeks later, in early May, the RAF Special Duty Flight disbanded for the last time.

By now Western leaders had been alerted to the existence of a new Soviet Myacheslav-4 jet-turbine-powered intercontinental bomber (NATO codenamed “Bison”). With the number of Bison bombers and nuclear weapons believed to be growing, the region of greatest concern in the U.S.S.R., and about which the least was known, was the Kola Peninsula in extreme northwest Russia, above the Arctic Circle. Intercontinental bombers positioned here could fly foreshortened routes over the North Pole to attack targets in America—and also could easily strike targets in Great Britain. A daytime photographic mission was called for. Whether the British agreed or not, Eisenhower approved one of his own.

In mid-April 1954, SAC—on instructions from the JCS—dispatched a detachment of RB-47Es to the Fairford RAF base near Oxford. The RB-47E mounted in its nose and bomb bay the same type of cameras carried in the RB-45C. On May 8 three aircrews were briefed separately for a secret mission to be conducted in radio silence near the Kola Peninsula in the northern region of the U.S.S.R. Two crews were instructed to turn back at a certain coordinate; unbeknownst to them, the third crew was instructed to fly on into Soviet territory and photograph nine airfields over a six-hundred-mile course from Murmansk south to Arkhangelsk, then southwest to Onega, at which point the aircraft would head due west to the safety of Scandinavia.

The aircrew named to fly this deep-penetration overflight consisted of Captain Harold Austin, pilot; Captain Carl Holt, copilot; and Major Vance Heavilin, navigator. When these men took off from Fairford early on May 8, 1954, they were quite unaware that they followed by one week the nighttime flight of the three RB-45Cs over the western-central Soviet Union. Soviet air defenses still reverberated from that futile exercise. After a refueling off southern Norway,
and at the designated departure point about a hundred miles north of Murmansk, two of the three aircraft turned back. Austin's pressed on. Two nonplussed aircrews watched over their shoulders as a comrade receded from view toward the Soviet mainland. It is a tribute to SAC's remarkable standards of professional training that the two aircrews did not break radio silence but, as briefed, returned to base.

Austin's aircraft coasted in over the Kola Peninsula at Murmansk, at noon, at 40,000 feet altitude, and at 440 knots (506 mph) airspeed. Heavilin turned on the radar cameras, along with the suite of cameras in the nose and bomb bay. The weather, Austin recalled, was crystal-clear; it was one of those days when “you could see forever.” Before they left the Murmansk area, a flight of three MiG fighters joined them, apparently confirming the identity of the intruder. As they approached airfield targets at Arkhangelsk, six more MiGs arrived, now intent on destroying the American aircraft. Cannon tracers flew above and below the RB-47E; the interceptors could not stay steady at that altitude, and their aim was poor. A running gun battle ensued as Austin finished covering his targets and turned toward Finland. As he banked the plane, a MiG struck from above, and the aircraft took a cannon shell through the top of the port wing, knocking out the intercom. Holt had fired the tail gun, but it jammed after the first burst. Nevertheless, he kept the MiGs at a safe distance long enough to reach the Finnish border.

Austin's RB-47E, with its cameras and film, succeeded in reaching Fairford after another refueling over the North Sea. The photographs reassured Western leaders that long-range bombers were not deployed on the Kola Peninsula. For their extraordinary aerial feat, the aircrew members each received
two
Distinguished Flying Crosses, though the SAC commander, General LeMay, made it plain that he would rather have decorated them only with a Silver Star. That award, however, required the approval of a board in Washington whose members were not cleared to know about SENSINT overflights.

If such reconnaissance overflights were to continue at a reasonable risk, another kind of airplane was required, one that operated above all known Soviet air defenses. A few months later, in November 1954, President Eisenhower approved Project Aquatone, a secret air force–CIA effort directed to build a jetpowered glider that could fly at altitudes in excess of seventy thousand feet, far above Soviet air defenses. So the U-2 was born.

There was at least one further overflight of the Soviet Union launched from Great Britain. In March 1955 a nighttime USAF mission led by Major John
Anderson followed routes and overflew targets that were nearly identical to those of earlier RAF flights: Three RB-45Cs took off from the Sculthorpe RAF base, flew east at thirty thousand feet, and simultaneously crossed the frontiers of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Baltic States—though this time the Ukraine track was farther to the south. The mission objective, as before, involved radarscope photography of Soviet military installations and cities for Allied target folders. Soviet fighters again scrambled into the night sky but, even with ground radar vectoring, could not locate the reconnaissance aircraft in the darkness. All of the RB-45Cs returned safely, landing in West Germany. These crew members, too, received Distinguished Flying Crosses.

That reconnaissance overflight mission preceded by a few months the Four-Power Summit Conference held in Geneva, Switzerland, in July 1955. There President Eisenhower, in an unannounced disarmament proposal, would call for mutual Soviet and Western overflights, eventually called “Open Skies.” At the time, the U-2 aircraft was about to begin flight trials in Nevada. Although Soviet officials rejected the Open Skies proposal, the president had determined to employ the U-2 in daytime missions over the western Soviet Union to assay the number of bombers in the Soviet Long-Range Air Force—a number, USAF leaders insisted, that surpassed the number of such bombers in the air force inventory.