The Cold War (29 page)

But the fragile U-2 was not air-refuelable. Even though its unrefueled radius of action was anticipated to be substantial, around 3,400 miles, when launched from England or West Germany, it would be unable to fly far beyond the Ural Mountains and return in safety. And it was not designed to operate in the snow and ice of Arctic bases. For American intelligence, the U.S.S.R.'s vast Arctic territory, stretching 3,500 miles from the Kola Peninsula in the West to Wrangel Island in the East, remained largely terra incognita—and the U-2 appeared unable to explore it.

Between March 30 and May 7, 1955, shortly before the summit conference convened, the Strategic Air Command conducted Project Seashore, again on instructions from the JCS. Four RB-47Es, specially modified with the sidelooking hundred-inch focal-length cameras like those carried by the Canberra, teamed with four RB-47Hs to fly PARPRO missions from Eielson AFB, Alaska, along Siberia's northern and eastern shores. The resulting intelligence of increased aerial forces in the region caused the nation's leaders to consider overflights of Russia's entire northern slope that would locate and identify air
defenses as well as the disposition of aerial forces there. In early February 1956, President Eisenhower terminated Project Genetrix, the launching of highaltitude photoreconnaissance balloons that would drift across the U.S.S.R. In the four preceding weeks, SAC had launched 516 of them from Western Europe and Turkey. Those that succeeded in crossing the U.S.S.R. released their gondolas by parachute, the gondolas being recovered in midair by C-119 cargo aircraft near Japan. But so many were shot down by Soviet air defenses, or were otherwise lost, that only forty-four were retrieved. At the same time, Eisenhower approved an air force project to fly SAC reconnaissance aircraft over and around the Soviet far north, mapping it completely, photographically and electronically.

The Strategic Air Command's Project Homerun overflights—unknown to all but a few until now—were launched from Thule, Greenland, between March 21 and May 10, 1956. During that seven-week period, RB-47E photo reconnaissance aircraft and RB-47H electronic reconnaissance aircraft flew almost daily over the North Pole to reconnoiter the entire northern slope and interior portions of the U.S.S.R., from the Kola Peninsula to the Bering Strait. It was a 3,400-mile round trip. The special SAC detachment formed for this operation included, with spares, sixteen RB-47Es of the 10th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron, Lockbourne AFB, Ohio; five RB-47Hs from the 343rd Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron from Forbes AFB, Kansas; and two full squadrons of some twenty-eight KC-97 tankers. All of these aircraft shared Thule's single ten-thousand-foot snow-and-ice-covered runway; all of them took off, refueled over the North Pole, and landed in complete radio silence.

The air base, located 690 miles north of the Arctic Circle on North Star Bay, is thirty-nine miles north of the nearest human habitation, the Eskimo village of Thule. The aircrews typically deplaned in temperatures of 35 degrees below zero (in an era when windchill factors were unheard of), in a region devoid of vegetation and covered in snow, at a time of year when darkness ruled nearly twenty-four hours a day. Maintenance crews and flight crews alike were quartered in what looked like railroad refrigerator cars, down to the levered door handles. Toilets operated via the “armstrong” flush system—hand-pumped. After receiving Arctic clothing, including fur-lined parkas and mukluks, the crews spent the first week in Arctic survival training and practicing Arctic flight operations: takeoffs and landings on ice-covered runways, navigating over the Pole, and air refueling in radio silence.

Planners had divided the Soviet Arctic into three basic sectors, spanning a

total of 3,500 miles. The first extended eastward from the Kola Peninsula to Dikson on the Kara Sea; the second extended from Dikson to Tiksi on the Laptev Sea; and the third from Tiksi to the Bering Strait. The RB-47s normally flew in pairs, often with an E (photoreconnaissance) and H (electronic reconnaissance) model teamed, in a normal wing formation. Because one tanker was required for each bomber, the KC-97s operated in a similar fashion. Each flight of one or more reconnaissance aircraft over the North Pole to the Soviet Union, whatever the number in it, was counted as a mission. About four or five missions were flown each day, rotating aircraft and crews, with the RB-47Es and Hs always arriving over Soviet territory during daylight. The aircrews for different missions were briefed separately, and no one knew where their compatriots were going or asked what became of the film and electronic recordings turned in at the end of the day.

The Thule missions photomapped the island of Novaya Zemlya (or “Banana Island,” as the aircrews referred to it) and its atomic test site. They flew in behind the Ural Mountains and down rivers, reconnoitering the timber, mining, and nickel smelting industries in the region. Siberia, they discovered, remained mostly wilderness, with few roads or towns. Most of the Thule missions, however, operated but a few miles inside Soviet territory all across the Arctic, locating, identifying, and photographing the infrequent radar stations and air bases. They confirmed that the Soviet Union's northern regions were poorly defended against enemy aircraft: Only on three or four occasions did Russian aircraft attempt to intercept missions, never successfully. At Thule, Brigadier General Hewitt T. Wheless, commander of the 801st Air Division, directed the operation along with Colonel William J. Meng, commander of the 26th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing at Lockbourne, which supplied the RB-47Es. Major George A. Brown served with them as the project operations officer and mission planner.

The Thule missions drew down in early May 1956, beginning with the RB47Hs' departure for Lockbourne AFB. Before the RB-47Es followed them, they conducted the so-called massed overflight. In a single mission flown on May 6 and 7, six RB-47Es took off from Thule, flew over the North Pole, and entered Siberia in daylight near Ambarchik. Flying abreast, they proceeded south at forty thousand feet, with engines operating at full power. The aircraft turned eastward and, while photomapping the entire region, exited the U.S.S.R. over
Anadyr on the Bering Strait. The RB-47Es recovered at Eielson AFB, Alaska, and the next day returned over the North Pole to Thule.

In his retirement years, General Curtis LeMay more than once referred erroneously to a massed overflight of Vladivostok. In Tom Coffey's book
Iron Eagle,
based on interviews with the general, LeMay declared, “I flew the entire SAC reconnaissance force over the Siberian city of Vladivostok.” But later writers have conveniently forgotten—or ignored—his words at the end of this accounting: “It wasn't my idea,” he said. “I was ordered to do it.” Whether LeMay altered and exaggerated the account for effect or for reasons of his own, we will probably never know.

Reflecting on the Thule missions collectively, Brigadier General William Meng recalled, “They were conducted in complete radio silence. One word on the radio, and all missions for the day had to abort. But that never happened; not one mission was ever recalled. Altogether, we flew 156 missions from Thule.” Throughout the entire operation, Meng might have added, with maintenance crews working in subzero temperatures on exposed aircraft, and with aircrews operating from the ice- and fog-covered runway, not a single person or airplane was lost in an accident or to Soviet action. To this day, the SAC Thule missions remain one of the most incredible demonstrations of professional aviation skill ever seen in any military organization at any time.

In Washington, D.C., on May 28, 1956, President Eisenhower met with top administration officials to discuss, among other things, a protest of the American overflights of Soviet Arctic territories. In attendance, beside Eisenhower's military assistant, Colonel Andrew Goodpaster, were Allen Dulles, director of the CIA; Admiral Arthur M. Radford, chairman of the JCS; General Nathan F. Twining, air force chief of staff; and Undersecretary of State Herbert Hoover, Jr. The Soviet note, dated May 14, had been delivered to the American embassy in Moscow (but, for whatever reason, did not mention specifically the massed overflight of Anadyr). Twining advised that the Thule operation had been shut down a few days before the note was received. The president said he wanted to encourage the Soviet leadership to move in peaceful directions: The American response must be carefully drawn. Hoover read a proposed draft to which, apparently, all agreed. The next day, May 29, the Department of State presented to the Soviet embassy a note explaining that “navigational difficulties in the Arctic region may have caused unintentional violations of Soviet air space, which, if they in fact had occurred, the Department regretted.”

A few months later, on July 4, 1956, a U-2 took off from West Germany and flew a first mission over the western U.S.S.R. It, too, drew a sharp Soviet protest a few days later. Because the overflights threatened a rapprochement between the superpowers, the president had become increasingly uncomfortable approving American violations of Soviet airspace. But administration leaders, according to the president's science adviser, James Killian, viewed the highflying single-engine U-2 as far less menacing than a multiengine reconnaissance bomber. Eisenhower determined to continue U-2 overflights, especially after a mission on July 5 provided intelligence about the number of Soviet longrange aircraft that all but ended the “bomber gap” controversy. In the fall, a newly-appointed chairman of the JCS, former air force chief of staff General Nathan Twining, nonetheless urged the president to approve another military overflight of Soviet territory with a new reconnaissance aircraft.

This aircraft was the air-refuelable Martin RB-57D-0, a single-seat photoreconnaissance version of the RAF Canberra bomber, built under British license. The lightweight long-winged aircraft, powered by two Pratt & Whitney J57 jet engines, possessed a combat speed of 430 knots (495 mph) and could reach an altitude of some 64,000 feet. Because it flew faster than the U-2 and almost as high, Eisenhower was persuaded that the machine would escape Soviet detection. He approved a mission to fly three RB-57Ds over separate targets in the maritime region near Vladivostok.

Three RB-57D-0s deployed to Yokota Air Base in Japan in early November 1956. This detachment flew the mission on December 11, a bright, clear day. They entered the maritime region simultaneously from three different locations near Vladivostok and overflew three different targets. Contrary to air force hopes, the bombers were picked up on Soviet radar, and MiG-17s scrambled to intercept them, but the Americans were out of reach. In the exposed film returned to the intelligence community, the fighters were clearly visible, pirouetting in the thin air beneath the bombers. The resulting protest on December 14 left no doubt about the capabilities of Soviet air defenses to detect and identify aircraft:

Four days after the Soviet note was delivered, an exasperated president met with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to consider the embarrassing situation and decide on a course of action. Under the circumstances, Dulles had to say that it would be difficult for the country to deny the RB-57 overflights. But Eisenhower would not consent to such an admission. Instead, he instructed Colonel Goodpaster to relay an order to Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, JCS chairman General Nathan Twining, and CIA director Allen Dulles: “Effective immediately, there are to be no flights by U.S. [military] reconnaissance aircraft over Iron Curtain countries.” With the sole exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. military overflights of the U.S.S.R. and other Iron Curtain countries ceased for the remainder of the Cold War—though CIA overflights would be authorized periodically.

When President Eisenhower ended U.S. military overflights of Iron Curtain countries, this clandestine effort disappeared entirely from view and almost entirely from memory. Though few of the pertinent documents can be located now, and despite the passing of almost all those who shaped the policy, military overflights have an important place in the postwar evolution of strategic overhead reconnaissance.

By the time Eisenhower approved the building of the U-2 in late 1954, peacetime strategic overflight reconnaissance had become a firm national policy. Meanwhile, the platforms from which to conduct it moved to ever higher altitudes: from military aircraft to high-altitude balloons, from the U-2 to the SR-71—a supersonic aircraft that could fly at altitudes above eighty thousand feet—and ultimately, from airspace into outer space with robotic reconnaissance satellites. After military fighters and bombers, every one of these remarkable technical advances was evaluated, approved, and first funded for development by one American president: Dwight Eisenhower. By the time Eisenhower left office in 1961, the intelligence produced by overhead reconnaissance had eliminated the supposed gaps in weaponry between the superpowers. Once American leaders could meet a real rather than an imagined Soviet threat, they could hold the size of the military establishment to reasonable limits. The resulting defense savings amounted to billions of dollars.