THE COLD WAR: High Flying Spies
by JOHN PRADOS
Original URL:
 |
Reports |
|
Russian president Boris Yeltsin startled the American public in June when he reported that Soviet forces had shot down nine American planes over Soviet territory during the 1950s. As of August 1, 1953, he said, a dozen Americans were in Russian prisons, labor camps or psychiatric hospitals. Yeltsin was just trying to be helpful in the continuing search for evidence of Americans missing in the Vietnam War, but his statement brought back memories of the coldest part of the Cold War. Old Cold Warriors responded with tight-lipped equivocations. Former CIA Director Richard Helms said, "I remember occasional trouble with reconnaissance aircraft that strayed over Soviet territory . . . but I don't remember numbers like that." Helms's denial aside, before the advent of reconnaissance satellites, airmen from the United States and other countries flew intelligence flights against the former Soviet Union every day. These extensive aerial intelligence programs are worth recording before their story is lost to the mists of time. The U-2 affair of 1960, which occurred when the Russians downed Francis Gary Powers in his U-2 spy plane, came at the end of the period, when U.S. intelligence had already begun to turn to satellites. That incident, as well as another that year involving an RB-47, are well known. But the origins of the aircraft programs in the period after 1945 are largely ignored. Immediately after World War II, Americans became so convinced that there would be no more war, military gear was virtually abandoned. A year after the end of hostilities, 70 percent of the navy's electronic equipment had become inoperable; the air force (still part of the U.S. Army at the time) was in even worse shape. The Cold War changed all that. The military was ordered to gather intelligence about the Soviet Union, and air intelligence began with so-called "ferret" flights -- aircraft missions that attempted to record and analyze the signals of enemy radars and electronic equipment. The earliest operation of this type seems to have been one in 1947, code-named "Passionate." On these flights, photographs were taken only when they did not interfere with the primary mission. Dedicated aerial reconnaissance flights began in 1949. Airborne interception of communications traffic was conducted on an experimental basis in 1952, and it became a spy program in its own right in 1953. Unlike the later U-2 program, all of the early flights followed the borders or coasts of the Soviet Union, and were thus called "peripheral reconnaissance." The State Department required planes to maintain a 40-mile distance from the Russian coast. But these restrictions impeded the intelligence effort; neither adequate photography nor good signal interception was possible. In the end the restrictions were changed, not the spy programs. In 1950, new guidelines provided that planes would fly no closer than 20 miles to Soviet borders except when flying past heavily defended areas, where the restriction was increased to 45 miles. Sensitive areas would be reconnoitered only under cover of darkness or inclement weather, when no Soviet fighters were capable of operating; certain geographic restrictions were also instituted. These ground rules existed under combined pressure for relaxation from intelligence collection units and agencies. When aerial overflights began, the air force established a standard cover story to be used if any crew were forced down over Soviet or adversary territory-that the plane had been on a weather data-gathering mission. This 1947 decision would be questioned in 1949 and again in 1952. From time to time, air force officers pointed out that the cover story would fall apart when crews faced good interrogators, especially if the Russians could examine any aircraft wreckage. Proponents of a new cover story suggested that crews should say they had been on long-range navigation training missions, or that the flight had been conducting surveys of radio signal propagation. The radio signal cover story was rejected on the grounds that international agreements required sharing the results of such studies, thus ultimately unveiling the cover story. (When Francis Gary Powers was shot down, Washington used the "weather mission" story, first concocted in 1947, with a singular lack of success.) The peripheral reconnaissance program was no secret to the Russians. By January 1948, the Soviets had enough information to file a formal diplomatic protest of a flight they tracked over the Chukotsk peninsula in the Soviet Far East. The United States rejected the protest on the grounds that no territorial violation had occurred-even though its own investigation showed that existing State Department rules had probably been broken. The first recorded instance of Soviet fighter interception of a U.S. spy plane was on October 22, 1949. The crew, in a Far East air force RB-29 on "Oversalt" mission 105-A, took photographs of the Russian plane that buzzed them. Not long after, a navy plane lost over the Baltic on April 8, 1950, became the first aircraft actually shot down. (Some accounts put it 13 miles inland over Latvia.) There were many aircraft losses, but two are particularly notable. The June 27, 1956, loss of a C-118 over Soviet Armenia was significant because the plane, a militarized version of the Douglas DC-6, happened to be the personal aircraft of Allen Dulles, then director of Central Intelligence. The situation was already tense because a U.S. helicopter had been shot out of the sky earlier that month over East Germany. The C-118 had carried senior CIA aides to Europe on an inspection trip, and it was in Turkey when it was diverted for some extracurricular spying. The plane was forced down and nine persons were captured. If CIA chief Dulles relished the situation, he must have been embarrassed by it as well. The other loss, on September 2, 1958, was an EC-130, also shot down over Armenia. Six men were killed, and 11 prisoners were taken. The EC-130 incident figured in the Cold War propaganda struggle after the Soviets released a transcript of the plane's broadcasts to prove its spy mission. Attempts at overflying Russia -- as distinct from the peripheral missions -- began with the introduction of more capable cameras. Early peripheral missions used 30-inch focal length instruments, which gave way to 100-inch cameras, but neither type could see more than a few miles beyond a border or coastline. The United States introduced high-altitude cameras in 1952. High-altitude spying also offered the best chance of evading Soviet detection, especially in areas where defenses depended on visual observations. The British also took advantage of the high-altitude benefits in modified Canberra bombers (B-57s in U.S. terms). Between 1955 and 1957, the United States used a B-36 mothership/RF-84 photo-ship combination. By then, the U-2 had more or less introduced the era of modern aerial photography. Recent news accounts about missing Americans suggest that up to 50 airmen may be unaccounted for from the Cold War reconnaissance missions. Interested observers have made other loss estimates, all much higher. One source records a total of 38 incidents between 1950 and 1966, with 26 aircraft shot down or forced to land, and 108 airmen killed and an unknown number missing. Another report gives a total of 225 airmen killed or missing from 1950 to 1967. A third puts losses at between 100 and 200, while yet another source estimates that at least 32 aircraft were shot down between 1950 and 1984, including four Nationalist Chinese U-2s. This source estimates that 140 U.S. servicemen were killed. Such numbers may seem high for a peacetime program. On the other hand, scattered data for European missions indicate that one ferret program that operated from 1950 to 1951 averaged nearly daily flights. Allowing for other programs and for global operations, it seems reasonable to estimate an overall sortie rate of more than a flight per day. The number of flights puts the losses in better perspective -- except that all occurred during a peacetime activity. Truly, aerial reconnaissance became one of the most dangerous practices of the Cold War. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower both tried to regulate the activity, calling halts when major incidents occurred. But demands always remained for additional intelligence of the kind that sparked the spy flights in the first place. It was inevitable that some Americans would be shot down, and perhaps the high costs of humans and hardware helped drive the transition to satellite reconnaissance in 1960 and later. John Prados is the author of Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush (1991). |