There was one other dark possibility that Powers wondered about much later. A young Marine assigned to the radar facilities of the Japanese U-2 had defected to Russia in 1959. A formal U.S. government investigation discovered that on three occasions the Marine had spoken to the Soviets of the vital information he could bring with him if they welcomed him. That government investigation was the Warren Commission Report, and the young Marine was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Powers died in August 1977, when his traffic helicopter crashed just three miles from the Skunk Works. He had run out of fuel, but there are those who believe it was no accident.
Within months after Powers was shot down, Richard Bissell had the temerity to suggest the program continue flights over the Soviet Union. The president ruled it out. Never again, the country seemed to collectively resolve, would manned spy planes make the pilot and the country that vulnerable.
But in August 1960, the very day Frank Powers stood in the dock in Moscow for sentencing, another of Bissell’s secret projects had finally begun to pay off. After more than a dozen failures, the engineers running the Corona spy satellite program successfully recovered a film pod ejected from the satellite whose public identity was Discoverer XIV.
Snatched by a C-119 Flying Boxcar at 8,500 feet, the capsule contained film of a million square miles of the Soviet Union — more than all the U-2 flights together had produced.
This was the future: no human at risk, no violation of airspace. To celebrate, the engineers got drunk and threw one another into a swimming pool. The recovery was announced; the public would not learn of the true spy mission for another thirty years or so.
The most important days of the spy plane, and especially the U-2, were still ahead. In October 1960, Eisenhower got to see for the first time the airplane that had caused him so much trouble, when he stopped in Texas after a trip to meet with the president of Mexico. That same month he approved U-2 flights over Cuba, where the new government of Fidel Castro was showing increasing belligerence toward the United States.
In August 1962, U-2 photos of Cuba showed a shape that photointerpreters recognized from the thousands of images they had of the Soviet Union: the star-shaped emplacements of Soviet SAM sites, holding missiles like the one that had brought down Powers. In the next few weeks, comparing the new pictures with an extensive database of older ones of the Cuban landscape, they saw more and more sites under construction, and by October they had matched boxes and equipment, carefully measured by computer, with shapes and sizes known from Soviet weapons displayed in Red Square parades: MiG-21s and Sandal missiles. The agency’s top “crateologists,” experts in all sorts of weapons and equipment packaging, were consulted. It was soon clear that the medium-range missiles — missiles that normally carried nuclear warheads — were being installed in Cuba.
On Saturday, October 12, 1962, Maj. Richard Heyster took off from Edwards North Base in a U-2. He reached the coast of Cuba early the next morning and returned with the key photos showing the six-sided star of SAM sites protecting the medium-range missiles NATO had code-named Sandal at San Cristobal.
When Heyster’s take provided Art Lundahl, the head of the photo interpretation office that handled the U-2 photos, with unmistakable evidence of the presence of Soviet missiles, Lundahl hurried to the White House. By noon on Tuesday, he was displaying the photos to the president and his top advisers; a week later, President Kennedy sat in front of the television cameras, announcing the quarantine (the term was chosen instead of “blockade,” an act of war in international law).
While the president was speaking, fifty-four of LeMay’s SAC bombers joined the dozen that were constantly orbiting on alert. Before the crisis was over, SAC would go from the normal Defense Condition Five to DefCon Two — the highest ever reached. Three days later, Adlai Stevenson, accompanied by staff from the National Photo Interpretation Center, was displaying the wares of the U-2 at the United Nations.
Kennedy ordered more thorough photography of the island, which required low-level, high-speed RF 101 Voodoos — their snouted shadows show up in the most famous treetop close-ups of the shrouded missiles and launchers.
On October 27, Maj. Rudolph Anderson was shot down in his U-2—the sole casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis, save for several crews of military aircraft that crashed during the mobilization. Anderson’s death came just as the Russians agreed to remove their missiles; it was the act, the Soviets said years later, of a trigger-happy local SAM commander.
Even more dangerous was the U-2 that went off course during the crisis and strayed into Soviet airspace near Siberia. “There’s always some poor son of a bitch who doesn’t get the message,” Kennedy remarked with a sigh. Khrushchev had rightly protested that in the current state of tension no one could be sure the spy plane had not been a bomber, the first shot of a nuclear war.
LeMay, the commander of the Cuban reconnaissance group, and Major Heyster were called to the Oval Office for commendation. A photo shows Heyster squeezed on a couch between the bigger officers. “Let me do the talking,” LeMay said. But days later, what LeMay talked about was how he had lost. He harangued JFK about how he could have forced out not only the Soviet missiles but the Soviets and Castro as well. We had the Russian bear in a trap, he said, and “we should have taken his whole leg off. Hell, we should have taken his testicles off, too.”
For decades, the U-2 would continue to be a vital source of some of the most important, detailed political intelligence.
The U-2 victories that did the most to prevent World War III, however, were the ones over President Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. Such intelligence provided support for those resisting the building of more bombers, more missiles. The numbers that did get built were huge, of course, but without the solid information to counterbalance the Curtis LeMays, they would have been far greater and the temptation to use them much stronger.
11. The Blackbirds
The U-2 may have been “Kelly’s Angel,” but even before it had flown over the Soviet Union, it was clear that what the CIA needed was an “Archangel.” Radars and missiles were improving. From the very first U-2 flight, CIA operatives and Skunk Works technicians had been surprised at how quickly the Soviets learned to track the craft on radar. The U-2 would have to be replaced.
Richard Bissell had the Skunk Works look into the best ways to escape detection by radar — speed, height, reduced radar profile, or some combination of the three. The result was the most heroic story in the whole Skunk Works buffs’ catalog.
The Skunk Works plunged into an extensive study of a superplane powered by hydrogen. Project Suntan, as it was called, cost taxpayers the equivalent of two billion of today’s dollars before officials realized that creating a whole system of refrigerated tanks and pipes for liquid hydrogen at bases around the world would cost billions more. The program would remain secret for nearly twenty years.
In 1960, the CIA finally settled on a Skunk Works plan for a high-flying conventionally powered craft, flying so high and fast — three times the speed of sound — that it could elude missiles and fighters. It would be built of titanium, the first such use of the metal. The program was called Oxcart. Eisenhower, increasingly apprehensive about the U-2, just called it “the big one.”