What was the truth? Were all the furor and alarm over the years wholly unjustified? Was the MiG-25 a «clinker,» a «turkey,» a flying «Potemkin village»? Had the Pentagon, together with its allies in the aviation industry, conjured up a phony threat to extract money from Congress, as Representative Carr implied? Did not the gift from Belenko reassuringly prove anew the superiority of the West? If so, how had the Russians nonetheless produced an aircraft whose recorded performance exceeded in several ways that of our very best?
The data collected in Japan, then analyzed by the Foreign Technology Division of the Air Force at Dayton, Ohio, and the reports of the ongoing interrogation of Belenko all were flowing into the office of Major General George J. Keegan, Jr., then chief of Air Force Intelligence. As the information was collated to form a single mosaic, clear and definitive answers emerged.
They showed that the West had been badly mistaken in its perceptions of the capability, purpose, menace, and implications of the MiG-25. The misconceptions occurred because the West evaluated the MiG in Western terms and thereby adopted false premises, which only the arrival of Belenko corrected.
Because the MiG-25 had been clocked and tracked flying at Mach 3.2 at 80,000 feet, the West assumed that the recordings reflected the plane's actual operational altitude and speed. Because, employing Western methods, the design and manufacture of an aircraft with the capabilities imputed to the MiG-25 would require an extremely high level of technology, the West feared the Russians had attained such a level. Because modern Western aircraft are designed to perform multiple missions — to intercept, dogfight, bomb — the West assumed that the MiG-25 functioned as a fighter as well as an interceptor.
But Belenko explained and his plane proved that the MiG-25 was not a fighter, not an air superiority aircraft designed to duel with other fighters. Against Western fighters, it would be, as Representative Carr claimed, virtually helpless. But the Russians never intended it to tangle with hostile fighters.
Once the false premises were rectified and the true origin and mission of the MiG-25 understood, then scientific detective work gradually unveiled a picture not so comforting or reassuring.
By 1960 the Russians had seen coming at them over the horizon a fearsome new threat in the B-70, which the United States was planning as the world's fastest and highest flying bomber. To counter the B-70, they had to build rather quickly an interceptor of unprecedented capabilities, one able to achieve Mach 3 at 80,000 feet. The problem was formidable, and the Russians were too poor, materially and technologically, to adopt an American approach in trying to solve it.
They lagged in metallurgy and particularly the exploitation of titanium, which although extremely expensive and hard to work with, is very light, strong, and heat-resistant. And the Americans deemed titanium or some more exotic metal essential to a high-altitude supersonic aircraft. The Russians lagged even more woefully in the technology of transistors, semiconductors, and integrated circuitry, the tininess, lightness, and reliability of which the Americans also considered essential. The only air-to-air missiles the Russians could count on in the foreseeable future would be big, heavy, and short-range.
The Russians lacked the time and resources to develop all the new technology Western designers and engineers doubtless would have thought necessary for the type of interceptor required. So, having no other choice, the Russians elected to make do with what they had. They decided to use, instead of titanium, heavy steel alloy; instead of transistors, vacuum tubes; instead of sophisticated new missiles, those that were available.
This meant that their aircraft would be extraordinarily heavy and could be propelled only by an engine of extraordinary power. But again, they could not afford the many years and billions that design and production of a new engine would demand. So they looked around for something already on hand.
Some years before, the gifted Soviet designer Sergei Tumansky had perfected an engine to power an experimental high-altitude drone or cruise missile. Because of Soviet metallurgical difficulties, he had had to build a big, rugged steel engine, which gulped fuel ravenously. Yet the engine over the years had proved itself highly effective and reliable at altitudes of up to 80,000 feet. Therefore, the Russians decided to create their new interceptor by constructing an airframe around two of these powerful Tumansky engines.
They realized that weight and fuel consumption would preclude the aircraft they were conceiving from maneuvering agilely as a fighter and from staying up very long. The plane could be expected only to climb at tremendous speed, like a rocket, fire missiles during one pass at the target, and then land. And that is all the Russians originally expected and designed the MiG-25 to do.
For all their ingenuity in making use of old technology, the Russians recognized they could not avoid innovating some new technology. Old-fashioned vacuum tubes could not accommodate to the sudden and extreme changes in temperature occurring as the plane skyrocketed from the ground to the subfreezing upper air. No pilot, however able, could in the brief time allowed and at the speeds entailed make an intercept without elaborate guidance from the ground. The airborne radar needed to lock onto the target in the final stage of intercept would have to be invulnerable to jamming.
While the Russians urgently concentrated on creating the new interceptor, American aerial strategy and planning suddenly and radically changed. For four years U-2 reconnaissance planes had flown over the Soviet Union with impunity, collecting enormous masses of military, scientific and economic intelligence through photography and electronics, and mapping the country so that it could be bombarded precisely in the event of war. Soviet fighters strained upward, vainly trying to shoot at the U-2 sailing above 60,000 feet, and each time fell back downward in futility. The Russians also had begun to fire surface-to-air missiles, but their guidance systems were not yet effective enough.
On May 1, 1960, the Russians fired a barrage of missiles at a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers. As Belenko was told and as a reliable source affirmed to the United States, some of the missiles hit and destroyed at least one MiG pursuing Powers. But one also hit and downed the U-2. This celebrated incident, coupled with estimates of the future capabilities of surface-to-air missiles, forced a reappraisal of American strategy. Ultimately the Americans concluded that missiles eventually would be so lethal that Soviet air defenses could not be penetrated by high-altitude bombers. Penetration would have to be effected at very low rather than very high altitudes. Therefore, the United States canceled the B-70 bomber.
However, the Russians, whether because of simple bureaucratic inertia, apprehensions that the Americans might reverse themselves, or for occult reasons of their own, proceeded to build the new interceptor. And their decision compounded the mystery of the MiG-25. For to the West, it did not seem logical that they would resort to enormous cost and effort to solve complex technological problems solely to guard against a threat that had been withdrawn.