Skunk Works

Other Voices

Marty Knutson

I was the first pilot selected to fly in the U-2 program and made the third flight over the Soviet Union on the morning of July 8, 1956. I was a twenty-six-year-old with a thousand hours of fighter time, who had almost died of disappointment the first time I saw the U-2. I looked in the cockpit and saw that the damn thing had a yoke, or steering wheel. The last straw. Either you flew with a stick like a self-respecting fighter jock or you were a crappy bomber driver—a goddam disgrace—who steered with a yoke, like a damned truck driver at the steering wheel of a big rig.

I wound up flying that U-2 for the CIA for the next twenty-nine years. It was a bitch to land and easy to stall out, but I fell in love. I was just crazy enough to enjoy the danger.

Now here I was flying over Russia in a fragile little airplane with a wingspan as long as the damned Brooklyn Bridge—and below I could see three hundred miles in every direction. This was enemy territory, big time. In those days especially, I had a very basic attitude about the Soviet Union—man, it was an evil empire, a forbidding, alien place and I sure as hell didn’t want to crash-land in the middle of it. I had to pinch myself that I was actually flying over the Soviet Union.

I began the day by eating a high-protein breakfast, steak and eggs, then put on the bulky pressure suit and the heavy helmet and had to lie down in a contour chair for two hours before taking off and breathe pure oxygen. The object was to purge the nitrogen out of my system to avoid getting the bends if I had to come down quick from altitude.

I knew from being briefed by the two other guys who flew these missions ahead of me to expect a lot of Soviet air activity. Those bastards tracked me from the minute I took off, which was an unpleasant surprise. We thought we would be invisible to their radar at such heights. No dice. Through my drift sight I saw fifteen Russian MiGs following me from about fifteen thousand feet below. The day before, Carmen Vito had followed the railroad tracks right into Moscow and actually saw two MiGs collide and crash while attempting to climb to his altitude.

Vito had a close call. The ground crew had put his poison cyanide pill in the wrong pocket. We were issued the pill in case of capture and torture and all that good stuff, but given the option whether to use it or not. But Carmen didn’t know the cyanide was in the right breast pocket of his coveralls when he dropped in a fistful of lemon-flavored cough drops. The cyanide pill was supposed to be in an inside pocket. Vito felt his throat go dry as he approached Moscow for the first time—who could blame him? So he fished in his pocket for a cough drop and grabbed the cyanide pill instead and popped it into his mouth. He started to suck on it. Luckily he realized his mistake in a split second and spit it out in horror before it could take effect. Had he bit down he would have died instantly and crashed right into Red Square. Just imagine the international uproar!

I kept my cyanide pill in an inside pocket and prayed that I would not have an engine flameout. A flameout meant I had a pack of goddam problems on my hands that might well land me in a Russian morgue or in some goddam gulag.

I was all pumped up—like flying combat in Korea. Nothing in the cockpit was automated back then. We had to fly a precise line at seventy thousand feet, looking through the drift sight and using maps. I’d compare what I was seeing through the sight to what the map showed. Pretty damned primitive, like 1930s flying, by the seat of the pants. But we all grew very skilled at it.

I flew over Leningrad and it blew my mind because Leningrad was my target as a SAC pilot and I spent two years training with maps and films, and here I was, coming in from the same direction as in the SAC battle plan, looking down on it through my sights. Only this time I was lining up for photos, not a bomb drop. It was a crystal-clear day and about twenty minutes out of Leningrad I hit pay dirt. This was exactly what the president of the United States was waiting to see. I flew right over a bomber base called Engels Airfield and there, lined up and waiting for my cameras, were thirty Bison bombers. This would prove the worst, I thought. Because the powers that be back in Washington feared that we were facing a huge bomber gap. I proved the gap—or so I thought. As it turned out, my pictures were rushed by Allen Dulles to the Oval Office. For several weeks there was real consternation, but then the results of other flights began coming in and my thirty Bisons were the only ones spotted in that whole massive goddam country, so our people began to relax a little and we turned our attention to their missile production.

I flew hundreds of missions for the agency after that, but that moment over Engels Airfield I considered the most important of any ride I took. I was overflying the most secretive society on the face of the earth, about whom we knew little, and here arrayed below with no place to hide from my lens was a big chunk of their airpower. I remember mumbling, “Holy shit,” as those cameras whirred. I knew that this was an espionage coup second to none in importance and significance.

After those first flights the Russians went all out to stop the U-2. The Russian ambassador delivered a formal protest to the State Department, and the Kremlin privately threatened the Germans to either close us down or face a rocket attack on the base. KGB agents parked in big black cars just outside the fence, watching us take off and land. So we moved to a base in southern Turkey. Most of these Turkish flights monitored Soviet missile test sites on their southern border. Sputnik went up October 1957, the Russians putting the first object into space orbit, and they bragged about their ICBM capabilities to reach anywhere in the U.S., although they had no test launches from May 1958 to the following February. Ike was being roasted alive by the press for letting them get the jump on us. We covered Tyuratam, their missile test facility, nuclear test sites, and Kapustin Yar, their operational center for ABMs.

I flew on the eastern side of the Urals to observe their missile test launches. The CIA had spies on the ground who tipped us off whenever there would be a missile test. We usually had one day’s notice to get ready and needed the president’s approval to monitor the shot. By the fall of 1959, they were test-firing one missile a week. I made one or two of those observation flights and they were truly spectacular. I flew in the dead of night over some of the most remote terrain in the world. No lights down there. On a moonless night it was like flying through an ocean of ink. I flew with a big camera perched on my lap. The camera was hand-held and had special film that could determine from the flame shooting from the rocket’s nozzle what kind of fuel they were using and even how they were making their rockets. The U-2 also had special sniffers, installed on the outside fuselage, that would pick up chemical traces in the air after the firing for analysis back in Washington. Suddenly, the sky lit up and that big rocket roared off the pad. I snapped away, taking pictures of that plume for a matter of seconds before it disappeared into space. The Russians never even knew I was up there.

But the most exciting mission I ever flew was out of a small landing field at Peshawar in Pakistan, where we had a support unit set up in late 1958. The flight was so long range that there was no way for me to get back to the base. My main target was in Kazakhstan, a radar and missile test center, then on to a nuclear test site near Semipalatinsk and finally an overflight of a main ICBM launch test facility. By then I would have stretched the airplane’s range to the limit and would be nearly out of gas. The plan called for me to glide over the Urals to save fuel and land at a tiny World War II airstrip near Zahedan, in Iran, right in the triangle where Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan converge. The agency would send in a C-130 with agents armed with grenades and tommy guns to secure the base from mountain bandits who controlled that territory. If I made it across the border and saw a cloud of black smoke, it meant that the field was being attacked by the bandits. If that happened, I was supposed to eject and bail out. I crossed the Russian border with only a hundred gallons of fuel remaining. Really getting hairy. I didn’t see any smoke, so I came in and landed with less than twenty gallons left in the tank. One of the agents had a six pack of beer icing. They had an antenna set up and were supposed to send a coded message that I was safe. One of the guys came to me and said, “Our equipment is down. I know you’re a ham operator, do you, by any chance, know Morse code?” I’m sitting there under a blazing sun, still in my pressure suit, sipping a beer in one hand, and with the other tapping out the dots and dashes.

About the start of 1959 we began seeing ominous activities going on inside Russia. Around their strategic bases were strange Star of David patterns. We learned quickly enough that that meant the construction of ground-to-air missile sites. We now had orders that if we saw any new Star of David patterns, we were to deviate from the flight plan and go film them. These first SAMs couldn’t reach us. The optimum use of their surface controls was lower—fifty-five thousand feet—to be used against our bombers. But we figured we were flying on borrowed time. Sooner or later, one of us would get nailed. I knew for sure it would be the other guy.

They tried to stop us by trying to ram us with their fighters like a ballistic missile. They stripped down some of their MiG-21s and flew straight up at top speed, arcing up to sixty-eight thousand feet before flaming out and falling back toward earth. Presumably they got a relight down around thirty-five thousand feet. I’m sure they lost some airplanes and pilots playing kamikaze missile. It was crazy, but it showed how angry and desperate they were becoming.

By the winter of 1960, we were getting intelligence briefings warning us about improvements in Soviet tracking and SAM capability. Their new SA-2 missile was an improved version of what they previously had, capable of reaching us and equipped with a powerful warhead that could be lethal if exploded within four hundred feet of an airplane. We gave the SA-2 a wide berth whenever possible. I have to admit we were all getting plenty worried. We had long since installed ejection seats. That was one item of added weight no one in his right mind would do without.