Skunk Works

During the final winter of the U-2 overflights of Russia, Kelly Johnson came back from a visit to CIA headquarters looking profoundly gloomy. He couldn’t believe how easily the Russians were tracking our overflights and knew it was only a matter of time before their ground-to-air missile defenses caught up with their prowess in radar development and blew us out of the sky. “Putting fixes on this airplane won’t do any good. We need a fresh piece of paper,” Kelly told a group of us. His mind was already churning, thinking about the U-2’s successor that could survive flying above Moscow. He had asked our ace mathematician Bill Schroeder to predict how long it would take the Soviets to bring down a U-2 with their latest missile system. Schroeder gave the U-2 less than a year.

One of our engineers came back from a quick-fix visit to the secret U-2 base in Turkey to say that the morale among the pilots was sagging. The guys were worried about new SA-2 missile sites under construction around the Soviet Union’s main target areas. The president was very aware of the growing dangers and had cut back sharply on authorizing U-2 missions. And the trip our engineer made to Turkey indicated the growing concerns about pilot safety: he was on hand to supervise a new “black box” installed into the U-2’s tail section to electronically counter incoming radar beams and scatter them away. In the jargon of the trade, the box was called an ECM—electronic counter-measure—and would hopefully prevent a missile fired at a U-2 from locking on.

The word Kelly received from Dick Bissell was that the intelligence community was pushing hard for at least one more overflight over Tyuratam, the big Russian missile test center deep in the Urals, since a recent flight had revealed significant advances toward development of their first operational intercontinental missile. Eisenhower was ready to approve the follow-up flight, but the State Department heard about it and Secretary of State Christian Herter was strongly opposed. Herter had replaced John Foster Dulles, who had died of cancer earlier in the year, and was worried that any overflight might upset the delicate planning that had revolved around a summit in Paris between Ike and Khrushchev scheduled to start on May 14.

Bissell told Kelly that Allen Dulles had wrested one final flight out of the president, provided it took place two weeks before the Paris summit. The target date was May 1, 1960, the Soviet May Day, akin to our Fourth of July. We hoped to catch them with their defenses down, with only skeleton crews at work.

As it turned out, our black box and the route of the mission finally selected would seal the fate of that tragic last flight. Ike had signed off on two mission options and left the final decision to the CIA. The choices were missions code-named Time Step, which would overfly certain key nuclear and missile test sites, and Grand Slam, a marathon nine-hour mission from Pakistan clear across Russia to land at a base in Bodo, Norway. The heart of Grand Slam was overflying Tyuratam, then heading south to photograph the huge military-industrial complexes at Sverdlovsk and Plesetsk. All were heavily defended.

The two plans were sent for review to the Air Force chief of staff, General Nathan Twining, who quickly spotted a flaw in the Grand Slam mission and called Allen Dulles to personally urge changes. Twining had noticed that the proposed mission repeated the exact route into Sverdlovsk from the south used less than a month earlier by U-2 pilot Marty Knutson. “Allen, if you come in that way again, they’ll know exactly where you are heading and will just be lying in wait. You’ll get nailed.” Dulles obviously didn’t agree. He personally chose Grand Slam with no changes.

Because the mission would be so demanding and long, covering 3,700 miles from Pakistan to Norway, the agency chose its most experienced pilot and the best navigator of the group—thirty-four-year-old Francis Gary Powers. The pilot had twenty-seven U-2 missions logged, including several marathon-length flights across the eastern Mediterranean in 1956 to gather intelligence on the movements of British and French warships participating with Israel in attacking Egypt during the Suez crisis.