Skunk Works

Other Voices

Richard Helms

(Director of the CIA from 1966 to 1973)

The U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union provided us with the greatest intelligence breakthrough of the twentieth century. For the first time, American policymakers had accurate, credible information on Soviet strategic assets. We could evaluate in real time the other side’s strengths and weaknesses, keep current on their state of preparedness, their research and development, their priorities in defense spending, the state of their infrastructure, and the disposition of their most important military units. It was as if the scales had been lifted from our eyes and we could now see with clarity exactly what it was we were up against. It really was as if we in the intelligence community had cataracts removed, because previous to those splendid U-2 missions our ability to pierce the Iron Curtain was uncertain and the results were often murky. We were forced to use defector information and other unreliable means to sift for clues about what the other side was up to. Given how little solid information actually filtered out to the West, we did a credible job, but the U-2’s cameras leapfrogged us into another dimension altogether. For example, those overflights eliminated almost entirely the ability of the Kremlin ever to launch a surprise preemptive strike against the West. There was no way they could secretly prepare for war without our cameras revealing the size and scope of those activities.

Building the U-2 was absolutely the smartest decision ever made by the CIA. It was the greatest bargain and the greatest triumph of the cold war. And that airplane is still flying and is still tremendously effective. In my opinion, the national security demands that we keep supplying new generations of surveillance aircraft to our policymakers. There is no way to replace the vital data provided by piloted airplanes. Satellites lack the flexibility and the immediacy that only a spy plane like the U-2 can provide. No president or intelligence agency should have to operate with only one eye in such an uncertain and dangerous world.

Richard Bissell

I have no doubt that the U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union made up the most important intelligence-gathering operation ever launched by the West. Until those flights, our side had to be content with some ingenious analysis on our part about their nuclear program, for instance, that later U-2 overflights would confirm as being remarkably correct. We were much less correct about their missile development because we had assumed—quite incorrectly—that they would continue to develop liquid-fuel missiles, while very secretly they dropped that concept and embarked on more sophisticated, solid-state missiles. That caught us by surprise and generated the so-called missile gap.

There was also a profound worry about the size of their long-range bomber fleet. President Eisenhower told Allen Dulles that obtaining a hard count of their bombers was the urgent priority of the intelligence community. And by the time Allen chose me to head the U-2 project, the president told me that he regarded hard intelligence on Russian bombers as the number one item on his national security agenda. He told me that the minute I flashed the signal to him that Kelly Johnson was ready to deliver that airplane, he was ready to give me permission to start those flights.

I told the president that we would probably have two years before the Russians would find a way to bring us down. As it turned out, we had a fruitful four years.

The first flights I decided to bunch. My reasoning was that the first would be the safest, catching them by surprise, so we’d overfly all the highest-priority targets. The first flight was to be over Leningrad, picking up important missile test sites and air bases along the route, then fly the length of the Baltic coast. I stopped by Allen Dulles’s office and told him, “Well, we have an Oval Office green light and we’re off and running.” When I told him the flight plan, he turned deathly pale. A few hours later I was able to inform him that all went well. The next day we scheduled two separate flights, one into the Ukraine and the other well north of that. We were looking for military airfields—our primary target. Only in later months did the location of hardened missile silos take precedence.

It took us four days to get our hands on the photographs from that first mission. I remember vividly standing around a long table with Dulles next to me, both of us chuckling with amazement at the clarity of those incredible black-and-white photos. From seventy thousand feet you could not only count the airplanes lined up at ramps, but tell what they were without a magnifying glass. We were astounded. We had finally pried open the oyster shell of Russian secrecy and discovered a giant pearl. Allen rushed with the first samples over to the Oval Office. He told me that Eisenhower was so excited he spread out the entire batch on the floor and he and Allen viewed the photos like two kids running a model train.

We never knew what we’d find from one mission to the next. Every airfield discovered increased our knowledge dramatically. On one flight a pilot saw a railroad track in the middle of nowhere and followed it and brought back stunning pictures of a Soviet missile launcher at a site we never knew existed. Many other photos were confirmations of locations of important military bases that we had received from our spy network on the inside. We would get a tip about a new plant somewhere, but the informant was uncertain about whether they were manufacturing tanks or missiles, so we would schedule a look. Our first missions out of Pakistan were staged so that we could overfly central Siberia and observe the Trans-Siberian railroad, mainly because we had very sketchy inferential information that atomic facilities were being built there. We brought back very revealing photos indicating that a nuclear test facility was nearly completed on the site.

After only four or five flights our analysts were able to make much firmer estimates of the Soviet bomber strength by types. We had a count on how many planes of each type were photographed sitting out on their ramps. Of course, it was not watertight because airplanes seldom stayed put at one base or another, and it was hard to tell if we were counting the same airplanes seen at base A that now appeared at base B, or if these were additional ones. But the accumulated weight of evidence from these flights caused the president of the United States to draw in a deep breath, smile, and relax a bit. I was able to assure him that the so-called bomber gap seemed to be nonexistent.

By six months into the overflights we turned our attention to their missile development. We found big research and development bases at the head of the Caspian Sea and just east of the Volga, and saw hard evidence of a number of experimental launches that had taken place there. We found a big radar installation at Sari Sagan, between Turkistan and Siberia, and also a down-range site under construction near there, so we began to monitor this particular section very closely.

Our estimates of their SAM missiles was that they could reach the altitude of the U-2 but that their surface controls were effective only up to fifty-five thousand feet and any higher than that they couldn’t control a missile and bring it home for a kill against our spy plane.

But the very unpleasant surprise was the ease with which they tracked every single one of our flights—almost from takeoff. Yet, until the Powers flight, they had never come close to hitting us. On one night flight out of Turkey they had actually scrambled fifty-seven fighters against one U-2. And on many occasions they were flying squadrons fifteen thousand feet underneath the U-2, trying to block the view. Kelly Johnson called that “aluminum clouds.”

After the first few flights they tracked, they could infer the U-2’s range, speed, altitude, and radar cross section, so they knew all the important essentials about the airplane which we cloaked under the deepest secrecy.

Ironically, the two governments, in their abiding hostility, were collaborating to keep these flights secret from the public. Because if they were ever revealed, the Russians would have to present us with an ultimatum and admit that they were impotent in stopping these flights over their territory. It must have been terribly upsetting inside the Kremlin knowing that the enemy could overfly with impunity. So I was constantly pressing Eisenhower for more flights and he was constantly resisting me. I had to go to the mat on nearly every authorization because he was following the advice of the other Dulles brother, John Foster, our secretary of state, who was wringing his hands over the spy flights right from the beginning.

We flew fewer than thirty missions over those four years, but each of them was a remarkable success. We accumulated about one million two hundred thousand feet of film—a strip almost two hundred and fifty miles long, that covered more than a million square miles of the Soviet Union. The flights provided vital data on the Soviet atomic energy program, their development of fissionable materials, their weapons development and testing, and the location and size of their nuclear stockpile. It also gave us precise information on the location of their air defense systems, air bases, and missile sites; submarine pens and naval installations; their order of battle, operational techniques, and transportation and communications networks. By the Pentagon’s own estimate, 90 percent of all hard data on Soviet military development came directly from the cameras on board the U-2.

As early as three years before Powers was shot down, I flew out to Burbank with my deputy, Colonel Jack Gibbs, to meet with Kelly about the future. We estimated that the U-2 was operating on borrowed time after the two-year mark. I said to Kelly, “We’ve got to begin now to design a successor.” He told me he had already begun thinking about a liquid hydrogen-powered airplane and was looking at ways to make his own liquid hydrogen fuel and build his own tank farm. A hydrogen-powered airplane was certainly ambitious, and in those days Kelly seemed entirely capable of moving the world.