Skunk Works

The Taiwanese squadron, which became known as the Black Cats, was a joint CIA-Taiwanese operation, flying from Taoyuan airfield, just south of Taipei. These U-2 flights over Red China lasted for more than fourteen years, from late in 1959 until 1974, when President Nixon finally put a stop to them in deference to his new diplomatic opening to the People’s Republic. But especially during the early 1960s, the overflights were considered by the intelligence community to be extremely urgent. We needed hard information on Chinese nuclear and missile development. The Pentagon was particularly eager to learn how the Sino-Soviet split was affecting China’s military capacity and its weapons procurements.

The flights were much more grueling and dangerous than the Soviet overflights—typical eight- to ten-hour missions calling for a three-thousand-mile flight over hostile territory practically from takeoff to landing. To reach the highest-priority targets of nuclear test sites in northwestern China and the Chiuchuan intermediate ballistic missile range in Kansu province meant flying twelve-hour round-trips. Over the years, as Chinese ground-to-air missile defenses improved, the Taiwanese took a pounding. Four U-2s were shot down and their pilots lost. During the sixties, the remains of those downed airplanes were put on display in downtown Peking, and the overflights so enraged the Communist Chinese, they offered $250,000 in gold to the Taiwanese pilot who would defect with a U-2 to the mainland. And no wonder. The intelligence acquired by these flights was so revealing that U.S. experts were able to accurately predict when the Chinese would finally test their first nuclear weapon in October 1964.

Back in Burbank, we did what we could to help cut down the U-2 losses. We developed improved electronic counter-measures (ECM), calculated to confuse Chinese radar operators working their SA-2 ground-to-air missile systems. On radar screens the U-2 would present a false display so that the missile would be launched in the wrong piece of sky. Our ECM package was bulky and heavy and cost around two hundred gallons of fuel-carrying capacity, cutting into range and altitude performance.

Some of the more distant nuclear test sites near the Tibetan border were out of range of the Taiwan-based U-2s. To cover these targets the agency flew from dirt landing strips in India and Pakistan on an ad hoc basis. In fact, three months before Powers was shot down over Russia, a CIA pilot flew from a secret base in Thailand against Chinese nuclear facilities. The U-2 dropped a javelin spike that we had dreamed up that contained special miniature seismic sensors to record an expected thermonuclear bomb test. Unfortunately, we never got any data back and never learned why. But the pilot on that mission was forced to crash-land short of his base in Thailand and came down in a rice paddy. He was able to negotiate a deal with the village headman: the villagers helped him to cut up the U-2 and put the pieces aboard oxcarts and haul it to a clearing, where a CIA C-124 landed the next day and took him and his plane out. In return, the agency paid the headman five hundred bucks to build a schoolhouse. Gary Powers should have been so lucky.