Skunk Works

Other Voices

James R. Schlesinger

(Director of the CIA 1973; Secretary of Defense from 1973 to 1975)

As secretary of defense, I confronted my own version of a Cuban missile crisis scenario in the mid-1970s, when I suddenly found myself under enormous political pressure and the U-2 came to my rescue and bailed me out. This happened during the Ford administration, in the spring of 1975, a period during which the Soviets were aggressively establishing bases and influence in northeastern Africa, in places like Somalia, Angola, and Uganda. Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, was pushing aggressively for detente with the Soviets. He and I were on opposite ends of a tug of war about establishing an American naval base in the Indian Ocean on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia. Kissinger was adamantly opposed to building such a base and had a lot of powerful support for his position in Congress. Democratic Majority Leader Mike Mansfield urged that the entire Indian Ocean region remain “a zone of peace” that would preclude us from operating there. The dispute with Congress over that base was endless. The Russians also screamed loudly about the provocation of an American naval installation in the Indian Ocean, even though they were crawling all over the place, aggressively extending their influence throughout the region. We had good intelligence on what they were up to in Somalia and Uganda, which were pretty much under their domination.

In April, spy satellite photos landed on my desk showing that the Soviets had constructed a missile handling and storage facility at the Somalian port of Berbera, commanding strategic approaches to the Red Sea, which would be a depot for storing Styx missiles used by the Soviet fleet in the Indian Ocean. These were missiles fired against other ships. The pictures provided proof of a Soviet military buildup in the area, but I was stymied by a blanket injunction against any public disclosure of satellite photography, extending even to members of Congress. In those days we didn’t admit that spy satellites existed, so I could not release the pictures, especially to make a political point. Instead, I ordered the Air Force to schedule a U-2 flight over the Berbera installation and provide overhead photos that I could make available to the press. The photos taken by the U-2 were superb, and I decided to go public and announced that the Soviets had begun storing missiles in Somalia. I knew that my announcement would fire a lot of angry skepticism in my direction, among detente proponents on the Hill as well as among some in the press, who heaped scorn on the Pentagon, claiming we were eager to sabotage detente and using scare tactics to overcome congressional opposition to a U.S. base in the Indian Ocean. The Russians and the Somalis vigorously denied my accusation. The Russians claimed they were only building a meat-packing plant at Berbera, and nothing more. Kissinger was concerned that I was about to upset his detente policy, so he was not enamored about having me release the U-2 pictures to the press to prove my contention. To be frank, he was rather infuriated with me over the entire episode, especially when I showed the U-2 pictures to the Senate Armed Services Committee and gave copies to the New York Times, which ran a picture in early June. The Russians called the picture “a mirage,” intended to win support for a larger Pentagon budget. But for me the release of those U-2 photos became a jolly good episode. Once again, overhead photography caught the Russians trying to upset strategic balances just as they had in the Cuban missile crisis by secretly extending their military capabilities on friendly shores. But before that summer ended, the U-2 pictures had nailed our case: the Somali government backed off its futile denials and, trying to save face and win congressional support for drought aid, actually invited us into Berbera to build a naval supply installation of our own.