The U-2 spy plane figured in two of the most consequential American-Soviet confrontations of the Cold War. One plane, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. President Eisenhower, assured by the CIA that neither the plane nor the pilot could have survived, insisted a weather reconnaissance aircraft had gone astray. After the USSR produced the pilot, still quite alive, and pieces of the aircraft, Eisenhower was forced to admit he had lied, then apologized and watched helplessly as his plans for a great-power summit collapsed. Two years later, U-2 planes discovered that the Russians had lied about the presence of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in Cuba, bringing the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war before Nikita Khrushchev backed down.
While traditional forms of espionage—stealing documents or suborning those who possess secrets—remain staples of today’s intelligence agencies, the U-2 was one of the earliest high-tech attempts to peer into the secrets of America’s enemies. Its successes and failures demonstrate some of the risks and rewards of new methods of espionage.
Two recent books explore the history of the U-2 project, some of the people who created it, and its impact on American foreign-policy-making. Neither offers any new revelations or digs into previously closed or unknown sources. Both are written in a lively, popular style, making them enjoyable reads, although one suffers from cloying, breathless, and overly dramatized prose.
Monte Reel tells the more interesting story in A Brotherhood of Spies by focusing on four men who played critical roles in the U-2’s history—Edwin Land, a brilliant scientist and founder of Polaroid; Kelly Johnson, the legendary aerospace designer at Lockheed; Richard Bissell, the hard-driving CIA official who oversaw the plane’s development and missions; and Francis Gary Powers, the pilot whose plane was downed over the Soviet Union.
Four more disparate people could hardly be imagined. Land, a Jewish immigrant from Kiev, son of a scrap-metal dealer, had built a business empire on his inventions and was one of the wealthiest men in America. Johnson grew up in a poor mining town in Michigan before quickly working his way up the corporate ladder at Lockheed, where he had designed the P‑38 Lightning and the P‑80 Shooting Star, America’s first combat jet plane. Lockheed gave him enormous autonomy in running his now-famous Skunk Works R&D facility. Bissell was born to America’s elite, attended Groton and Yale, and abandoned his America First isolationism after Pearl Harbor. Hired by the CIA in 1953, his first assignment had been to facilitate the overthrow of the left-wing Árbenz government in Guatemala. Powers, a product of western Virginia coal country, was newly married to a difficult woman and struggling with money problems when he was recruited for a top-secret project that promised adventure and a far better salary than his Air Force pay.
The U-2 was the product of fear. In 1949 American officials and the public had been blindsided by a years-earlier-than-expected Soviet atomic test. In response, President Truman ordered development of the H-bomb. Further spooked by the Soviet rollout of new long-range bombers in 1954, and by speculation that these bombers left the United States vulnerable to a devastating surprise attack, President Eisenhower tasked James Killian, president of MIT, with convening a scientific panel to consider how to respond. How serious was the Soviet threat? The CIA had had little success in recruiting spies within the USSR. Land, participating in the panel out of patriotic concerns, argued that a plane capable of flying at very high altitudes, above Soviet radar, equipped with a high-resolution camera, could provide the intelligence that would allow the administration to base its policies on hard data.
There was a design available; Kelly Johnson had cooked up for the Air Force plans for an unarmed craft with very long wings and a narrow fuselage. But Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay—perhaps because he considered unarmed airplanes anathema, perhaps as payback for a clash with Johnson years earlier over the technical feasibility of nuclear-powered aircraft—rejected Johnson’s design as a “bunch of s—.” Land was informed of Johnson’s design and was immediately attracted by its promise of flying at 70,000 feet, almost at the edge of space. He was also convinced that it would allow the United States to avoid the dangerous and immoral activities associated with traditional espionage.
Land and Killian enlisted the CIA as an ally and Eisenhower approved the project. Today, when building a new airport can take more than a decade and rolling out a new weapons system is an exercise of staggering complexity, the breathtaking speed with which the U-2 was developed seems impossible. Johnson promised to provide 20 planes in 8 months and have them operational in 20 months at a cost of $22 million. That the U-2 was produced on time and under budget was astonishing enough; given the technological problems that had to be solved it was a truly remarkable feat, in no small degree owed to Bissell’s exacting oversight.
Designers had to develop a new aerial camera with a higher resolution and greater range than anything yet in existence. Kodak’s new but as yet untried polyethylene plastic provided a photographic film much lighter than the standard acetate-based film, thereby cutting down the plane’s weight significantly. Thin aluminum framing, the use of light bolts instead of steel rivets, and special low-vapor kerosene all had to be developed. A desolate test site, some 75 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was designed and set up within three weeks. (The secretive use of this site, called Area 51, led to many pop-conspiracy theories about its purpose.) And in July 1955, one day before the eight-month deadline, a disassembled U-2 was shipped from California to Nevada and put together. The first test drive—a chance just to check the engine by taxiing around on the ground—was almost a disaster: Because of its unique wing structure, the plane accidentally became airborne without the pilot even knowing; he had to make a forced landing.
Changes were improvised on the fly. Originally designed to land on its belly—to obviate the need for heavy landing gear—the plane soon had rudimentary wheels added. Pogo sticks were used to keep the long wings from collapsing before the plane was airborne. The pilots had to breathe from tanks of pressurized pure oxygen for two hours to drain nitrogen from their blood and then were fitted into uncomfortable pressure suits. Sweating profusely, U-2 pilots could lose up to 10 pounds on a long flight. The plane was tricky to fly; several pilots were killed in crashes.
But the U-2 produced results. Early flights over the United States gave remarkable images; Eisenhower was shown details of a flight over his Gettysburg farm and was stunned by the level of detail and clarity. His concern that the plane might be shot down or crash over the Soviet Union was assuaged by the CIA’s “absolutely categorical” assurance that the pilot could not survive a crash. A self-destruct button could be used to destroy the plane and all its equipment. While pilots were given a poison pin and assured they could eject and parachute to earth, Bissell was confident that, at worst, the American government could explain a crash as the result of a weather reconnaissance plane getting lost and crashing, and that no pilot would survive.
The first U-2 overflights of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union began in 1956. The intelligence was invaluable; pictures revealed that the Soviet long-range bomber program was still in its infancy. Photos of secret naval bases, missile sites, and industrial plants gave priceless data to CIA analysts. But from the U-2’s very first flight over Soviet territory, radar stations were able to detect it. The Soviet Union protested the violation of its airspace and embarked on a program to build surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) capable of reaching its altitude. While the State Department dismissed the Soviet claims, Eisenhower now required that he personally approve all future flights. They continued for several more years, identifying chemical weapons sites and nuclear testing facilities. By late 1958, perhaps 90 percent of the hard intelligence on the Soviet Union came from U-2 flights. Bissell moved up to the number two position in the CIA and was widely regarded as Allen Dulles’s successor as director.
Eisenhower, because of his upcoming summit with Premier Khrushchev, wanted no overflights after May 1, 1960. Francis Gary Powers, the most experienced U-2 pilot, took off that day for a long flight over the heart of the USSR. Because it was a Russian national holiday, there were virtually no commercial flights and radar was able to track his plane. Over Sverdlovsk, a SAM exploded near his craft, disabling it; he barely was able to eject himself. (A detail that Reel does not mention: The proximity fuse that brought down Powers’s U-2 was directly modeled on the one stolen by Julius Rosenberg and handed over to his KGB controller at a Manhattan automat during World War II.)
Describing Powers’s subsequent trial, conviction, and exchange for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, Reel largely plods over ground that will already be familiar to readers who know about this Cold War episode. In the United States some commentators and military men were angered that Powers had not killed himself or that he had confessed, but Reel agrees with the CIA’s assessment that he had behaved honorably and given the Russians only information he was sure they already had. After returning to the United States in 1962, Powers was hired by Johnson, working at Lockheed until around 1969. He died in 1977 when a news helicopter he was piloting crashed in Los Angeles.
Johnson went on to design for Lockheed spy planes intended to fly higher and faster than the U-2 and to be much harder for radar to detect. One of these, the SR-71, turned out to be the fastest airplane ever built; even now, two decades after its retirement, it holds the world airspeed record.
Land remained an adviser to the government on national security matters until the early 1970s, when it was revealed that his name was on one of President Nixon’s “enemies lists.” (Land “was particularly honored,” a friend recalled, “as it was the only honor he had received without working for.”) His experimentation, innovation, and style of leadership at Polaroid inspired, among others, Steve Jobs, who called him a “national treasure.”
The U-2 fiasco did not damage Bissell’s career, but it collapsed the following year after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion that he spearheaded.
If Reel’s book is the saga of a remarkable technology that revolutionized the business of spying but wound up embarrassing the government when a mission failed, Casey Sherman and Michael Tougias explain the role played by the U-2 in the Cuban missile crisis a few years later. Above and Beyond highlights both the dangers of the spy flights and the hazards they created in 1962 as the United States and the USSR came frighteningly close to nuclear war. Much of the book rehearses the well-known timeline of the crisis. Its short, dramatically written, episodic chapters read more like an article in People than serious historical analysis, and its breathless odes to John Kennedy (“we are all lucky that someone as levelheaded as John Fitzgerald Kennedy occupied the White House on October 27, 1962”; he “was no stranger to death, which is why he had fought so hard to preserve life”) ignore how JFK’s foreign policy mistakes and misjudgments helped fuel the crisis.
There was evidence that Soviet military shipments to Cuba were increasing, but the Kennedy administration, wary of provoking the Soviet Union during a period of rising tensions, had limited U-2 overflights of the island—worried that if one were shot down unpleasant echoes of both Powers’s ill-fated flight and the Bay of Pigs invasion could damage America’s image around the world. Khrushchev, convinced that JFK was weak, insisted that the Soviets were only supplying Cuba with defensive weapons to thwart another American attack on the island. Finally, Kennedy, concerned about the political and military costs of ignoring the buildup, okayed the first U-2 flight in six weeks—and was stunned when an October 14 flight provided clear evidence that the Soviets were installing medium-range ballistic missile sites. Subsequent missions determined that the sites were close to being operational and that they likely would have nuclear missiles mounted on them.
The most interesting portions of Above and Beyond focus on several of the U-2 pilots who flew missions during the tense standoff after the United States imposed a blockade of Cuba. Although Capt. Chuck Maultsby flew his U-2 in Alaska, collecting air samples from Soviet bomb tests, one of his flights during the crisis, on October 27, nearly provoked an aerial battle. Flying by celestial navigation near the North Pole with no visual landmarks, he went far off course after the stars were obscured by the aurora borealis. Unable to establish radio contact, Maultsby wandered into Soviet territory and was tracked by Soviet MiGs for more than 300 miles but they were unable to reach his altitude. American planes sent up to find and protect him were themselves armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles. After a harrowing flight of more than 10 hours, he finally landed safely.
Things ended much worse for Maj. Rudy Anderson, killed when his U-2 was shot down by a SAM, also on October 27, just two days after another U-2 had been fired upon over Cuba. In both cases, the decision to try to shoot down the planes was made by lower-level Soviet military generals stationed in Cuba. Anderson was not the first pilot to die flying a U-2; as early as 1956, three had died during training accidents. But his death—and the possibility that any other surveillance flights by the defenseless U-2s might be targeted—led the Joint Chiefs of Staff to recommend attacks on the Cuban SAM sites by October 29 and a full-scale invasion a week later. Only the U.S.-Soviet agreement reached on October 28—in which the Russians agreed to remove the ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads in return for an American pledge not to invade and to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey—prevented the crisis from turning into a war.
The crucial role played by the U-2 in confirming that the USSR did not have the long-range bomber capability to strike the United States and that Soviet offensive missiles had reached Cuba was intelligence that American officials could not have received from human sources or that would not have been as believable without photographic images. Gathering that intelligence required both vision and risk.
Like all technologies, the U-2 had its limitations, and the Soviet Union eventually developed measures that reduced its effectiveness and raised the costs of using it. Ironically, during Powers’s trial a spy satellite, Discoverer 14, went into successful orbit, flying hundreds of miles above the USSR and providing more information than all previous U-2 flights, albeit with less clear resolution. Given the many reconnaissance satellites now in orbit, not to mention the advent of unmanned aircraft for aerial surveillance, one would think that the U-2 would have been retired long ago. But remarkably, it still remains in use by American intelligence: Its capabilities have kept it flying in the Middle East, and although there have been several efforts to retire the U-2, current plans have the spy plane remaining in service indefinitely.
