Operation Overflight (52 page)

The most immediate result, however, was anger; and that anger needed an outlet, someone to blame.

Many criticized President Eisenhower for making the unprecedented admission that he had authorized espionage. Boxed into a corner by Khrushchev, given a choice between this and the admission he was not in charge of his own government, he really had little opportunity to do otherwise. Yet I personally feel it says much for the President that he chose this alternative to one of the “easy outs,” such as making Allen Dulles or “Newman” and Powers the scapegoats.

Others found another target. Following the lead of the Russians, they made the pilot the symbol. It was far easier to fix the blame on a single individual, as did Representative Cannon when he suggested the fault might lie in “some psychological defect” in the pilot, than to accept the unpleasant fact that the blame would have to be shared by a great many people.

The impression that I had “told everything,” the belief that I had gone against orders by refusing to kill myself, my statement during the trial that I was “sorry,” added weight to the censure.

There were good and valid reasons why the CIA did nothing to clear up these impressions during my imprisonment.

It was otherwise when I returned home.

A scapegoat, by dictionary definition, is one made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place.

The making of scapegoats is also an excuse to avoid facing the truth.

These, to my mind, were some of the mistakes made during the U-2 incident. I state them here neither to justify my own conduct nor to engage in Monday-morning quarterbacking (it is rather late for that, thanks to the eight-year suppression of this story). Nor is it my intention to join those who would make the Central Intelligence Agency a repository of all our national ills. This simplistic attitude is only another manifestation of scapegoatism. I believe in the value of accurate, properly evaluated intelligence. Its lack, I feel strongly, is one of the greatest dangers our system of government faces in this thermonuclear age. The CIA is a major part of our intelligence apparatus. I have no desire to subvert it.

But this does not mean I wouldn't like to see it function better. Although these are strong criticisms, I feel they are both constructive and fair. They should come as no surprise to the CIA; they are much the same complaints I made in the debriefings upon my return, in my work with the training section. Perhaps unrealistically, I had hoped that by now some of these lessons would have been learned.

Having stated this, I also wish to make it clear that I do not approve of everything the CIA has done. While the lack of accurate intelligence may be one of the greatest threats to our national survival, it is not the only one. Sometimes in our rush to achieve an objective we overlook our reason for pursuing it. It would be
tragic if, in the process of trying to protect our government, we forgot that it was founded upon the concept of the worth of the individual.

These are some of the negative aspects of the U-2 incident. There is, I believe, a more positive side to the whole affair.

There are many turning points in history; the U-2 incident was one. Never again would we look at the world in quite the same way. Never again would we be quite so innocent.

When my U-2 was shot down, a number of our most cherished illusions went crashing down with it: that the United States was too honorable to use the deplorable enemy tactics of espionage; that we were incapable of acting in our own defense, until after being attacked.

I'm not too sure the loss was all that great.

As a people, we Americans grew up a little in May, I960, and during the days that followed. As with any growing process, it was at times a painful experience.

Yet I suspect that, for more than a few persons, reaction to the disclosure that we were keeping our eyes on Russia must have been similar to what I first felt in 1956 on learning of Operation Overflight; pride that the United States could conceive and carry out an intelligence operation of such boldness and importance; relief that we weren't asleep, weren't totally unprepared.

I'm also inclined to agree with Philip M. Wagner, when he wrote in the June, 1962,
Harper's
that President Eisenhower's admission that the United States was engaged in espionage “had a number of wholesome effects.”

“For one thing, it invoked a sudden respect for American intelligence work which had not been general in Europe. In invoked that same respect in Russia. It also caused abrupt revision of estimates of American military strength, and such estimates are important influences on the course of diplomacy. If we had been able to keep that secret, what other secrets were we perhaps keeping? Were we as weak as many had been saying? Possibly not. It caused other revisions of judgment. U-2 was damning commentary on the supposed invulnerability of Russian air defense.”

Also, I'm not too sure some of those negative aspects mightn't prove to be of positive value. It isn't necessarily bad that we've become suspicious of the motives behind some of our governmental pronouncements, that we question whether certain information is
being withheld from the public because of “national security” or for strictly political reasons, that our elected leaders are on occasion called upon to justify their actions to the people they represent, that we demand—though we don't always obtain—a greater honesty from our officials.

The alternative is the kind of government to be found in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Communist China, and elsewhere.

Following the U-2 incident, espionage attained an acceptance in the United States reaching the dimensions of a popular fad. Beginning with America's discovery of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and the popularity of such TV shows as
I Spy
it progressed to the much more realistic novels of John LeCarré and others.

In I960, in the earliest cover stories following the downing of the U-2, the United States denied its engagement in anything so distasteful as espionage.

In 1968, with the capture of the
Pueblo,
the United States was frank from the outset in admitting that the ship's mission was intelligence-gathering.

In my trial in August, I960, when, acting on the advice of counsel, I stated that I was “deeply repentant and profoundly sorry,” many in the U.S. damned me for doing so.

In December, 1968, when a representative of the United States government signed a document admitting that the
Pueblo
had invaded North Korean waters, at the same time stating that this was a lie, done only to effect the release of the crew, there was little criticism of his action.

For better or worse, we've grown up to accept some of the realities of our times, unpleasant though they may be.

But then, we're not the only ones who've done so. In I960 the Soviet Union was still denying that it used spies. In 1962 the release of Powers and Abel was not an exchange, for Abel was not one of theirs; it was simply a gesture of Soviet humaneness, on behalf of the families of the two men (which, presumably out of modesty, they did not bother to announce in the USSR). It was therefore with more than a little amusement that I read a wire-service report in November, 1969, describing an event in East Berlin. One of that city's streets was being renamed for Richard Sorge, the remarkable agent who stole German and Japanese secrets for the Russians. Present for the dedication ceremony, according to the account from behind the Iron Curtain, were Russia's most famous spies, including one Rudolf Abel.

In 1970 the U-2 will celebrate its fifteenth birthday. Those few which remain, that is.

Of the original aircraft, less than one-third survive. None died of old age. None were junked for parts. All met violent ends. Communist China accounted for at least four, Cuba two, Russia one. Communist China has released a photograph of four it downed. The actual number may be higher. These particular planes are owned and piloted by Nationalist China. In addition to the crash which killed Major Anderson, another went down while returning from a Cuban overflight.

Ironically, the aircraft which made so many headlines during the sixties was never produced during that decade. Production ceased in the late fifties.

It's no secret that the U-2, manned by USAF pilots, again proved its value over Vietnam. Elsewhere, its primary use today is for high-altitude air sampling to detect and measure radio-activity. Not too long ago the U-2 also played a major role in a program to obtain data on high-level turbulence, to determine its effect on supersonic transports.

Some have the impression that the U-2 became obsolete with the advent of the space satellite, just as the covert agent was supposedly superseded by the spy flight. Neither example is true, and I believe it is dangerous if we deceive ourselves into thinking this is so. Each had, and continues to have, its uses and can obtain information which the other can't. As far as I know, a satellite can't fly over a country at any time of the day or night and photograph exactly what it chooses. Nor can it fly slow enough to monitor radio and radar messages in their entirety. Too, for all the claims made by both Russia and the United States, I've still to see any photographic evidence that its cameras can pick out troops in the field or even smaller objects. Someday maybe. But at present I remain unconvinced.

Yet the fact remains that as an aircraft the U-2 is a vanishing species.

When I began working at Lockheed I had about six hundred hours' flight time in the U-2. Today I have in excess of two thousand. I know and respect the plane, and would like to see its life extended. Of a number of possible uses which have occurred to me, two may merit mention. One is the possibility that NASA, or possibly one of the larger universities, obtain one of the Air Force U-2s and adapt it for installation of a telescope for use in astronomy. Since it flies above ninety percent of the earth's atmosphere, the photographs
would be exceptionally clear. The other possibility would be for a TV network to purchase several for transmission of weather pictures. Thus, before leaving for work in the morning, the viewer could not only see the weather picture over the area where he lived and worked, he could also follow the course of storm fronts as they moved in and know what was coming up. Only someone who has flown in a U-2 can realize how graphic such an overview can be.

There are, I'm sure, other possibilities such as map making, particularly of heretofore uncharted areas. And in wanting to prolong the usefulness of the U-2, my motives, I must admit, are not entirely unselfish. For the year 1970 will probably mark the end of my association with the U-2. In October, 1969, as this book was in its final stages, I was informed by “Kelly” Johnson that, U-2 test work being scarce, as of early 1970 my services would no longer be required at Lockheed.

As I write this, it's possible I've already made my last U-2 flight.

Regrets? Yes, I have a few. My greatest is not that I made the flight on May 1, I960; rather the opposite—that we did not do more when we had the chance. We had the opportunity, the pilots, the planes, and, I sincerely believe, the need. Yet from the very start of the program in 1956 we made far fewer overflights of Russia than were possible. Moreover, from early 1958 until April, I960, we made almost none. If the program was important to our survival in 1956 and 1957—and I'm convinced it was because of the single flight which exposed the Russian bomber hoax and alerted us to the USSR's emphasis on missiles, then in itself it alone was worth the cost of the whole program, saving not only millions of dollars but, possibly, millions of lives. The overflights became even more important as Russia's missile development progressed. We could have done much more than we did. I regret that we did not. I only hope that time won't prove this to have been one of our costliest mistakes.

This is my most serious regret. I have others, of course. But my participation in Operation Overflight isn't one of them. I'm very proud of that. While I might wish that many of the things that followed had never happened, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I served my country—and, I believe, well.

That is no small satisfaction.

On that day when all men and all nations agree, there will be no more need for U-2s, RB-47s, EC-121s, spy ships, and surveillance satellites, and their successors.

Until such time, it is almost inevitable that there will be more “incidents.”

But that doesn't mean that we can't learn from our mistakes.

The Cold War lasted for another thirty-one years after my father was shot down over the Soviet Union. The U-2 Incident forced the U.S. government to admit publicly that a worldwide intelligence network operated by the CIA was able to penetrate the Soviet Union. This effort, in the words of President Eisenhower, was a “vital but distasteful necessity in order to avert another Pearl Harbor.”

Although my father's flight—the twenty-fourth over the Soviet Union—was the last to overfly that country, U-2s operated by the CIA continued to fly reconnaissance missions over Cuba, the Middle East, China, Southeast Asia, and other areas. And more U-2s were shot down by SA-2 missiles, the same weapon that downed my father's aircraft on May Day I960. The CIA operated the U-2 until 1974, when the agency's surviving U-2s were transferred to the U.S. Air Force.

After his return to the United States, my father worked briefly at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., training agents on how to conduct themselves if captured and subjected to interrogation. One day, as my father turned a hallway corner, he bumped into an attractive woman. Coffee was spilled. He offered to buy Sue Downey another cup and, with his car in the shop, managed from the subsequent conversation to get a ride to work from her. In repayment, he asked her out to lunch. She accepted that invitation and soon lunch turned into dinner, and dinner into romance. My father and his first wife, Barbara, were separated. That marriage, rocky from the start, didn't survive the shootdown, his imprisonment, and the subsequent press coverage. They divorced officially in January 1963.