Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [70]
The accuracy with which Soviet radar had plotted the U-2’s course had stunned Bissell, though he took some comfort in the fact that the Russians had mistakenly identified the spy plane as a twin-engine medium bomber. At least that meant that the U-2’s secret was still safe, that the Soviets had no inkling of what they were dealing with, or how to counter it. In its protest, which was not made public, the Kremlin had purposely omitted mentioning the plane’s detour over Moscow and Leningrad. That was simply too embarrassing to admit. “What I remembered most about the U-2 flight is how reluctant Father was to send a protest note to the U.S. government,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. “All his injured pride resisted. . . . He thought the Americans were chortling over our impotence.”
For Khrushchev, this latest incursion had come on the heels of Curtis LeMay’s mock attack on Siberia. Only this time, the Americans had not overflown some remote corner of Russia’s empty Arctic wasteland. They had brazenly put a plane right over Red Square, the symbol of Soviet power, and the most heavily defended piece of airspace in the entire Communist bloc. It was a provocation designed to end any chance of rapprochement. “Certain reactionary circles in the United States,” the Soviets protested, in a thinly veiled swipe at LeMay and the Dulles brothers, were trying to sabotage “the improvement of relations” between the two countries. The Soviets openly blamed “renegade” elements in the U.S. Air Force, though, as John Foster Dulles had predicted, they were careful to keep their complaints quiet.
Secretary Dulles responded, disingenuously, that no U.S. “military” plane had violated Soviet airspace on July 4. Technically this was true, since the U-2 was a CIA operation. But it was also true that American military aircraft had been probing Soviet air defenses ever since the end of the Second World War. The forays, or “ferret” missions as they were known, used a series of converted bombers—initially propeller-driven RB-29s, then the bigger jet-powered RB-47s—to search for gaps in Russia’s radar coverage and to determine how quickly the Soviets could scramble interceptors in response. Invariably, American planes would only brush up against Soviet airspace, making quick dashes across the frontier. Usually “ferret” pilots skirted the twelve-mile offshore territorial limit claimed by Moscow. Very occasionally, as in the case of LeMay’s Operation Home Run, they penetrated the deeper three-mile limit set by international law. And always they fled at the first sign of an answering plane. It was a cat-and-mouse game that could at times turn deadly. (The fate of 138 U.S. airmen shot down during the border overflights remains unknown to this day because Washington never inquired as to their whereabouts, and their families would not be told for forty years. “Representations and recommendations have been made to me by intelligence authorities,” wrote one State Department official after a C-118 with nine crew members aboard was shot down over the Baltic on June 18, 1957, “that no legal action be pursued.”)
The sheer volume of ferret missions, several thousand a year in the mid-1950s, annoyed the Kremlin. But as long as the American planes stayed close to the borders, and the White House stayed silent if any of its planes were hit, the game was played within the acceptable limits of superpower rivalry. Of course, Washington might have had a different view of permissible cold-war norms if the situation had been reversed,