Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [71]
The U-2, however, raised the intrusions to a different order of magnitude. With the maiden Independence Day flight, the United States had abandoned any pretense of respecting the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union. U-2s didn’t take tentative steps along frontiers. They flew border to border in brazen 4,000-mile north-south sweeps. Khrushchev, naturally, was livid at the sudden change of rules. To add insult to injury, the CIA repeated the July 4 overflight the very next day and followed up with four more flights over the next six days. To the Soviets, the seemingly ceaseless parade of American planes over their two largest cities was a humiliating signal that the hard-line hawks in Eisenhower’s administration now intended to harass the USSR on a weekly basis.
“The notion that we could overfly them at will must have been deeply unsettling,” Bissell acknowledged. But the information the U-2s were bringing back was worth the risk, as a jubilant July 17 CIA memo indicated. “For the first time we are really able to say that we have an understanding of what was going on in the Soviet Union on July 4, 1956,” wrote the analyst Herbert I. Miller.
Broad coverage of the order of 400,000 square miles was obtained. Many new discoveries have come to light. Airfields previously unknown, army training bases previously unknown, industrial complexes of a size heretofore unsuspected were revealed. We know that even though innumerable radar signals were detected and recorded by the electronic system carried on the mission, fighter aircraft at the five most important bases covered were drawn up in orderly rows as if for formal inspection on parade. The medium jet bombers were also neatly aligned and not even dispersed to on-field dispersal areas. We know that the guns in the anti-aircraft batteries sighted were in a horizontal position rather than pointed upwards and “on the ready.” We know that some harvests were being brought in, and that small truck gardens were being worked. These are but a few of the examples of the many things which tend to spell out the real intentions, objectives and qualities of the Soviet Union.
The “bomber gap,” the reconnaissance flights soon showed, was bogus. There were no new armadas of Bears and Bisons lining Russian runway, just row after row of smaller shorter-range Tupolevs that could never reach American soil. But Ike couldn’t confront Senator Symington with this information; it would mean blowing the U-2’s cover.
Aside from the treasure trove of data it produced, the beauty of the U-2 lay in its deniability. As long as the Russians couldn’t produce hard physical evidence of the incursions, or were too ashamed to make a public fuss, the planes could operate with impunity. As a result, as Miller’s memo underscored, the CIA for the first time could eliminate much of the guesswork about Soviet weapons development programs and arms buildups. Craters at nuclear test sites could be photographed and measured to determine the size of the blasts. Missile launch sites could be examined for clues as to the capabilities of Russian rockets. Submarine pens could reveal the secrets of the Soviet underwater flotilla. Air base photographs could give an accurate picture of the number, strength, and battle readiness of bomber fleets. In a society so closed that it took six weeks for the CIA to get wind of Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech (despite the mass protests that it set off in Tbilisi), the best way to peer past the Iron Curtain was from above. A lone U-2 could produce infinitely more useful data than all the previous reconnaissance missions combined. What’s more, the information could be targeted, aimed at a particular site the CIA wanted to know about. And on August 28, 1957, the highest-value target in the Soviet Union was Tyura-Tam.
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If the R-7 was no longer a secret, it was partly Nikita Khrushchev’s fault. He had been unable to resist trumpeting the achievement,