The Cold War (27 page)

The Special Duty Flight disbanded shortly thereafter, though in October it was reformed at Sculthorpe. Training for a second mission began. But in early December the impending mission was canceled. For Churchill, the risking of his political future in one covert overflight had perhaps proved enough. On December 18, John Crampton and Hack Mixson led the Special Duty Flight of four RB-45Cs back across the Atlantic Ocean, landing at Ohio's Lockbourne AFB as snow was falling. Through the gloom, base maintenance personnel who approached the aircraft stared in disbelief at the U.S. Air Force bombers still decked out in British livery.

Back in the United States, the air force, in collaboration with the navy, already had begun to probe eastern Siberia's coastal radar sites and airfields through shallow penetration overflights. Directed by the JCS in 1952, these secret missions depended on the navy Lockheed P2V-3W, a two-engine unpressurized aircraft that possessed a top speed of 300 knots (345 mph) and a service ceiling of 32,000 feet. The novel P2V-3W, equipped with a ventrally mounted APS-20 radar beneath the aircraft, was employed primarily as a submarine
hunter-killer. This aircraft was modified with an experimental electronics suite that filled the nose: It could identify, locate, and home in on radars and communications equipment over a wide range of frequencies.

Piloted by Commander James H. Todd with Lieutenant (jg) Richard A. Koch as copilot, the P2V-3W flew out of the Kodiak Island, Alaska, naval base and, in March 1952, conducted test missions against radars of the Alaskan Air Command. It then began overflights of the Siberian coast, leading an air force RB-50 (an improved version of the B-29) that photographed the Soviet radar sites and airfields.

Between April 2 and June 16, 1952, the two planes flew eight or nine missions. They maintained the strictest secrecy, without radio communications of any kind, even on takeoff and landing. They managed to locate and photograph Soviet installations from the Kamchatka Peninsula in the south all the way north through the Bering Straits to Wrangel Island. They were, according to Koch, daytime missions, which were normally launched from Kodiak or Shemya in the Aleutian Islands. The P2V-3W flew at fifteen thousand feet, with its crew on oxygen, and the RB-50 followed above and behind it. Flying inland about fifteen to twenty miles from the Soviet coastline, the navy aircraft used special direction-finding equipment to locate installations for the cameraladen RB-50.

In Alaska, only the aircrews—the admiral commanding Fleet Air Alaska, the general commanding the Alaskan Air Command, and their deputies for intelli-gence—knew of these missions. Recovery bases varied according to the mission. In one instance late in the evening, the Navy P2V-3W, intercepted by F-94s, landed in radio silence before nonplussed personnel in the control tower at Ladd AFB, Alaska (the RB-50 had presumably gone on to its home base). Immediately surrounded by gun-wagging security police, the navy aircrew members were forced to throw their identity tags onto the tarmac. The exhausted aviators remained under guard and confined onboard their aircraft for several hours until a “higher authority” could be found to vouch for them.

On two of these overflight missions, Soviet MiG-15s intercepted the American aircraft: once over the Bering Strait near the St. Lawrence Islands, and once over Soviet territory, when the fighters scrambled from a snow-covered runway. In each instance, Koch recalled, the MiG-15s flew alongside, inspected and photographed the U.S. planes, but did not attack. (At this time there was apparently a tacit gentleman's agreement between the air forces of the two nations not to initiate hostile action.) Shortly after these shallow overflight
missions terminated in mid-June 1952, the navy recalled the crew and their P2V-3W to the continental United States. The crew members neither asked nor were told where the “take” from their missions went—or of any results produced.

Whatever the intelligence product of the air force/navy peripheral overflights of Siberian shores in the spring, by the summer of 1952, American military and political leaders had new cause for concern. By listening in on Russian shortwave broadcasts, signals intelligence had learned that the Soviet air force had begun staging Tu-4 bombers in large numbers at airfields at Dikson on the Kara Sea; at Mys Shmidta on the Chukchi Sea; and at Provideniya on the Chukotskiy Peninsula at the Bering Strait. Moreover, U.S. intelligence suspected that World War II airfields deep inside Siberia, used for staging American lend-lease aircraft bound for Soviet forces on the Eastern Front, might also have been upgraded to accommodate these four-engine bombers. If loaded with the nuclear weapons then believed available to them, any unusual concentration of these bombers represented a real threat.

Officials in the Department of Defense and the CIA again sought permission to photograph air bases in Siberia through deep-penetration aerial overflights. On July 5, 1952, headquarters advised SAC to modify two B-47B bombers for a special photoreconnaissance mission over “unfriendly areas,” in the event it was requested. On August 12, Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett delivered to President Truman memoranda from General Omar N. Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Walter Bedell Smith, director of the CIA, requesting two reconnaissance overflights of Siberia. After discussion, the president approved a “northern run” between Ambarchik and the Chukotskiy Peninsula, but disapproved as too dangerous a “southern run” over Provideniya southwestward past Anadyr to Magadan, returning eastward over the Kamchatka Peninsula. His approval of a single overflight, Truman told Lovett, was contingent on the concurrence of “appropriate officials of the State Department.” Secretary of State Dean Acheson must have concurred, because on August 15, USAF headquarters issued instructions for the mission.

For this flight, SAC modified two B-47Bs from the 306th Bombardment Wing at Florida's MacDill AFB. Colonel Donald E. Hillman, the deputy wing commander, was selected to plan the mission and pilot the primary aircraft. The mission was assigned the highest of security classifications; only the commander of SAC, General Curtis E. LeMay, and his directors of operations and
intelligence knew the details. In the field, initially only Major General Frank Armstrong, commander of the 6th Air Division at MacDill (and responsible for executing the project), and Hillman knew of it. It should be emphasized that in this instance, as in all others involving overflights, LeMay took his orders from above.

On September 28, 1952, the two modified B-47Bs, accompanied by two KC-97 tankers, flew from MacDill to Eielson AFB. Hillman remained as command pilot of the primary aircraft, with Majors Lester E. Gunter, copilot, and Edward A. Timmins, navigator. Colonel Patrick D. Fleming piloted the backup aircraft, with Majors Lloyd F. Fields, copilot, and William J. Reilly, navigator. With word of good weather over Siberia, General Armstrong authorized takeoff early on October 15, 1952. After meeting the KC-97 tankers in the area of Point Barrow, Alaska, the B-47s received full loads of fuel, and the mission proceeded.

Fleming and his crew photographed and mapped Wrangel Island, located about a hundred miles from the Siberian mainland, and then flew to the communications area over the Chukchi Sea and took up station, flying a racetrack pattern. Maintaining radio silence, Hillman continued on course past Wrangel Island, then turned southwest toward the Soviet coast. Making landfall close to noon, Timmins switched on the cameras as the aircraft swung south for a short period, and then turned eastward and flew back toward Alaska, through the heart of Siberia. The weather, which had been bright and clear throughout the flight, changed after the B-47 crossed the coast. Scattered clouds appeared, and occasional haze at the ground obscured viewing of the surface for the remainder of the flight.

By now, after burning off fuel, Hillman's aircraft had become light enough to be able to fly above 40,000 feet and well over normal cruising speed, at approximately 480 knots (552 mph). After two of five target areas had been covered and photographs of the forbidden landscape below had been taken, warning receivers on board told the crew that the aircraft was being tracked by Soviet radar. Gunter swiveled his seat 180 degrees to the rear to control the plane's only defensive armament, the tailguns. A few minutes later, he advised Hillman that he had Soviet fighters in sight, below and to the rear, climbing desperately to intercept them. But the fighters had scrambled too late to catch up to the B-47, and it flew eastward unopposed.

The aircraft completed photographing the remaining three areas in eastern Siberia without encountering any more fighters. It passed over Egvekinot, then
over Provideniya, and turned northeast, exiting Soviet territory at the coast of the Chukotskiy Peninsula. Hillman flew his B-47 straight back to Fairbanks, landing at Eielson well after dark. A few minutes later, Fleming's backup B-47 touched down. Altogether, the mission spanned seven and three quarter hours in the air; the primary B-47 had made a 3,500-mile flight and overflown some 1,000 miles of Soviet territory.

Technicians immediately developed the film. The photographs would belie the presence of massed Tu-4 bombers in Siberia. Messages intercepted soon after revealed that the Soviet regional commander had been sacked and that a second MiG regiment was to be moved into the area. As for the Americans, members of both aircrews received the Distinguished Flying Cross.

By that same fall, Communist and U.N. forces had reached a virtual military stalemate at the 38th Parallel in Korea. Indeed, the Korean conflict had provided President Harry Truman the legal rationale for overflights of the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R., an unannounced co-belligerent, supported Chinese and North Korean forces with military aircraft operating from sanctuaries in the Soviet Far East. Under international law, when engaged in a United Nations peace enforcement operation, the U.S. could claim the right to overfly such sanctuaries under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. But as early as 1950, even before the outbreak of hostilities, a pair of special drop-tank and cameraequipped RF-80As began reconnaissance missions, in an effort to determine the composition of Soviet air forces in the Far East. Between March and August they periodically flew around—and later, directly over—Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands and the Soviet mainland near Vladivostok.

These Far East Air Forces (FEAF) tactical reconnaissance aircraft operated from Yokota Air Base near Tokyo. After the outbreak of the Korean conflict, a detachment of three SAC RB-45Cs performed occasional deep-penetration overflights of North Korea, the Soviet maritime provinces, and the People's Republic of China. In December one of these aircraft was apparently lost to MiG fighters over North Korea, near the Yalu River, leaving only two aircraft to continue the missions. Although details are wanting, these RF-80As and RB-45Cs unquestionably penetrated Soviet territory before Colonel Hillman's B-47B overflight almost two years later.

In October 1952 two RB-45C crews replaced their compatriots in the detachment at Yokota Air Base. Led by Captain Howard S. (Sam) Myers, Jr., they continued deep-penetration overflights in the Far East. Besides missions over
North Korea, other overflight missions, though few in number, focused on mainland China, Sakhalin Island, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Vladivostok area. For example, on the night of December 17–18, 1952, Myers and his two-man crew flew RB-45C number 8027, which was painted entirely black, to avoid detection by searchlights, from Yokota across the Sea of Japan. They coasted inland a few miles south of Vladivostok; the Soviet city was well lit and clearly visible off the right wing tip at thirty-five thousand feet. They continued on three hundred miles to targets of interest in the neighborhood of Harbin, Manchuria. After collecting radar-scope photographs of airfields and other military and industrial installations in the area, they returned via South Korea. The two RB-45Cs continued to fly reconnaissance missions until April 1953.

The extreme secrecy that surrounded these flights increased, if that was possible, during 1953. It was a time of leadership change in both the Soviet Union and the United States. Stalin died, and Dwight D. Eisenhower succeeded Harry Truman as president. The former supreme commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II fully appreciated the value of strategic overflight reconnaissance that might alert American leaders to a potential nuclear surprise attack (both countries had now exploded hydrogen devices). But if the Korean Armistice that he engineered in July ended hostilities, it also eliminated any legal justification for overflights of the Soviet Union and Communist China. Eisenhower weighed the importance of strategic reconnaissance to national security and the precedent set by President Truman against the political risks of continuing overflights in peacetime, in violation of international treaties to which the United States was a signatory. His choice seemed clear. He determined to continue the overflights as part of the Sensitive Intelligence Program (SENSINT).

In the Far East after July 1953, overflights of the Soviet maritime provinces launched from Japan employed new reconnaissance fighter aircraft—RF-86Fs and RF-100s—and B-57A Canberra bombers converted to photoreconnaissance aircraft. (Overflights of the People's Republic of China devolved largely on the air force of the Republic of China based on Taiwan.) Most, but not all, of the FEAF reconnaissance fighter missions between 1953 and the end of 1956 were shallow-penetration overflights. One deep-penetration daytime overflight, however, is known to have surveilled the city of Harbin in Manchuria, in the People's Republic of China.

Major Robert E. “Red” Morrison piloted another unusually deep-penetration overflight in a reconnaissance fighter in 1955. Morrison had assumed command
of the 15th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, composed of RF-86Fs stationed at Komaki Air Base, just west of Nagoya. These RF-86s had had their guns removed and their weight and balance adjusted. Each one was equipped with four drop tanks (two 200-gallon and two 120-gallon) that extended their range significantly, and each mounted two aerial cameras featuring a distortionless telephoto lens that adjusted automatically to the pressure and temperature variations inherent in high-altitude photography. Mounted on either side of the pilot's seat, the two cameras photographed the earth in a near-panoramic overlapping swath. Blisters outboard on the fuselage accommodated the film magazines. A widearea mapping camera looked at the earth vertically from a position beneath and just forward of the pilot's seat.