Page 78 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 78 of 237

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1960: The U-2

The U-2 spy plane was developed by Richard Bissell, Trevor Gardner of the Air Force and Clarence L. (Kelly)
Johnson of Lockheed, after initially being turned down by the Pentagon on June 7, 1954. The Defense
Department finally did approve the ultra-secret espionage project in December of that year. The first model was
flying by August, 1955. During the four years, starting in 1956, that the spy plane flew over Russia, it brought
back invaluable data on Russian "airfields, aircraft, missiles, missile testing and training, special weapons storage,
submarine production, atomic production and aircraft deployments." [15] It flew so high (well over 80,000 feet)
that the Russians were unable to shoot it down at first.

The summit conference of Eisenhower, Macmillan, De Gaulle and Khrushchev was scheduled to take place on
May 16, 1960. As the date approached, the intelligence technicians who ran the U-2 program decided to get one
last U-2 flight in under the wire before the conference. They feared the Paris meeting might result in a detente that
would ground the spy plane indefinitely. The feeling within the intelligence community was that a successful
conference, followed by Eisenhower's planned trip to Moscow, would make flying the U-2 impossible.

Eisenhower approved each general series of U-2 flights. These groupings allowed considerable flexibility for a set
number of missions to be flown within a given time span. Eisenhower did not suspend the program as the summit
date approached.

On May 1, 1960, Francis Gary Powers, a CIA pilot from the hill country of Virginia, was downed in his U-2 over
Sverdlovsk, * in the Urals. Khrushchev announced on May 5 that a plane had been shot down. This set off an
incredible period of confusion in the highest councils of the United States Government.

At first, Washington insisted it was a NASA weather plane that had drifted over the border from Turkey when its
pilot had oxygen trouble. After waiting two days for this explanation to sink in, Khrushchev triumphantly
revealed he had the pilot and the plane. At that, the State Department admitted the spy flight, but said it had not
been authorized in Washington. Two days later Eisenhower reversed this position, took responsibility for the U-2
program and issued a statement widely interpreted to mean that the flights over Soviet territory would continue.

That did it. Khrushchev stormed and demanded an apology at Paris. Eisenhower finally announced at the summit
table that no more U-2s would be sent over Russia. But the 1960 summit meeting collapsed.

Why had the CIA and the Eisenhower Administration so confidently issued its original "cover story" about a
"weather" plane? One important reason was that Powers had been instructed to blow up his plane in the event of
trouble over Russia. This, the CIA expected, would destroy evidence.

The U-2 contained a destructor unit with a three-pound charge of cyclonite -- enough to blow it up. U-2 pilots
were instructed in the event of trouble to activate a timing device and eject from the plane. It would then explode,
so they were told. But Allen Dulles was aware that some of the U-2 pilots were worried about the workings of this
intriguing and delicate destructor mechanism. They were not really sure how many seconds they had to get out.

At a Senate hearing [17] after his release by the Russians, Powers testified: "My first reaction was to reach for the
destruct switches ... but I thought that I had better see if I can get out of here before using this. I knew that there
was a seventy-second time delay between the time of the actuation of the switches and the time that the explosion
would occur." *