Operation Overflight (10 page)

Though Operation Overflight was nearly four years old, we were totally unprepared for an “accident.” It didn't necessarily have to be a missile. One loose screw, in just the right place, could bring an aircraft down.

The silver dollar had provided the obvious opening, and I had presumed someone would ask it then. But no one had done so. Now, as we were preparing to resume overflights, I decided to put it directly to the intelligence officer.

“What if something happens and one of us goes down over Russia? That's an awfully big country, and it could be a hell of a long walk to a border. Is there anyone there we can contact? Can you give us any names and addresses?”

“No, we can't.”

While it was not what I wanted to hear, his answer was at least understandable. If we had agents in Russia, as we presumably did, release of their names could place them in jeopardy also.

I persisted. “All right, say the worst happens. A plane goes down, and the pilot is captured. What story does he use? Exactly how much should he tell?”

His exact words were, “You may as well tell them everything, because they're going to get it out of you anyway.”

As if anticipating our concern, and perhaps hoping to set it to rest before such questions were asked, the agency had set up a survival exercise the previous summer—excluding the little bit of evasion-training on the East Coast at the start of the project, the first such for most of us since we had been in the Air Force. Divided into several groups, we were driven out into the desert, with only parachute and minimal rations, and left there.

Our group managed fairly well. When our supplies finally ran out, we stumbled onto a farmer's sugar-beet patch.

Only later, thinking about it, did we consider that had he appeared with a shotgun, and been inclined to use it, a good portion of the U.S. U-2 program in Turkey could have been wiped out.

Surviving a bad thunderstorm, we found a little village, were treated to an excellent but native meal, and, renting donkeys, rode back to the pickup point in style.

Another group was not so lucky. Some of the natives, claiming they had seen men parachuting out of planes, called the Turkish police, who arrested them as Russian spies.

If the intention was to buoy up our self-confidence, the exercise was decidedly less than a success.

Overseas, possibly because it is so limited, you consume news. What newspapers you can get, such as
Stars and Stripes
, you read from beginning to end.

During April, I960, we were aware of the upcoming Summit Conference, scheduled to take place in Paris the following month; like other topics of the day, we discussed the talks, hopeful that something good would come out of them. But not optimistic. There still seemed to be no solution to the problem of Berlin; according to everything we read, Khrushchev was determined to make trouble over the issue.

But it was a minor topic. We were equally interested in Senator John F. Kennedy's win over Hubert Humphrey in the Wisconsin Presidential primary; De Gaulle's visit to the United States; the orbiting of a navigational satellite from Cape Canaveral. We didn't connect it with our work, or with the sudden increase in the number of overflights.

We had our own explanation for that.

No one told us this, it was just a presumption, but we had a feeling that intelligence, suspecting the Russians were close to solving their missile-guidance problem, was trying to crowd in as many important targets as possible while time remained.

The feeling, correct or not, didn't lessen the tension.

However, the first April flight, on the ninth, went off as smoothly as its predecessors.

There was no reason to suppose that mine, scheduled for late in the month, would go otherwise. Yet we were a little more apprehensive about it than usually would have been the case, since it would differ from all previous overflights in one respect.

Taking off from Peshawar, Pakistan, I was to fly thirty-eight hundred miles to Bodö, Norway.

It would be the first time we had attempted to fly all the way across the Soviet Union.

Four

T
he main reason we had never tried to fly all the way across the Soviet Union was not fuel but logistics. Previously all the overflights had returned to their originating base. Taking off
from one base and landing at another required two ground crews, doubling personnel, preparation, and risk of exposure.

But it was considered worth the gamble. The planned route would take us deeper into Russia than we had ever gone, while traversing important targets never before photographed.

Since arriving in Turkey in 1956, Detachment 10-10 had changed commanding officers several times. The latest, who had joined us only a short time earlier, was an Air Force colonel, William M. Shelton. Shelton handled the briefings for the flight, conducted at Incirlik, prior to our leaving for Pakistan.

As usual, they were concerned primarily with navigation.

Taking off from Peshawar, Pakistan, I was to overfly Afghanistan and cross the Hindu Kush range, an extension of the Himalayas. Once in the Soviet Union, my route would take me over or near Dushambe, the Aral Sea, the Tyuratam Cosmodrome (Russia's Cape Canaveral), Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Kirov, Archangel, and, on the Kola Peninsula, Kandalaksha and Murmansk, from which I was to fly north to the Barents Sea and along the northern coast of Norway to Bodö. This way I would avoid overflying Finland and Sweden.

The flight would take nine hours, cover approximately 3,800 miles, 2,900 within the Soviet Union itself. With an early-morning takeoff, and considering the time changes, I would be in Bodö about nightfall.

I was thinking about this as, early on the morning of Wednesday, April 27, I packed a bag for the trip. Should I stay in Bodö a day or two, I'd need a shaving kit, civilian clothes, ID, and money. Checking my wallet, I found I had some German marks, Turkish lira, and about one hundred dollars in U.S. currency. Estimating that should be sufficient, I tossed the wallet into the traveling bag along with the other items.

With a refueling stop at Bahrein, the trip to Pakistan would take about seven hours. Barbara, fixing a lunch for the flight, asked if I'd be back in time for the party.

It took me a minute to remember which one. In the fall of 1959 the married couples had moved from town back onto the base, our trailers forming a small community at the end of the base housing area. Proximity had rendered the parties all the more frequent. Unfortunately, the drinking problem not only remained, but had grown worse. I'd miss one recent party because of being scheduled for an early flight the next morning. Barbara had gone anyway, fallen down while dancing, and broken her leg; it was
still in a cast. Nevertheless, she continued to insist she had no problem with alcohol.

She did, however. But because I had never encountered it before in someone I knew, I didn't know how to handle it. Although on flights I'd learned to leave personal concerns behind and to concentrate on the job at hand, I worried about her when I had to be gone for several days on trips of this sort. I worried not only about her excessive drinking but also about what she was apt to do when left alone.

Then I remembered. This was to be a special party. The communications chief was returning to the States; an appropriate sendoff had been planned.

I checked the calendar.

If the flight took place as scheduled, on Thursday the twenty-eighth, I should be back in plenty of time.

The party wasn't until Sunday evening, May 1.

More than twenty of us made the Turkey-Pakistan trip, aboard a Lockheed C-130 turboprop transport. It took that many to handle each flight. In addition to the detachment commander, navigator, intelligence officer, doctor, crew chief, mechanics, and photographic and electronic specialists, radio personnel were required to pick up the O.K. for the flight, transmitted from Washington through Germany to Turkey and from there to Pakistan via radio code.

Accommodations at Peshawar were primitive. Our hangar was set off from the rest of the base; we slept there on folding cots and cooked our own food from rations.

There was one departure from routine. Rather than bringing the U-2 over and leaving it at Peshawar until the flight took place, we were trying something new. Chiefly for security, to reduce plane exposure, we were ferrying it to Peshawar the night prior to flight, then, should the flight not take place as scheduled, for weather or some other reason, we would ferry it back to Incirlik.

It was the best plane we had, which was comforting. Aside from the long layoff, and the fact that this flight would be going all the way across Russia, there was nothing else to distinguish this overflight from its predecessors. Nor did the thought of an overflight in itself make me nervous. Of the original group of pilots at Adana, I was the only one who hadn't transferred elsewhere or returned to the States. As a result, simply by being there so long, I had
accumulated more spy flights—overflights, eavesdropping missions, and “special” missions—than any other pilot. One other pilot and I tied on the total number of overflights. However, I could later claim the totally uncoveted distinction of having made the last.

Yet because this was to be the first flight all the way across Russia, I felt an additional touch of excitement and some apprehension. However, my complete trust in the aircraft helped.

The schedule called for a six-
A.M.
takeoff. Wednesday afternoon I went to bed about four o'clock. It was hot and noisy in the hangar; as usual, I tossed and turned, sleeping only sporadically. At two
A.M.
I was awakened by someone from message center. I had washed and was dressing when I received another message: due to bad weather, the flight had been postponed twenty-four hours.

This left me with a full day of nothing to do.

Thursday afternoon I again went to bed early, to be awakened at two
A.M.
This time I had finished breakfast and was “on the hose” when the second order came through: another twenty-four-hour postponement.

Friday afternoon, shortly before I was to go to bed, word came that there would be no flight on Saturday. A night of poker and a day of reading and loafing relieved some of the tension built up by the two false starts. But not all. For I also discovered that I wouldn't be flying the plane I'd hoped.

The departure from routine had turned out to be less than a good idea. Periodically, after a certain number of hours' flight time, an aircraft has to be grounded for maintenance check. Flying back and forth from Turkey to Pakistan, time on the plane I'd counted on flying had run out.

As substitute, on Saturday night U-2 number 360 was flown over.

Following its emergency landing on the glider-club strip in Japan, number 360 had been returned to Lockheed's Burbank, California, factory for repairs. Inasmuch as we were at that time short a U-2 at Incirlik, one of our planes also having been returned to Lockheed for maintenance, number 360 was sent to us.

It was a “dog,” never having flown exactly right. Something was always going wrong. No sooner was one malfunction corrected than another appeared. Its current idiosyncrasy was one of the fuel tanks, which wouldn't feed all its fuel. But not all the time, just occasionally. So the pilot was kept guessing.

Saturday afternoon I again went to bed early, again to be awakened at two
A.M.
With my backup pilot, I had a good substantial breakfast—two or three eggs, bacon, toast. It was to be the last
food I'd have until reaching Norway, some thirteen hours from now. The doctor checked me over, finding me in good shape. During prebreathing my backup and I were joined by the pilot who had ferried number 360 over the night before, a good friend whom we'll call Bob.

Bob had flown the April 9 overflight on which I was backup, and had been present when I finally asked the intelligence officer the long-avoided question. On this particular mission he would act as mobile control officer. Among his other duties, he would acknowledge when I used the radio code: single click indicating proceed as planned; three clicks meaning return to base.

There was no need for additional briefing. I had studied the maps, knew the route. There had been a slight wind change, meaning navigation had to be corrected; otherwise the weather looked good. Because of 360's fuel-tank problem, however, Colonel Shelton suggested that if, just before reaching Kandalaksha, I discovered I was running low on fuel, I could take a short cut across Finland and Sweden, thereby saving a few minutes' time. As for alternate landing fields, he told me I could land in Norway, Sweden, or Finland—the first being preferable, the second less so, the third to be used only in dire emergency, but added, “Anyplace is preferable to going down in the Soviet Union.”

As I was suiting up, I remembered that traveling bag, with wallet and clothing, and asked that it be put in the cockpit.

“Do you want the silver dollar?” Shelton asked.

Before this I hadn't. But this flight was different. And I had less than complete confidence in the plane.

“If something happened,” I had previously asked the intelligence officer, “could I use the needle as a weapon?”

He couldn't see why not. One jab, and death would be almost instantaneous. As a weapon, it should be quite effective.

“O.K.,” I replied. Shelton tossed it to me, and I slipped it into the pocket of my outer flight suit.

Though with more than sufficient time to think about it since, I'm still not sure why this time I chose to take it.

Could it have been premonition?

About 5:20
A.M.
, with Bob's assistance, I climbed into the plane, the personal-equipment sergeant strapping me in.

It was scorching hot. The sun had been up nearly an hour.

Bob took off his shirt and held it over the cockpit to try to shield me from its rays.

Takeoff was scheduled for six
A.M.
I completed my preflight check and waited. And waited. Six o'clock came and passed with no sign of a signal.