THE TIME OF THE ANGEL THE U-2 CUBA, AND THE CIA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000100030002-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 26, 2004
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: October 1, 1977
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

OCTOBER 1 AV( Approved For Release 2005 01/11: CIA-RDP88-0131IRP 00~j.O
rM. TIML VIC
rhe,U.2, Cuba, and the CIA
G._ . Cam, F t i~ ;
T n the still of the October night, the slender, birdlike plane threatening stance and imposed a naval blockade; Sovietpremier
1 lifted into the sky from its base in California, climbed sharply Khrushchev ultimately backed down, and the missiles were
on acolumn of flame, and headed east through the darkness. Pilot dismantled and returned to Russia.
Richard Heyser, in the cramped, tiny cockpit, had good reason to As the missile crisis unfolded, a critical factor was Kennedy's
that nuclear missiles
be apprehensive, but he had little time to worry. He was totally certainty, beyond any shadow of doubt,
occupied with the intricacies of navigation and with the exacting were indeed being installed just a hundred miles from American
task of keeping his sleek aircraft aloft; for this plane was so shores. Kennedy was certain enough to take the grave risk of
specialized, so refined, that in the rarefied atmosphere that was imposing a blockade-in itself an act of war-certain efiough to
its element it hung in the sky only tentatively, as if suspended contemplate the even graver risk of launching an air strike
from a wisp of spider's silk. As the plane climbed above fifty against Cuba, an act that might well have brought Soviet
thousand feet it entered a critical altitude level called the retaliation. How could Kennedy have been so sure?
"chimney." Once in the chimney, if the pilot flew a shade too slow, The answerlies in a secret airplane flight and in the technology
the plane would go into a stall and a spin from which it would that made it possible--a technology of spying developed under the
never recover. If he flew a shade too fast, the fragile craft would aegis of the Central Intelligence Agency.. This technology
n
ed American spies in a new cloak, ending the Mata Hari era
ra
pp
come apart in mid-air. w
and ushering in an age of optics and electronics. The technology
tinent
th
,
e con
arrowed across
For several hours the aircraft
gradually climbing higher and higher into the chimney. Periodi- also gavethe U.S. an enormous intelligence-gathering advantage
the over the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. At times, as
d
li
b
l
,
e
m
ane c
tally the pilot adjusted his airspeed, for as the p
razor's edge between stall and disintegration grew ever finer, in the missile crisis, this intelligence allowed the U.S. to antic
sharper. Dawn came, then sunrise. Now the Gulf of Mexico ipate threatening moves by Russia. Equally important, the
shimmered below. intelligence also dispelled groundless fears about Russian mili-
The island came into view, tropical green rimmed by bright tary superiority. Given the touchy temperamentofthetimes,had
sand beaches. The pilot flew south of the island to a predeter- the U.S. not possessed such intelligence, events might have taken
me an even more frightening turn.
ht
i
i
co
g
t m
mined point in space, then turned back north. Pursu
at any time now, quick death slanting upward like an arrow. The development of sophisticated intelligence-gathering tools
There was a switch on a panel at his right hand. He had already began in the early 1950's, a time when the climate for such
thrown it from "off" to "stand by." Now as the plane passed high development was very favorable. For one thing, the President of
over the island's shore the pilot' looked into his drift sight, a the United States was a former general of the Army who had a
periscopelike device that peered through the belly of the plane. professional soldier's familiarity with photographic intelligence.
Then his hand moved once again to the switch on the panel... During World War II, aerial reconnaissance had been carried out
? by ordinary bombers and fighters stripped down and equipped
D D uring a period of thirteen days in October, 1962, the United with cameras instead of guns. These unarmed planes were highly
States and the Soviet Union stood at the brink of war. In a vulnerable and extremely unpopular with their pilots, whose
confrontation over Russia's placing nuclear tipped strategic motto could be paraphrased as: "Get your pictures and get your
ault tail out of there." The recon planes had to fly at low altitudes in
d
l
ass
s, an
missiles in Cuba, American aircraft, naval vesse
troopswent on alert and prepared forbattle, while in Cuba Soviet turbulent air; since the cameras had no gyrostabilizing mech-
isms to cushion them against shock, the quality of the photo-
t
h
an
a
technicians rushed to complete the installation of missiles t
could reach almost any point in the United States. During the graphs was generally poor, and even the quantity of information
two-week crisis, President Kennedy estimated that the chance of was limited by the film, which had a thick, space-consuming
armed conflict was "between one in three and even." Of course backing. In spite of these shortcomings, postwar analysis
that potentially catastrophic war did not occcurwKennedy took a revealed that some 80 per cent of all useful military intelligence
,CON T1fNUM M.
 Approved For Releas
Kennedy explains his stand...
UJ.L
came from aerial reconnaissance photograph..
Dwight Eisenhower entered the Presidency with a strong bias
toward photographic reconnaissance. He felt that the intelli-
gence-gathering services of the U.S. placed far too much reliance
on "humint" (the spy trade's term for intelligence gathered from
human sources) and "sigint" (the interception of radio and other
electronic signals).Humintwas prone to errors of judgment, bias,
and exaggeration. As for sigint, most sensitive radio traffic was
encrypted, and thus had to be decoded. Photographs neither lied
nor required code-breaking.
Another factor made the time ripe for a breakthrough in the
techniques of spying. In recruiting agents during the war, the
Office of Strategic Services-the CIA's predecessor-bad turned
to the academic community, particularly to Ivy League and other
prestigious universities. The reason was simple enough: the OSS
needed people who had traveled abroad and who had proficiency
in foreign languages; with the U.S. just emerging from the
Depression, only the highly educated were apt to have such
experience. This alliance of spies and scholars remained intact
during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, indeed remained
intact until the academic community grew disillusioned over the
war in Vietnam and over revelations of assassination plots and
other dirty tricks carried out by the CIA.
Then of course there was the Cold War itself. During the early
1950's there was widespread concern about Russian nuclear
superiority. In 1953 the Soviet Union exploded a hydrogen bomb.
Shortly afterward it became clear that the Russians were
working on the production of long-range aircraft, and in 1955
they unveiled an intercontinental bomber, the Bison, which was
capable of striking the U.S. The Russians took pains to suggest
that they were far along in their bomber program by skipping
numbers in the serial designations on the planes they publicly
displayed. When Western observers saw planes numbered, say,
19 and 21, they assumed that there was a bomber number 20,
which did not in factexist
At the time, the U.S. had no reliable way of determining
whether or not the Soviet Union had achieved superiority in
nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles. Grasping at straws,
American spies launched camera-carrying balloons that soared
across Russia at sixty thousand feet or more, and then, over
western Europe, dropped their camera mechanisms by para-
... and Castro explains his.
1IbsaoRLD
chute-with luck into the hands of waiting intelligence agents.
Butsomeof the spy balloons went astray, and others drifted down
inside Russia where they provided grist for Soviet propaganda,
In any case, the balloon cameras produced pictures that, while
adequate for making maps, did not provide enough detail to
enlighten the U.S. about Russian weapons development
Eisenhower was appalled at the lack of sound information
about Russian capabilities. Thus in 1954 he created a special
presidential committee to study the subject of surprise attack.
Chaired by James Killian, the president of MIT, the committee
was charged with determining whether or not the U.S. might be
facing another Pearl Harbor. At a meeting in the fall, the
committee decided that the U.S. should begin reconnaissance
overflights of Russia and the Soviet-bloc countries.
The only problem was that no aircraft existed that could carry
out such a mission. But in the course of its investigations the
committee learned that a conceptual design for a high-altitude
reconnaissance plane had recently been submitted to the Air
Force by Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, the chief aircraft designer
for Lockheed. Johnson's proposed design was so extraordinary
that the Air Force turned it down on the grounds that such a plane
simply could not be built. But the President's committee was
more sanguine, and they passed on their views to Eisenhower,
who immediately told Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA, to get
that airplane built-urgently and secretly.
Dulles appointed one of his top deputies, Richard Bissell, to
ramrod the project. A recent CIA recruit, Bissell was an econo-
mist who had taught on the faculty of Yale and MIT, and whohad
.served as an administrator in the Marshall Plan. Bissell started
things moving that very day. With an opposite number from the.
Air Force, he hatched a scheme to finance the project secretly.
The CIA had a special reserve fund for which it had to make no
specific accounting. From this fund the agency would pay for the
air-frame development. The Air Force already had on order a
large number of Pratt and Whitney enginesthat could powerthe
Lockheed design. The Air Force would buy a few more engines
and bury the extras in their larger order. Financing settled,
Bissell phoned Kelly Johnson at Lockheed and told him to get to
work.
Kelly Johnson was a shy, chubby genius who looked ratherlike
W. C. Fields, and whose idea of recreation was working calculus
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PONTINUEU
 Approved For Release 2005/01/11 : CIA-RDP88-01314R000100030002-0
Above: Clarence '.'Kelly"Johnson,
brilliant designer of the U-2, at the
wingtip of one model, ca. 1962. Right:
Tony Levier, Lockheed test pilot, who was
the first man toffy the extraordinary
new airplane when it was built in 1954.
ABOVE: LOCKHEED. RIGHt LOSAHGELES T(n,et
problems. He was probably the most brilliant aircraft designer a cargo aircraft or transported to a take-off point by truck
.
alive. During his long career he created. the famous P-38 of World The plane would ultimately become known as the U-2. But the
War II, the F-80, which was America's first jet fighter; the C-130 men in the Skunk Works had a nickname of their own for the
Hercules, which is still an Air Force cargo workhorse; the F-104 graceful machine they were creating. They called it "the
work with a compact staff and a minimum of fuss and red tape, As the first Angels were built in the Skunk Works, Bissell,.
his stature with Lockheed was such that he had almost total Kelly Johnson, and Lockheed test pilot Tony Levier armed
autonomy. Now he hand-picked a small team of twenty-three themselves with topographical maps and made scouting flights
engineers and technicians and moved them into a Lockheed overthe western deserts, looking fora location so remote that the .
hangar in Burbank, California-a secret workshop that Johnson Angel could be test flown in total secrecy. Finallythey found adry
named "the Skunk Works," after the spot in Dogpatch where lake bed that could serve as a landing strip. Now roads had to be
Hairless Joe brewed up his famous Kickapoo Joy Juice. built, a well dug, hangars and living quarters erected at the
It was no wonder the Air Force had considered the plane hidden site. The construction crews who did this job had no idea
impossible to build. To be safe from interception it had to fly at an what they were working on, and indeed everything about the
.altitude of seventy thousand feet-some twenty-five thousand Angel was shrouded in secrecy. In discussions the plane was
f
b
eet a
ove the operating ceilings of contemporary aircraft. In the
thin air at that altitude, a jet engine would barely run at all, and it
would produce only 6 percent of its sea-level thrust. The plane had
to stay in the air forover ten hours and cruise as far as a B-52, and
its fuel capacity was so limited that it had to get an incredibly
efficient five miles per gallon of fuel while flying at five hundred
miles per hour. And since the crash landing of a spy plane on
foreign soil would have serious diplomatic repercussions, the new
aircraft had to be highly reliable. .
Under tight security, Johnson's team went to work on the
project, which was code-named'.'Aquatone" The plane that soon
took shape in the Skunk Works Was 'a marvel of elegant simplic-
ity, a sleek machine with an eighty-foot span of slender, tapering
wings. It looked more like a glider than a conventional airplane,
and indeed from seventy thousand feet it would glide for three
hundred miles before touching the earth. Johnson's engineers
struggled to pare away every ounce of excess weight. They
designed a wing that weighed only three pounds persquare foot-
a third that of a normal aircraft. They attached the tail assembly
-to the fuselage with just three bolts. They designed the canopy
above the cockpit to be operated by hand. Instead of heavy
conventional landing gear the plane had "pogos"-tiny wheels
suspended from the wingtips by slender rods. On takeoff, the
e
pogos dropped off as soon as the plane was airborne. On landing, otherguys" (men from the CIA). These pilots were an elitegroup.
the pilot coasted in on a belly wheel and lightweight skids on the Candidates had to haven thousand hnura of a;nrrle- tim
e
bl
d
i
ps.~?a m
....,s~
e
, LeLq~q,~uepsBAeaou ue~sos~reaa~way;n~ ewWtimid 6tMTtlehdd`f6l'"l'I TY-`Z'"i'd don Of those accepted,
known as "the article," the pilot was called "the driver," and the
secret desert base was called "home plate." In Burbank, disas-s
sembled Angels were loaded into covered trucks,which pulledout
at dusk and traveled to "home plate" during the night.
On August 6,1955, just under eight months from the day that
Kel ly Johnson got the go-ahead from Bissell, theAngel was ready
to fly. On its first taxi test the plane popped thirty-six feet into
the air-with its ultralight construction and enormous wingspan,
the Angel simply wanted to fly. When Tony Leviertook the plane
upon its first flight, he had to try five times before he could force
the eager Angel back to earth.
Until the pilots got accustomed to the plane, the Angel's
determination to stay airborne caused them considerable diffi-
culty. There were other snags too. Condensation formed on the
faceplates of the pilots' pressure suits, blurring their vision, and
the Pratt and Whitney engine that powered the plane proved
subject to flameouts at high altitudes. Before all these problems
were solved, one Angel crashed, a second disintegrated, and a
third disappeared along with its pilot.
Eventually the difficulties were overcome. Angels started
making long endurance flights to the Canadian border and back,
to the Tennessee mountains and back. A training program was
set up for pilots, both "blue suiters" (Air Force officers) and "th
 Above, left: the U-2camera. Left:
"Automat," the secret photo-
interpretation center in Washington,
D.C. Above: Art Lundahl, master
photo-interpreter.
A Soviet freighter headsfor Cuba
carrying crated guided-missile patrol
boats in August, 1962. Such pictures,
although not taken by U-2s, convinced
American intelligence experts that U-2
flights over Cuba must be made.
U3.1iAVY
had to such an expert in Art Lundahl, a teacher of photo-interpretation
its the
l
i
y
a
many had problems with the spec
pressure .. wear at high altitude. These garments were so precisely fitted from the University of Chicago. A friendly, ebullient man with
that if a pilot gained orlost two pounds, his suit was useless. And boundless enthusiasm for his arcane craft, Lundahl had worked
the suit forced a pilot to breathe artificially; that is, he had to on the Bikini atom bomb tests, determining from photos the
consciously suck in a breath-then the suit would force him to damage done to ships that were still too radioactive for close-up
expel the air. Before they could fly the tricky U-2, the pilots spent inspection. He was a master both of photo-interpretation-the
hours in pressure chambers, learning to breath this way naturally qualitative art of identifying photographed objects-and photo-
and unconsciously. Some simply could not acquire the knack, and grammetry-the quantitative art of determining their dimen-
sions
hi
f
?
s reason.
or t
perhaps half the trainees washed out
Even as the Angel was under construction and the pilots were In Washington, Lundahl setup a small photo-intelligence unit.,
being trained, other components necessary for a spy plane were and in December, 1954, he got a cryptic phone call from Allen
being rushed to completion. Among the breakthroughs was a new Dulles` office, relieving him of all duties and telling him to report
Mylar-based film developed by Eastman Kodak. Hardly thicker to the director immediately. He met with Dulles and Richard
than Saran Wrap, this film could be loaded into a compact aerial Bissell, who unveiled the plans for the U-2 and told Lundahl to
camera in enormous quanti ties. Another crucial component was a establish a photo-interpretation shop capable of handling large
revolutionary new lens designed by Dr. James Baker, a Harvard quantities of film. He was to keep what he was doing an absolute
astronomer. The resolving power, or sharpness, of a lens is secret-not even his immediate supervisor was to know what he
measured by the number of lines it can distinguish per milli- was up to.
meter. World War II aerial lenses could resolve from twelve to Lundahl set up his laboratory in the last place anyone would
fifteen lines. Baker's new lens could distinguish from fifty to think to look-above an auto repair shop in a seedy section of
sixty lines. When mounted in a telephoto camera in an airplane Southeast Washington. He and his team kicked their way
flying at an altitude of about eight miles, the Baker lens could throughgarbage togettowork and risked muggings on their way
read the headlines on a newspaper lying on the ground. At home, but they had plenty of room and a high degree of
thirteen miles, it could see an object the size of a sport jacket. Not inconspicuousness. Lundahl foresaw the day when his lab would
only was this lens superior to anything that had existed before, be able to provide an unprecedented amount and variety of
but it could now be produced in quantity, and quickly. Previously, information to suit any intelligence appetite, and so he gave his
lenses had to be ground by hand-a laborious, slow process. But operation an appropriate code name: Automat.
now, in the new electronics age, computers could take over the Plane, film, lens, camera, interpretation-the greatest intelli-
task of lens making. gence-gathering tool in history was now complete. From a height
Something else was needed: a new camera. With Dr. Edwin of thirteen miles the U-2 could photograph aswathof country750
Land, the innovative head of Polaroid, functioning as a general miles wide, about 150 miles of that in high-resolution stereo.
catalyst, a series of camera designs were created by the Hycon Carrying twelve thousand feet of film in its magazines, the plane
Corporation, a California optical company. Chief among these could scan a path from Washington to Phoenix in a single flight
was the "B-camera." This rapid-fire machine swung its lens from And in justtwelve missions, the inquisitive Angel could gather all
side to side, producing strips of pictures that, when overlapped, significant information on a land mass the size of the-United
formed a stereo image. Weighing 450 pounds, the camera was States.
designed to fit snugly into the slender fuselage of the U-2. The first U-2 flight over Russia took place on July 4,1956. By
There was still one more ingredient necessary for a completed the second or third mission the Russians had picked up the plane
spy system: someone had to make expert sense out of the on their radar, which was more sophisticated than U.S. analysts
enormous quantity of photographic intelligence that the U-2 had thought, but the Soviets had no weapon capable of bringing
would soon be bringing home. In 1953 the CIA had acquired just down the high-flying intruder. For four years the Angels criss-
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 crossed the Russian ski es, until M ay 1,1960, when a U-2 piloted by
Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russia by a SAM-a
surface-to-air missile. The Powers incident brought a storm of
protest from Russia, and resulted in a cessation of overflights.
But in those four years the spy planes had gathered an enormous
amount of information. First they had proved that a "bomber
gap" did not exist; the Russians were not ahead of the U.S. in
long-range bomber capacity. Later, they proved that the much-
feared "missile gap" did not exist either.
But the ultimate employment of the U-2 was not to occur for
two more years, during the administration of John Kennedy. In
the summer of 1962 it became evident that Russia was sending
massive arms shipments to Cuba. The U.S. intelligence commu-
nity had a worldwide ship-watching network, and as Russian
vessels passed through choke points like the Bosporus, U.S.
military attaches in Istanbul simply stood on the shore, observed
the ships, and photographed them. Many of the ships had large
crates on theirdecks, and these were a dead giveaway, forback at.
Automat Lundahl's interpreters had developed a new skill they
called "cratology"-which was the science of deducing the
identity of objects concealed inside crates. For years CIA agents
bad been observing the kinds of packages the Russians used to
wrap their military equipment. During May Day festivals in
Moscow, when the Soviets traditionally paraded their new
weapons, agents observed and photographed missiles, tanks,
planes, and other hardware. Now when photographs of the
Russian deck cargo arrived in Washington, Lundahl's photo-
grammetry experts needed only a single known dimension-such
as, say, the height of a deckhand-to measure accurately every-
thing else in view. By August some seventy-five Soviet or Soviet-
chartered ships had reached Cuba or were en route, and the
cratologists had determined that they were transporting missile-
carrying PT boats, cruise missiles, MIG fighters, and other
sophisticated weapons.
Along with this evidence, the CIA was also gathering a great
deal of "humint" on the Cuba buildup-too much of it, in fact. At
the time, refugees were pouring out of Cuba and into Miami. The
new arrivals were taken to Task Force W, a CIA debriefing
station established at Opa-Locka, Florida. There they were
interrogated by Spanish-speaking analysts; those who seemed to
have useful information were held for further questioning. The
' quarantine, president Kennedy put Air
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refugees were full of gossip, rumors, hysteria, and a generalized
hatred of the Castro regime that caused them to see apocalypse
around every corner;They flooded the system with reports of
SAMs and nuclear missiles. Again and again these reports proved
false. (Indeed, by January of 1962, months before the arms
shipments began, the CIA had received 211 refugee reports of
missiles in Cuba.) Confronted with so much bad information, so
much "background noise," the CIA's intelligence analysts
became skeptical about all refugee reports. -
Intelligence from agents in Cuba would have been more
reliable, but such intelligence was in short supply in 1962:
Following the Bay of Pigs, Castro had declared a "war on
traitors," rounding up thousands of Cubans with doubtful loyal-
ties; among them were most of the CIA's Cuban spies. With those
informants lost, analysts had no way of corroborating the
refugee reports.
Harder information was needed-the kind that could be
provided only by the U-2. A mission was flown, and when the film
was inspected on August 29, Lundahl's interpreters saw some-
thing new, and sinister-the familiar Star of David pattern of a
Russian SAM site. Indeed, in ensuing days they found eight such,
sites under construction. The key question was: were the SAMs
simply part of an antiaircraft defense system, or did their
presence have more menacing implications? Could they be there
to protect other missiles-nuclear missiles?
The discovery of the SAMs caused consternation in the White
House, but on September 4 Khrushchev sent a message via
Russian ambassador Dobrynin to Robert Kennedy, for relay to
the President. The message said, in effect, that Khrushchev had
no intention of creating any problems for Kennedy during 1962,
an election year. In response, Kennedy issued a public warning
that if offensive missiles were introduced. into Cuba, "the gravest
issues would arise." A few days later, the Kremlin made another
mollifying statement indicating that there was no plan for
installing missiles in Cuba. t._
Most members of the American intelligence community
accepted the Russian denials-not because of faith in the Krem-
lin's honesty, but because it simply did not seem rational for the
Russians to place offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba. They had
never placed such missiles in Soviet-bloc countries in Europe,
although they could have done so with impunity. Why would they
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 now place them in the Caribbean, where the U.S. was sure to
regard their presence as extremely provocative, and where the
U.S. had total military superiority? Cuba was important to
Russia; the United States had already backed one botched
invasion of the country. Why provide the Americans with an
excuse to launch an all-out attack?
Certainly it was plausible that the Kremlin believed it neces-
sary to beef up Cuba's antiaircraft defenses. The U.S. had
supported the Bay of Pigs attack the previous year, and the CIA
had been busily hatching bizarre schemes for doing away with
Castro. The U.S. also had allowed some publicity about a forth-
coming military exercise planned for the Caribbean in the fall of
1962. This operation, code-named "P'hilbriglex-62," was to
involve an assault by seventy-five hundred Marines, heavily
supported by aircraft carriers and other vessels, on an island off
the coast of Puerto Rico. According to the scenario, the Marines
were to "liberate" a small country called Vieques from a dictator
named Ortsac-which, of course, is Castro spelled backward.
Russia was aware of this operation, and might reasonably have
suspected it was apractice run for the real thing.
There were some dissenters from the generally sanguine
outlook shared by most U.S. intelligence experts. Chief among
these was John McCone, who had taken over from Allen Dulles as
head of the CIA in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
McCone, who always took the dimmest possible view of Russian
intent, felt that the Kremlin might indeed install offensive
missiles as bargaining chips for future negotiations. McCone
accounted for the fact that Russia had not given such missiles to
its eastern European allies on theground that Russia did not trust
its satellites, and feared the missiles might be turned back on
Moscow. Placed in Cuba, medium-range ballistic missiles could
not reach back to Russia. But they could reach the United States.
The truth could best be learned through the hard data produced
by more overhead reconnaissance. But now there was an obstacle
to sending the Angels winging over Cuba. With SAMs now in
place in Cuba, there was a strong possibility of losing a plane, and
the resulting international uproar could severely limit the future
use of America's most effective spying tool. The Committee on
Overhead Reconnaissance, made up of representatives from the
CIA and various military intelligence branches, finally decided
on a compromise course. They would send the U-2s on "sheep
crisis, while Marines infighting gea r
awaited orders to move.
BMW ROBERT W. KEULY. Life sucAUNECT1NE, WC.
dipping" missions-that is, the planes would fly off the island's
shore, briefly dipping inland to take quick photographic peeks,
then hightailing it away. None would fly directly over the
western end of Cuba, where the SAMs were being installed.
The sheep-dipping flights failed to turn up any new evidence,
and on September 19 the U.S. Intelligence Board met in Wash-
ington to try to draw some conclusions. The board, made up of
members from the CIA, the National Security Council, and the
State and Defense Departments, weighed all available evidence
and advised the President that it was extremely unlikely that the
Russians were installing strategic nuclear missiles. Pessimistic
as always, John McCone, who was honeymooning on the Riviera,
cabled his dissent.
But no soonerhad the board reported to the President than new
information surfaced-information with disturbing overtones.
For one thing, large-hatched ships were seen arriving in Cuba,
Ordinarily these ships were used for transporting such bulk cargo
as lumber, but the vessels approaching Cuba were riding high in
the water, as if carrying light but bulky loads. Then intelligence
analysts received a report that Fidel Castro's personal pilot had .
drunkenly boasted that "We will fight to the death and perhaps
we can win because we have everything, including atomic
weapons." On September 21, two days after the Intelligence
Board meeting, acrucial report finally reached Washington: nine
days earlier, a CIA agent in Havana had spotted a truck carrying
what appeared to be a shrouded long-range missile. The agent
managed to get onto a refugee flight to Florida, where he met
with intelligence analysts. His sketches of the truck's rear profile
and other information he gave suggested that the truck was
indeed carrying a large strategic missile. Corroboration for his.
story followed quickly, with another report that similarly laden
vehicles had been seen in the area of San Cristobal, about fifty
miles southwest of Havana.
There was yet another worrisome bit of intelligence: Colonel
John Wright, an analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency,
had carefully studied the earlier U-2 photos of the SAM installa-
tions. There was something peculiar about the SAM sites in the
San Cristobal area: the missiles were laid out in a pattern similar
to that the Russians had used when setting up defenses for
strategic missile sites in the U.S.S.R.
By October 4, the accumulated evidence was so suggestive that
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CONTINUED.
At Guantanamo, the big American naval
nd, ships and
~vkaw~gv I wvv I v vvv y,~-v ?
planes per~ormet~ exercises during the
 At an emergency session of the United
Nations Security Council on October 25,
the U.S.A., shows convincing U-2 evidence;
Ambassador Zorin of the U.S.S.R. (behind
"President "sign) ignores it. ti
NEALBOENMTHENew York Times
the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance decided to authorize
a U-2 flight over the San Cristobal area, in spite of the consid-
erable risks involved. But instead of launching a spy plane
immediately, the intelligence community now got involved in a
time-consuming bureaucratic squabble over which agency should
run the operation, the CIA or the Air Force. In case the plane was
shot down-and that was a strong possibility-the difference
would be by no means academic. If the pilot was a CIA man he
could be treated as a spy, even shot. But under what is known in
the spy trade as the "theory of plausible denial," the U.S. could
disavow any connection with the mission. While such a disavowal
would be a transparent fiction, it would have a certain diplomatic
utility. On the other hand, if the pilot was an Air Force officer the
overflight could be construed as an act of war.
For these reasons, sensitive missions such as the one now
planned were customarily flown by CIA pilots. In this case,
however, with actual armed conflict now a clear possibility, the
Air Force lobbied for the right to fly the mission, and eventually
won out. The pilot would, however, fly a CIA plane, for the
agency's U-2s were souped-up models carrying electronic coun-
termeasures against SAMs.
More time was lost because of cloud cover over.Cuba, but
finally, on October 14, Mission G3101 Victor was launched. Major
Richard Heyser, the pilot, was a 35-year-old Floridian. An
experienced flier, he was an old friend of Francis Gary Powers,
and he was skilled in avarietyof maneuvers designed for evading
SAMs. Just in case he was shot down he carried plenty of Air
Force identification to ensure that he was not treated as a spy. He
did not carry cyanide pillsorothersuicide devices. If captured and
interrogated, he would divulge no more information than neces-
sary, but he was not expected to remain silent in the face of
torture.
About 8 A.M. on the fourteenth, Heyser approached Cuba from
the south across the Isle of Pines. He passed over Cuba in six
minutes, while the camera behind him in the fuselage, its lens
rotating from position to position, took 928 photographs. No
SAMs were fired at him. His work done, Heyser flew back to the
U.S. and landed in Florida.
The film was rushed to Lundahl's Automat operation in the
Washington slums, and the next morning, in a high-ceilinged
room painted battleship gray, a team of photo-interpreters went
to work. Late that afternoon Lundahl got a call from one of his
men. "We want you to come and look at something."
When Lundahl reached the room, the interpreters said nothing
about what they had found, for it was customary in this business
to let each man draw his own conclusions.. Lundahl went to the
light table, where he adjusted the twin stereoscopic eyepieces to
suit his vision. There on the film he saw an area of palm trees and
jungle vegetation slashed by the track marks of heavy equip-
ment. In a clearing he saw empty missile transporters, blast .
deflectors, cherry-picker cranes, wires and cables strung along
the ground. Most significantly, he saw rectangular tents
designed to cover something very long and narrow, and some
special vans like those the Russians used to transport nuclear
warheads.
After examining the film carefully for five minutes, Lundahl
turned to the interpreters and said, "OK, I know what you guys
are thinking, and you're right. These are medium-range ballistic
missiles. I don't want anyone to leave this room. Call your wives,
breakup your car pools. Do it casually. But stay in this room."
It was 5:30 P.M. Lundahl picked up a 'secure "gray phone" and
called the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. McCone was :
out of town attending a funeral, and Lundahl got Ray Cline, the -
agency's deputy director for intelligence. "Ray," he said, "sorry
to break up your day, but we're looking at MRBMs going into
Cuba, and even out here in the boondocks we know what that
means."
Cline was dumbfounded. "Are you sure? You aren't imagining
"I'm sure."
"I hope you're holding the ceiling on."
"I've got everybody buttoned up in the room,"
"Don't go off half-cocked." Cline said. "Go back and do your
homework again." After telling Lundahl to recheck the film,
Cline faced an awkward couple of hours. The CIA was hosting its
counterparts from England, Canada, and Australia at a
Commonwealth intelligence conference in Washington, and
Cline was expected to appear at a cocktail party that evening. He
bluffed his way through the party, got home by eight, and talked
once more to Lundahl, who confirmed the existence of the
MRBMs. Lundahl had found two sites containing SS-4 missiles.
Known to U.S. analysts as "Sandals,"they had a range of 1,020
CONTINilEl)
 As things calmed down, Soviet freighters
,left Cuba carrying crated bombers (above,
left) and missile launchers (above); J.F.K.
gave Art Lundahl and others silver
souvenir calendars (left).
CLOCRW SE FROM TOT LEFT. U.F.L, WTDE WO1LD. ART LUNDAHL
nautical miles-which put them within striking distance o:
Washington, D.C.
Cline's first action was to call presidential assistant McGeorge
Bundy at his home. Since he had no scrambler phone, Cline felt it
necessary to be circumspect. "You know that island we were
talking about a few days ago?" he said. "Well, they've got some
bigones."
Bundy caught on immediately. He was staggered by the news.
"Are they ready to shoot now?" he asked.
"No, but they are rapidly approaching it."
Next, Cline tried to alert the State Department. He reached
Roger Hilsman, the department's chief of intelligence, at a
cocktail party. Once again Cline described the missiles circum-
spectly, but this time his cryptic references were less effective.
Hilsman thoughthewas talking aboutbombers, not missiles, and
it took some time for Cline, using circumlocutions, to make
himself understood. As soon as he hung up, Cline found out he
wasn't so clever as he thought. His fourteen-year-old daughter,
who bad happened to be in the next room, came in and said,
"Where are the missiles-in Cuba or China?"
Through the rest of Monday evening, other top-level officials
of the government were tracked down at home or at social
functions and were told the news. Meanwhile, all through the
night, Lundahl's team kept checking the film overand over again.
Everything they saw strengthened their convictions.
Early the next morning, McGeorge Bundy went to the White
House and informed the President: "There is now hard photo-
graphic evidence that the Russians have offensive missiles in
Cuba." Realizing that Khrushchev had lied to him, Kennedy
reacted with surprise and anger. "He can't do that to me!"
Meanwhile, Lundahl and Cline were preparing their briefing
forthe President at the CIA's Langley headquarters. Just as they
were walking out the door with a big black case full of
photographs, a bus carrying the delegates to the Commonwealth
intelligence conference pulled up. Cline, who was supposed to
address the opening conference session that morning, was caught
in an embarrassing spot-anyone could see that he was going off
on some important errand. (Later, as the feverish comings and
goings around Washington became increasingly obvious, Cline
dropped hints that convinced the foreign intelligence officers
that the crisis was over Berlin).
At the White House, Lundahl and Cline went to the Oval Office
and spread the pictures out on the President's desk. Lundahl
handed Kennedy a big Sherlock-Holmes? style magnifying glass
and pointed out the incriminating evidence. Kennedy took along
time examining the pictures. Then he turned to Lundahl, fixed
him with a hard stare, and said, "Are you sure?"
"It can be a papier-mi the world out there," Lundahl replied.
"But I'm as sure of this as a photo-interpreter can be."
Over the following days there were more U-2 flights, and the
photo-interpreters were able to pinpoint a total of six MRBM
sites. They also found three sites for intermediate-range ballistic
missiles, which could carry nuclear warheads for twenty-two
hundred nautical miles to strike at any point in the United States
except for a small section of the Pacific Northwest. At the United
Nations when Adlai Stevenson accused the Russians of installing
the missiles, Soviet Ambassador Zorin tried to deny their exis-
tence, but Lundahl's deputy was waiting in the wings with huge
enlargements of the photographs. When he wheeled the pictures
onto the floor of the Security Council, there was no contesting the
evidence. Representatives of the CIA flew to the capitals of major
Allied nations with copies of the pictures and convinced the
foreign chiefs of state that the U.S. was acting on hard fact.
Confronted by all this, Khrushchev ordered the missiles removed
from Cuba. Later, when the Russians began to withdraw the
missiles, U-2s confirmed that they were gone.
T oday, of course, all this seems almost primitive, for things
have changed a lot in the last fifteen years. The technology
of spying is much advanced, with Russian and American satel-
lites orbiting the earth and sending back intelligence from
altitudes far beyond any achieved by the U-2..
John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev are gone-and most
of the experts who played key roles in the development of the
Angel and its associated technology are now fully or partly
retired. But they must look back, from time to time, to a brief
moment when it and they were in charge of history.
Don Moser, who was formerly an assistant managing editor of
LIFE,is now afree-lance writerwho lives in Washington, D.C. He
is currently working on a book about the China-Burma-India
theaterin World WarIl.
Approved For Release 2005/01/11 : CIA-RDP88-01314R000100030002-0