LAST-MINUTE CONSERVATIVE PLEAS INFLUENCED REAGAN'S DECISION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP94B00280R000700140008-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 9, 2011
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: May 1, 1986
• Content Type: MEMO

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3NPACE + U. S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT
14 April 1986
WASHINGTON 1
WHISPER S
Will Libya's Qadhafi be
pushed out in a year?
Will Qadhafi be gone within a year?
Some top U.S. intelligence experts are
betting on it-not deposed through
American action but by Qadhafi s own
military officers fed up with his irration-
al behavior that has made Libya a pari-
ah among nations.
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FSHINGTON POST
6 April 1986
The Spy Plane That Flew Into History
MAYDAY
Eisenhower. Khrushchev
And the U-T Affair
By Michael R. Beschloss
Harper & Row. 494 pp. $19.95
By James Bamford
FRANCIS GARY POWERS was sup-
posed to be dead. The problem was
he didn't know it.
A few minutes earlier he had bailed
out of his crippled U-2 and was now parachut-
ing into the heart of a May Day celebration in
Central Russia. At the Central Intelligence
Agency and the White House, the possibility
that one of the spy planes might go down over
hostile territory was always a remote possibil-
ity. What Powers was never told, however,
was that no U-2 pilot was ever supposed to live
to reach earth. "It would be impossible,"
President Eisenhower remembered the CIA
and Joint Chiefs assuring him, "if things should
go wrong, for the Soviets to come into posses-
sion of the equipment intact-or, unfortunate-
ly, of a live pilot." Another White House aide,
Eisenhower's son John, also recalled that it
was "a complete given, a complete assumption
as far as we were concerned," that no pilot
would be taken alive by the Soviets.
It has now been more than a quarter of a
century since Frank Powers slipped a poison
suicide needle into his pocket, climbed into the
cockpit of U-2 Number 360, and began the
odyssey which would lead to the failure of the
Paris summit conference and the most severe
crisis of the Eisenhower administration. May-
day, by Michael R. Beschloss, an historian at
the Smithsonian Institution and author of Ken-
nedy and Roosevelt, is a fast-paced, highly
readable history of that crisis.
Although many of the details have been writ-
ten about before, Beschloss skillfully weaves
together an assortment of memoirs, docu-
ments from presidential libraries, declassified
reports and interviews into the most compre-
hensive analysis of the U-2 incident to date. At
the same time, through use of backnotes in-
stead of footnotes, frequent shifts of scenes,
and an abundance of detail, he has accom-
plished the difficult task of making a work of
scholarship read like a novel.
While much has been written about the tre-
mendous accomplishments of the U-2 pro-
gram, and there were many, little has been
written about the dangerous arrogance of
those who ran America's early airborne recon-
naissance activities. For years, even before the
U'2 incident, the United States had been se-
cretly sending military aircraft into the Soviet
Union for both photographic and signals-intelli-
gence collection. "One day, I had forty-seven
airplanes flying all over Russia," boasted one
Air Force general.
Yet one wonders what the U.S. reaction
might have been had it suddenly discovered
four dozen Russian military aircraft heading
into the United States from Canada and Mexi-
co. President Eisenhower gave an indication
during the height of the U-2 program: Nothing,
the president indicated to his senior military
men involved in the program, would make him
ask Congress to declare war "more quickly
than violation of our airspace by Soviet air-
craft.'
0 NCE, WHEN a deeper penetration
was called for, a Marine general
working for the CIA persuaded the
British to conduct the risky mission.
The Royal Air Force took a bomber, loaded it
with cameras and extra fuel tanks, and flew it
from West Germany down over the Soviet mis-
sile testing area of Kapustin Yar, 75 miles east
of Stalingrad. By the time the aircraft reached
safety in Iran its fuselage was peppered with
holes.
To avoid this problem, the CIA in 1953
asked Lockheed to develop an aircraft that
could fly above the reach of Soviet aircraft and
surface-to-air missiles. This would allow the
United States to virtually own the sky over the
Soviet Union-for a time. The result was the
U-2. It could cruise at altitudes of between
68,000 and 72,000 feet, giving the aircraft an
8,000- to 12,000-foot safety buffer above the
Soviet SA-1 missiles.
From the very first overflight, in the sum-
mer of 1956, the Soviets knew what was hap-
pening-and we knew they knew what was
happening. The National Security Agency con-
stantly monitored the Soviet air defense radar
systems as they helplessly tracked the invisible
bird. But by 1960 the situation began chang-
ing. According to Beschloss, the Soviets began
installing their new SA-2 rockets which, the
CIA believed, could strike a target as high as
70,000 feet and thus eliminated the U-2's
safety buffer zone. 'Nevertheless, the rockets
were still thought to be quite inaccurate above
60,000 feet.
President Eisenhower had always harbored
serious reservations about the U-2 program.
He had entered office with high aspirations of
improving relations with the Soviets and, he
knew, a U-2 accident over Russian territory
could destroy that hope. Therefore he person-
ally scrutinized each proposed flight and route
and, to the chagrin of many at CIA and Air
Force, kept the numbers to the minimum.
It appears a possibility that, in order to en-
courage a greater number of flights, the .pre-
dent may not have been providerwith the' full
details of Soviet
reaction to the flights. Beschloss quotes from
a memo in which an Air Force official tells the
president in early 1959 that the Soviets have
never fired a missile at any of the U-2s. How-
ever, former CIA deputy director Richard Bis-
sell, who ran the spy flights, has indicated to
this reviewer that missiles were in fact fired
at the aircraft. In addition, Red Air Force
fighters were frequently scrambled in an at-
tempt to shoot down the intruder. On one
flight from Norway to Turkey, according to
Bissell, the National Security Agency re-
corded 56 different aircraft being scrambled
against the U-2.
' A&6f t(ld 1'Pl c146*1, 6 . to
have been a moratorium on Soviet overflights
for much of the fall of 1959 and spring of
1960. Then, strangely, although worried
about the dangers of creating an incident prior
to the Paris summit conference with the Sovi-
ets in the middle of May, Eisenhower ap-
proved a flight which took place on April 9.
The president appeared to have mistaken
Khrushchev's lack of a formal protest against
the flights for acquiescence. (In fact Khru-
shchev was boiling mad.) As a result, shortly
before the summit, he approved another
flight. This, to Khrushchev, was nothing less
than a deliberate insult-planned not only to
precede the summit but scheduled on the
most festive, day in the Soviet Union, May
Day.
Beschloss is unable to provide any. r w an-
swers as to how and at what height- F cis
Gary Powers' U-2 was shot down, but he .does,
indicate?that the weight ef.the evidence tends
to support the pilot's story that his aircraft
was disabled by the near-miss of a Soviet
rocket near his cruising altitude. Neverthe-
less, there is also some evidence of Not error,
brought on by fatigue.
On learning of the shoot-down, President
Eisenhower first put out a weak cover story
and then, on learning that Powers and much of
the aircraft survived the crash, admitted the
spying and his knowledge of the program but,
untruthfully, denied specific foreknowledge of
the May Day flight. To most Americans, it
came as a shock to find out that their govern-
ment would he to them. In fact, it was worse.
Beschloss points out that Secretary of State
Christian Herter attempted to hide the presi-
dent's.role in the planning of the various over-
gnl_,a untruthfully telling a Senate com-
rl*tee, i igating the incident that the ap-
Prq h$d-never "come up to the president."
Following the U-2 incident and with the ad-
vent of reconnaissance satellites shortly
thereafter, the United States has apparently
refrained from actual overflights. But that
situation may change. Currently on the draw-
ing boards is a new type of military spare
plane designed to occupy that area above the
high-flying reconnaissance aircraft, about 20
miles up, and, the orbits of low-flying spy satel-
lites, about 70-miles high.
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UNITED PRESS INTERNATIC
27 November 1985
HIJACK - TURNER
WASHINGTON
Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner said Wednesday the United States may
not have enough evidence to retaliate against Libya for its involvement in the
hijacking of an EgyptAir jet.
Turner also acknowledged that he contemplated taking action against Libya's
leader Moammar Khadady when he was President Carter's intelligence chief.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has blamed Libya for the weekend hijacking
that cost the lives of 59 people. Egyptian commandos shot the hijackers in a
bloody rescue Sunday at an air field on the Mediterranean island nation of
Malta.
President Reagan has said the United States would strike out at terrorists if
they can be clearly linked to an attack or hijacking.
Turner, interviewed on the ''CBS Morning News,'' was asked if a ''smoking
pistol'' was necessary for a retaliatory raid.
''Yes, I think you do, because of our moral and ethical attitude,'' Turner
said. ''If we're going to retaliate against Khadafy, and I hope we can some day
because he certainly deserves it, you've got to have really strong evidence.
''It's my experience in this kind of thing that you very, very seldom have
that with respect to nations supporting small, splinter terrorist groups like
this. (And) If you have the evidence, you may not be able to produce it in
public. You may not be able to turn it loose because your intelligence sources
will be compromised.''
Turner, a paid consultant for the network, said when he was CIA director,
he looked for a chance to mount a covert operation against Khadafy but failed to
find one.
"I would advocate (such operations) if they could be successful,'' Turner
said. "I explored that considerably in my time in the CIA and never found the
opportunity for it being successful.''
Turner said he does not think ''the situation is ripe'' to attempt to depose
Khadafy. ''Although there are certainly people opposed toKhadafy ... I don't
believe there is enough activity in Libya against Khadafy on which you can
build. His strength is a little too strong.
The former CIA director recommended the United States lead a campaign to
establish an international airport inspection agency that would inspect
security, particularly at international airports in Egypt and Greece, and place
armed passengers aboard flights to deal with hijackers.
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