If the intention was simply to render inoperative certain parts of the equipment, fine. But in this case the agency should have kept those limitations in mind. It should also have considered the possibility that in some situations even this might not be possible. Instead, if President Eisenhower’s memoirs are correct, even the President was led to believe that “in the event of mishap the plane would virtually disintegrate.”
A lesson learned? According to accounts of the Pueblo’s seizure, it carried “hundreds of pounds” of classified documents, with no simple means of destroying them in an emergency. In the case of the Pueblo, however, there was at least the excuse of a reason for complacency—that the ship was to remain supposedly invulnerable in international waters. With the U-2, we lacked that excuse.
We manned the U-2 with pilots who had never been adequately briefed on what to do if captured. The word “capture” did not appear in their contracts, it did not come up in their discussions. As for me, it was mentioned only once in a briefing, and then only after I had made a number of flights over Russia and only because I had brought it up. We should have talked about it, planned for it as for any other possible eventuality. Ignoring a problem does not solve it.
Perhaps it was felt best, psychologically, that such fears never arise. If so, apparently both the occupant of the White House and many in the upper echelons of the CIA succumbed to this psychological conditioning also, inasmuch as they were as unprepared as the pilots.
And remained so, even while evidence accumulated that the day was rapidly approaching when we would no longer be invulnerable to missiles at our altitude.
It is a bad intelligence practice to fail to consider all available evidence. Yet, throughout the U-2 crisis, there are indications that this is exactly what happened, not once, but again and again.
If the pilots were under orders to kill themselves to evade capture—as so many, including even the President, apparently believed—then the pilots should have been apprised of this fact. In which case, we should have been required to carry the needle, not given a choice in the matter; and use should have been declared mandatory, not optional, the briefing officer making definite exactly what was expected of us. While I can only speak for one of the pilots, I know that had I been told this I would have been ready to obey those orders, or never taken the flight.
As pilots, we were not only unprepared for capture, we were ill-prepared, in many ways a much worse situation. The advice “You may as well tell them everything, because they’re going to get it out of you anyway” was, under the circumstances, bad. Perhaps the agency couldn’t have foreseen this. Brainwashing, drugs, and torture having been the lot of prisoners in the past, it may have been wise to prepare us for the worst. All I know, however, is that had I followed these instructions, the damage to the United States would have been monumental.
Even more serious, in many ways, were the misconceptions I carried with me. From the American press, from my Air Force indoctrinations, from the attitude adopted by the agency, I had been led to believe that Russian intelligence was nearly omnipotent, that the KGB had agents everywhere, that “they probably know more about you than you know about yourself.”
These misconceptions, as it turned out, were far more dangerous than the advice I had been given. Because I believed the Russians knew a great deal more than they probably did, I may well have told them far more than was necessary. That it was a great deal less than our orders called for does not minimize its seriousness. Overrating an enemy can be as much a mistake as underrating him.
At no point in my agency training was I instructed on how to handle myself during an interrogation. In my CIA “clearance” the agency justified this with the explanation that we were hired as pilots, not espionage agents. This was true. But it ignores the fact that, though pilots, we were potentially in as much danger of capture as any covert agent. We should have been briefed—as to what tricks to expect, as to tricks we could in turn use to avoid answering a question, as to how best to withstand hour after hour of continuous interrogation. While such briefings, I realize, wouldn’t have prepared me for all eventualities, they would have helped immensely, if only to give me a realistic idea of what was possible under the right conditions. Instead, I had to improvise. It worked out better than I expected. But it could have gone very badly.
Much has been written about the mistakes made in pulling from the files a cover story which did not fit the facts, then maintaining it even when it was obviously discredited. In all this criticism, one very serious error has never been brought out. And that is that the pilots themselves were never informed as to what the cover story would be. I not only hadn’t been briefed, I wasn’t even sure a cover story would be issued. It may well be that no cover story would have been adequate to the situation; the one I improvised fell apart the moment my maps and rolls of film were brought in. But it would have helped to have some idea about the story being told in the world outside.
While we overrated the Russians in many ways, we also underrated them in the one area in which they are undisputed masters: propaganda.
In Waging Peace, President Eisenhower wrote: “Of those concerned, I was the only principal who consistently expressed a conviction that if ever one of the planes fell in Soviet territory a wave of excitement amounting almost to panic would sweep the world, inspired by the standard Soviet claim of injustice, unfairness, aggression, and ruthlessness. The others, except for my own immediate staff and Mr. Bissell, disagreed. Secretary Dulles, for instance, would say laughingly, ‘If the Soviets ever capture one of these planes, I’m sure they will never admit it. To do so would make it necessary for them to admit also that for years we had been carrying on flights over their territory while they, the Soviets, had been helpless to do anything about the matter.’”
Secretary Dulles made a bad guess. But he could have been right. The worst mistake is not that he guessed wrongly, but that we were unprepared for any other possibility. Not only that, but even after the receipt of contrary evidence, we ignored it because it did not fit our preconceptions. Instead, we engaged in wishful thinking, as if wishing would make it so.
There were, I’m quite sure, many in Washington who hoped that the pilot was dead. That is, I realize, a strong assertion, but after ten years it seems foolish any longer to deny the obvious. The cover story, and our whole official attitude in the week of May 1 through May 7, was predicated upon this assumption. Yet, from the beginning, the possibility that I was alive existed and was ignored.
I was amazed to discover, on my return to the United States, that on May 5—two days before Khrushchev’s announcement of my capture—the State Department received a telegram from Ambassador Thompson in Moscow warning of a rumor that the pilot was alive and a captive of the Russians. It was an unconfirmed report, the drunken bragging of a Soviet official at a diplomatic reception. But surely someone in our intelligence apparatus should have been alerted. Instead we continued to embellish the cover story, walking blindly into Khrushchev’s trap.
It was a decidedly one-sided chess game, Khrushchev calling the moves, the U.S. ignoring the pieces on the board.
I now believe that the story that I had descended to a lower altitude was a controlled leak. I also believe that some person or persons within the agency, desperate to justify the decision to make the flight, helped perpetuate it. If the aircraft had descended to a lower altitude and then was shot down, it would have been bad luck, therefore, no one in the agency could be blamed.