Spying from on High

Newly released photographs show just how much the U.S. knew

One of the pictures, taken in 1967 over Hanoi by a U.S. reconnaissance plane, freezes a terrifying moment in the Viet Nam War: an exploding SAM missile scoring a kill on a U.S. Phantom reconnaissance jet that has burst into flames. Another shot resembles a sort of hacksaw that turns out, on closer inspection, to be an assortment of bombers at a top-secret airfield in the Soviet Union. There are also high-altitude views of submarines nestling alongside their mother ships on the coast of the Barents Sea; a lunar-like landscape that is a Soviet hydrogen-bomb test site; a graceful triangular pattern deep in central Asia that marks the Tyuratam launch site for Soviet space shots and missiles.

Except for the Phantom being downed, these remarkable pictures (all but one never before published) were shot by U-2 aircraft flying high over the Soviet Union as long as 24 years ago. The glider-like plane was conceived in December 1953 by the brilliant Lockheed Aircraft Corp, designer Clarence L. ("Kelly") Johnson, now 70, for one purpose: to gather hard data on Soviet military capabilities. Its mission was to soar beyond the range of any jet interceptor or antiaircraft missile and provide the photographic and electronic intelligence necessary for accurate military assessments.

"Kelly's Angel," as the odd-looking plane was called by its pilots, was up to the task. Flying from bases in Turkey and Pakistan, U-2s crisscrossed the Soviet Union with impunity from 1956 to 1960. Though the Kremlin was aware of the spy flights, it issued no public protests; to do so would have amounted to an embarrassing admission that the Soviets could not protect their own airspace.

As a result, the U-2 was free to make discoveries that strongly influenced U.S. strategic policy for several years. The 1956 picture of M-4 Bison jet bombers lined up at one airfield showed virtually the entire Soviet production of the craft; only a few were found at the other fields, ferreted out by the U-2s. That convinced the Pentagon that the feared bomber gap was fictional. Three years later, the overhead view of the Tyuratam site (where all Soviet missiles were then tested) gave the U.S. some needed reassurance. Determining that the rocket booster aperture at the base of the launch pad was 15 meters (50 ft.) in diameter, photo interpreters concluded that the Soviets were still using missiles boosted by auxiliary rockets strapped around the circumference of the main rocket. Because they were so cumbersome that they could not be practically deployed, U.S. strategic planners concluded that the missile gap did not exist either. The photograph of the Soviet's North Sea submarine fleet showed that it was largely a defensive force; the moored submarines shown here turned out to be Whisky-and Foxtrot-class submarines, designed to attack surface ships rather than to launch nuclear missiles.

Though the U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union ceased after Francis Gary Powers was shot down in May 1960 by a newly developed SAM-2 rocket, U-2s played a major role in U.S. intelligence of Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis. They shot pictures that the CIA'S top photograph interpreter, Dino Brugioni, analyzed to prove that Russian missile sites were being built on Cuban soil. Brugioni is now an ardent advocate of preserving declassified aerial photography. Says he: "I say these are historic films. The record of our times is here."

Today much of the aerial spying role has been taken over by giant satellites like the 12-ton Big Bird and by the top-secret SR-71 Blackbird high-altitude reconnaissance plane (also designed by Kelly Johnson), which flies near but not over Soviet territory, peering far into the heartland with its sophisticated electronic and optical sensors. The SR-71 may have set a record. So far, it has successfully eluded some 900 attempts by the Soviets and their allies to shoot it down.

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