The Day After Roswell (19 page)

So we played gamesmanship with them, probing their defenses,
deliberately sacrificing pilots who we believed died when their planes
were shot down, and always denying what we were doing even as
Khrushchev screamed at Eisenhower that the U2 program was putting
Khrushchev himself at risk inside the Kremlin. “We can deal
with each other, ” the Communist Party chairman told Ike.
“But not if you force me out of office. ” But as
much as Eisenhower hated the U2 program and the jeopardy into which it
placed our pilots, the President had to accommodate himself to one of
the other agendas of the surveillance: the ongoing search for any
evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft landings or crashes within the
vastness of the Soviet Union. We also wanted to see whether the Soviets
were harvesting any of the alien aircraft technology for themselves.
That’s what made the U2 program too valuable to give up until
we had an alternative. And the alternative, although it was an air
force and not an army program, was part of a shared R&D between
our intelligence services and the National Security Council/CIA
apparatus. And it was already in development within Lockheed in a
division they called “skunk works. ”

Because we had set up our U2 flights to provoke the Soviets
and because we knew that ultimately we would start to lose pilots and
planes, the National Security staff began looking aggressively for a
more secure surveillance program as early as 1957, my last year at the
White House. Intelligence decided to take orbital satellite photos of
Soviet installations, but only if they could get a bird up there that
would be reliable. Also, we didn’t want to let the Soviets
know we were turning earth orbit into a surveillance facility because
we didn’t want to encourage them to go after our satellites.
So the trick was to get a satellite up there in complete secrecy. But
how could you do that with the whole world watching?

The army and air force had an idea. Lockheed had already shown
that it could develop a surveillance plane, the U2 and eventually the
SR71, out of the public view and run those flights without too much
interference from Senate watchdog committees and out of the presence of
any newspaper reporters. Could they do the same thing with a satellite?
And if they could, would the satellite recon photos be as reliable as
the photos we were getting from the U2s?

Normally, I would have said that if the army were putting up a
satellite, it could do anything it wanted because everything we did
under our intelligence blanket remained relatively secure. However,
both the army and the air force were effectively put out of the
satellite launching business toward the end of the Eisenhower
administration by the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Agency
under a pooled resources crash program to get satellites up into space
to show the world the flag. The Soviets had beaten us in the race
initially with Sputnik, and the failed army and navy attempts to launch
satellites only made us look worse. I learned for a fact that when the
New York Daily News  ran the full page headline, “Oh
Dear, ” after the Corporal rose a few inches, fell back onto
the launchpad, and blew up into smithereens, no one was laughing harder
than Nikita Khrushchev.

After a few of these attempts, the National Security Council
advised President Eisenhower to throw in the towel, pool all the
national scientific resources he could, and turn the U.S. entry into
the space race over to a civilian agency. The military services had
learned their lesson about competing over the same technology the hard
way and had to stand back and watch NASA take over.

NASA had some immediate successes, and before the end of the
Eisenhower administration in 1960, they had managed to put satellites
in orbit and experiment with the effects of orbital flight on animals
in far more sophisticated ways than the army’s V2 experiments
with small primates at Alamogordo in the late 1940s and early1950s. As
the army and air force intelligence offices looked at the successes of
these NASA satellites and at the increasing vulnerabilities of the U2
flights, they saw the possible answer to their need for a fail safe
surveillance program. When NASA began its Discoverer orbiter program,
launching a payload into low orbit and returning it, the military
services thought they saw a solution. If they could somehow manage to
build a workable photo recon satellite small enough to fit into the
very limited space inside the Discoverer payload capsule, recover the
surveillance device when the orbiter returned to Earth, and install the
entire military spying program within a civilian scientific exploration
program that was getting a lot of attention from the newspapers without
alerting the public to the military’s secret agenda, they
would have their covert surveillance.

We knew that the Soviets would very quickly find out about the
program, but that wasn’t such a bad thing. We reasoned that
there was no way, given the CIA’s penetration by the KGB, to
keep the program completely covert, but if the Soviets knew we were
able to watch them it might keep them honest. And Khrushchev
wouldn’t have to worry about our deliberately violating his
airspace, so he was off the hook at the Kremlin and thankful for it.
All we had to do was keep it out of the public arena and we’d
be home free. The whole program rested on our being able to slip what
we now called “Corona” into the existing Discoverer
program without a whisper in the air, the Soviets would go along
without a protest, and we would get our surveillance photos.

We added an additional incentive for the Soviets to discourage
them from getting their friends in the CIA to leak the story to
friendly journalists and blowing the cover on the whole operation. We
encouraged them to participate with us in the hidden agenda of Corona:
surveillance of potential alien crash landings. Army Intelligence, upon
Eisenhower’s and the NSC’s express approval, let it
be known to their counterparts in the Soviet military that any aerial
intelligence we developed as a result of Corona that revealed the
presence of aliens on Soviet territory would be shared with the
military. What they did with the information, we said, we really
didn’t care. But the military was more than grateful. The
professional military didn’t trust the commissars in the
Communist Party anymore than we did and hated being under their
collective thumb. Thus, in a perverse way, although we were tipping off
the Russian military about alien activity in their territory, we really
weren’t sharing information with the Communists because of
the deep division within the Soviet government between the Communist
Party and the military.

Our incentive worked and the KGB encouraged the CIA - even I
was surprised at how effectively they worked together - not to leak the
story. Now it was up to the air force and the skunk works division at
Lockheed to build the Corona surveillance satellite out of the public
arena and load the vehicle into the Discoverer rocket right under the
noses of the American press. It was one of the trickiest operations of
the Cold War because the Russians knew what we were doing, NASA was
making the entire project happen, but the American press, hungry for
even the smallest tidbit of spaceflight information, had to be kept
completely in the dark. If necessary, we had to lie to them, provide
them with cover stories, completely trick them into thinking that all
the American people had to think about was the little chimp that was
blasted into orbit wearing his custom sized space helmet. And we
didn’t have much time to do it because we knew the Soviets
were trying to embarrass Ike at the end of his term by bringing down
one of our U2 planes with a live pilot inside. We were now in a race
against the Soviets to replace the U2 with the Corona, even though the
Soviets understood and accepted what we were doing every step of the
way. It was one of the ironies of the Cold War.

The engineers at Lockheed designed the satellite camera
package to fit neatly into the payload cone of the Discoverer capsule.
They worked under brutal time constraints because President Eisenhower
was putting pressure on the National Security Council to cut off the U2
overnights completely. The old general knew it was just a matter of
time before the Soviets would capture a living American pilot, extract
his confession, and march him in front of the television cameras to the
humiliation of the United States. Eisenhower was a man of his word who
disliked politicians because they always sought the expedient solution,
not the most honorable one. Eisenhower disliked expedience for
expediency’s sake and always preferred to take the most
directly honest path whenever he could. But, as Khrushchev complained
about the U2 flights, Ike always denied we were sending them. It was
such an obvious lie that Khrushchev kept goading Eisenhower about
exposing himself that way. “We will shoot one of them down,
you’ll see, ” he kept telling Eisenhower whenever
he complained. “Then what will you say?”

But President Eisenhower denied the existence of the U2,
put down the telephone, and turned on his own staff, furious that they
had put him into such an untenable situation. “Stop the
nights, ” he ordered. But the CIA kept pushing for one more
flight. It was serving a purpose, they argued. They were learning about
the Russian air defense system at the same time they were surveilling
possible areas of alien spacecraft activity. With or without the
Russians’ knowledge, the U2s denied the extraterrestrials a
complete camouflage because of our high resolution aerial surveillance.
I don’t know whether we actually found any evidence of an
alien landing on Russian territory from our U2 surveillance, but the
extraterrestrials certainly could see that we were able to surveil the
Soviet Union, and their knowledge of our capability served as a
deterrent to roaming the vast areas of the Soviet Union with impunity.

The CIA claimed the U2s were so important to our national
security that they were even ready to sacrifice one of their own
pilots. However, I also believe that the KGB moles who had penetrated
them wanted Eisenhower to be embarrassed before the entire world. And
when Francis Gary Powers took off in May 1960, they had their chance.

There is still a great deal of doubt about the shootdown of
Powers’s U2. His mission was to fly over the most sensitive
Soviet missile installations and make himself a target. We believed the
Russian SAMs couldn’t reach his altitude. But, whether Powers
fell asleep at the stick because of oxygen deprivation or whether his
CIA controllers forced him to a lower altitude to get better photos or
even to make himself a more provocative target, we’ll never
know. I believe that Powers was probably startled out of a low oxygen
lethargy by the explosion of a SAM close enough to force him to lose
control. His plane was not hit by the missile. The U2 was the type of
aircraft that was very difficult to fly. Powers probably pulled into a
stall and was unable to bring it back. As his plane spun toward the
ground and Powers became too disoriented to regain control, he pulled
on the lever next to his seat, blew the canopy off, and ejected.

Powers was captured alive, paraded before cameras, and forced
to confess that he was spying on the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had his
excuse to cancel a summit meeting with Eisenhower and put on one of the
great performances of his career in front of the Supreme-Soviet.
Eisenhower, as he had most feared, was publicly humiliated and forced
to admit to Khrushchev that he had sent the U2s over the Soviet Union.
He promised Khrushchev that the U2 flights would end, eliminating a
valuable surveillance tool and potentially blinding us not only to what
the Soviet Union was doing but potentially to what the
extraterrestrials were doing in Asia as well. It was a terrible
experience for the old man, who believed he had been compromised by his
own administration.

All the while during the final months of preparations before
Gary Powers’s U2 flight, NASA was completing the engineering
details to insert the Corona payload into the Discoverer payload. If
all went well, the first launch of Corona would give the National
Security Council the results they wanted and the U2 program would come
to an end because it had been made obsolete by Corona. Then Gary Powers
was shot down and the U2 program came to an end because Eisenhower
terminated it. We were blind. Then Discoverer was launched from Cape
Canaveral and those of us in the army and airforce missile programs who
were aware of Corona and what was at stake in the mission held our
collective breaths. If it worked, we had eyes. If it failed, our best
surveillance opportunity would have failed.

You can imagine the jubilation at the Pentagon when the Corona
payload was recovered and we developed the first photos. They were
better than what we had gotten from the U2, and the Corona was
completely invisible to the Soviets. Khrushchev hid the information
from his own Supreme Soviet, and Eisenhower certainly didn’t
make a public statement to the American people. We were back in the
photo intelligence business, and in addition to keeping tabs on Soviet
missile developments, we had a way to track any possible EBE attempt to
set up a base in the remotest parts of Asia, Africa, or South America.
We were gaining parity with the EBEs, a small victory, but a victory
nevertheless.

What satisfied me the most about Project Corona, I thought as
I reached the outskirts of Washington on my way back from Fort Belvoir,
was that it was elegant as well as successful; Just like the ease with
which we had slipped the Roswell night visor into the development and
engineering stream at Fort Belvoir, so had we slipped the Corona
photo-surveillance payload directly into the ongoing Discoverer
program, reverse engineering Discoverer to make the payload fit. No one
realized what we had accomplished or how effectively the military
utilized traditional programs as a cover for their own secret weapons
development systems.