-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- from: a friend, thanks. http://www.kingston.ac.uk/cusp/Lectures/Lashmar.htm Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.kingston.ac.uk/cusp/Lectures/Lashmar.htm">Paul Lashmar - Spyflights of the Cold War</A> ----- Paul Lashmar - Spyflights of the Cold War 12 March 1997 Kingston University I will start with a question. 'Why spyflights?' On the surface fairly sort of arcane "boys for the toys" activity, airmen playing around with aeroplanes. And I have to say when I first got into this I thought that a bit too. It took me about two years to grasp a rather important fact about spyflights: they are one of the best micro-examples of the nature of the Cold War. One of the key contradictions of the Cold War is the difference between the presentation by the Western governments of what the Cold War was about and how it was actually waged behind the scenes. The West was far more aggressive than it was portraying itself. It demonstrates that we moved quite a way from just deterrence into a fairly aggressive stance and a stance, to some degree, of compellence against the Soviet Union. Spyflights really are one of the cutting edges of the Cold War because they are an area of direct confrontation, whereby aircraft are actually shot down, there were deaths. It was a hidden war, a battle that was going on that the public, on either side, knew nothing about except when it would occasionally appear as a piece of publicity like the Gary Powers shoot down of the U2 in 1960. So mostly it was going on quietly behind the scenes but it was very real for those who took part. Now as a micro-example of this it also reflects the way in the last five years how our perceptions of the Cold War have changed because, like many journalists, I have been digging around where possible and using researchers to go into the archives of the former communist countries. What we find there gives us a different spin on the Cold War. We now have a much clearer idea of what was really taking place. One of the areas that I have looked at is the Korean War and when you see the documentation that has come out of the Soviet Union's archives you can see that when Stalin got involved in the Korean War behind the scenes it was not his first act in the path of world domination as it was played at the time. He was very much an opportunist. It was a piece of opportunism taken on the basis that this local leader, Kim I1 Sung was anxious to take over the South and that Stalin thought this was an easy way of getting some territory. Stalin's position was that he only agreed to it because he was convinced, he had been convinced, that the Americans wouldn't get involved. And that's a different, I think, perception from the way we have previously looked at the War. There have obviously been debates as I say but the general history of the Korean War is it was Stalin's first attempt to move against the West and the West expected the next thing would be the tank divisions to come over on the plains of Europe. The key points I would like to go through really why spyflights are important in different ways. Firstly is that they reflect the nature of the military relationship between the UK and the USA. As you will see the British paid a disproportionately important part in the early period, given their comparative resources at the time. Second, how the British were prepared to conduct some of these missions when the White House was not. Third, the British missions fitted in with a hidden USA agenda which I don't think the British were really appraised of. I do not think they knew what was in the Americans mind. The fourth thing I think that comes out of this is how you can use intelligence to deduce what you want from it. It is interesting. You would think that intelligence is a fairly pure. That if you produce facts that show something you can conclude the obvious but in the wacky world of intelligence it is interesting to see how apparently clear facts are bent and twisted and distorted on the occasions that fit in with prevailing doctrine of the time. I would just like to come back to the beginning of the Cold War. At the beginning of the Cold War the Iron Curtain has come down and in the West the fear is mounting of what the Soviets are going to do. And one of the big problems they had was getting information as to what Soviet were really doing. Because of the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union it meant that there wasn't any free movement. It was very hard to get diplomats to move around the Soviet Union at the time. You certainly weren't supposed to fly over the Soviet Union. They didn't have satellites at that period, spies are erratic, and there were a lot of difficulties. So there was a very big problem of knowing what Soviet intentions and capabilities were at that point - certainly from 47 onwards. It's an open question. Initially the Americans and the British were flying some missions around the peripheral of the communist bloc as it was to see what kind of defences were in position, what kind of offensive capability they could glean from the borders. And the borders could reveal quite a lot because that is where you keep a lot of aircraft and especially on the European side. So if you could get a glance over the border you could often work out some idea of what kind of resources they had. And if you need to launch an attack, you need to know what the capab ilities of the other side are. Do they have radars, how can they spot your aircraft coming in, how many fighters do they have available? And this was a very real, major consideration to the West at that point. The Western countries have aircraft flying around and occasionally, in some of the sectors, they are flying over of the communist bloc. At that point there were virtually no radars on the Soviet northern side so the Americans especially used to fly into the north sectors in the late 40s. At first the Soviets weren't in a very strong position to do anything. Their aircraft didn't really compare with the American aircraft. The weren't as fast or flexible. They weren't all-weather so their ability to respond to these incursions, in some cases at the early stage, even identifying them was very limited. So the intrusions go on for a while. Then you come to April 1950 and it is a very important point here, when the Russians actually shoot down their first American spy plane which is a US Navy aircraft. It was an electronic intelligence aircraft which was trying to listen in to radio and radar transmissions off the Baltic seeing what kind of naval dispositions and defences were operating on the Baltic and they shoot the aircraft down in international waters. There was a dispute over it. It was an international incident. Truman didn't like this and by all accounts he said I don't want any overflight at this point and he put the whole reconnaissance thing on hold while he had it checked out and it restarted but on very, very strict terms, backed up by the State department at that time saying that they couldn't fly anywhere near territorial waters. 15-20 miles out was the closest they could come and as I say, very importantly, Truman made it clear he didn't like overflights. They had a provocative element and that he felt that he had enough problems with Korea and other things. He didn't want to just provide the Soviets with some kind of justification. So that quickly became a problem. The people it became a problem for were the Strategic Air Command and the British Bomber Command. Of course the Americans had recently exploded a H-bomb, they had obviously gone from A-bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the early 50s they were going to have an H-bomb and they needed to know where to drop these bombs, how to get in and then where to drop them. And there was this large hole called the Soviet Union in which they had very little idea of what was going on. They were to some extent reliant on Luftwaffe reconnaissance photographs as the main source of information for the 10 years after the war. So you know they have this situation. They have got to know the defences and they have got to be able to identify the targets and of course the targets are changing. You would think that an A-bomb and later with an H-bomb, 'well you don't really need to be very precise', but actually they did want to be very precise, they wanted to be able to identify groups of cities, groups of airfields, nuclear plants, manufacturing plants, electricity stations, those kind of things and they wanted to hit them. And they wanted to put them very precisely because as, Curtis LeMay who would rapidly become a noted figure in this lecture, pointed out that if you actually dropped a bomb between a city and an airfield you collected bonus points because not only did you knock the airfield out but you wipe out a city as well. So a well placed Atom-bomb made the most of your weaponry. Both the Americans and the British bombers needed to be able to fly at night and to be able to fly in adverse weather. So it was no longer a case of just spotting a city and then dropping your bomb. You would be up too high, there would be no lights, you would have very little idea of where you were, except for your radar and they had ground radar on these aircraft. This sounds all incredibly technical but it is actually incredibly important because the whole of the nuclear attack was based on the idea that you could use radar to spot the targets. As you go over the ground using radar you can see the outline of particular features, and take photos of the radar images, you can train your bomb aimers well so they can recognise where they are and place the bomb. Well that is all very well if you can fly over the territory and if you can't, how are you going to know where you are going to drop these bombs? Well it was a big problem. By 1950 Strategic Air Command have a growing nuclear force. They want to be able to drop atom bombs in the right place, come the crunch. But Truman's overflight ban. What are the going to do. Well what they do is they approach the British I found out about these missions from an oral history and then moved back into the documents which took me nearly three years to find. The British documents on these flights which I call the Sculthorpe Missions are still retained by the Ministry of Defence. They will not release these documents. What I did find was some correspondence in the Library of Congress in the papers of Gen. Twining who was the head of the United States air force in that period and it's a very revealing correspondence. For instance there is a top secret letter in these from Air Chief Marshall Sir Ralph Cochrane in July 1950 and at that point the RAF were worried that the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee would not give approval and were hedging their bets. "We have not yet obtained a political agreement which will be necessary if this full project is to be undertaken". The British said, 'okay we'll help'. But there was a quite clear problem here in that the British didn't have any aircraft that would be capable of doing such a mission that could get any distance into the Soviet Union. We had at that point, with the budget cuts, we were really still flying largely World War 11 aircraft. So what the deal was, was that the British would train up a team of, a crew for three aircraft, a rather little known aircraft, which was then called the Tornado, and was known as the RB45C which was an American aircraft. The Americans had 33 of these which was really first medium jet bomber. 33 were converted reconnaissance versions and they had a cracking radar reconnaissance capability so that they could take pictures of the ground and on the radar screen and then photograph them so that they could be used to show your targets to a bomb aimer so he would know where to drop his atom bomb. So the deal begins to transpire. The British are going to provide the pilots and its going to be a British operation using American aircraft which are already in England because by that point, after 48 there are American aircraft on British soil the beginning of the unsinkable aircraft carrier Britain idea. And the unit that is particularly concerned is out at Sculthorpe which is a former war-time air base that was taken over by the US Air Force and became a major bomber station for American aircraft, a very long runway and was also home to a unit of a the American reconnaissance force. They have got the problem of Attlee and are still discussing and discussions build up to a head on 15 August 1950 there is a letter Air Chief Marshall Sir William Elliott, head of the British Joint Services Mission in Washington wrote back to Cochrane, who I mentioned earlier, "this afternoon Vandenberg", who at that point was actually the head of the air force, Twining was his deputy, "asked me to come and see him. He told me that on the American side the true purpose of the project had been kept extremely secret and was only known to himself, Twining, LeMay and White." These are the four most senior people dealing with nuclear bombing in the American air force at that time. It makes no mention of what Truman's position on this. Whether he's been informed, or whether it's a way round Truman's overflight ban. So Cochrane assigns, a senior former Dambuster officer to take charge of the operational unit. He recruits a noted navigator who had been a veteran navigator of 33 bombing missions over Europe in the second world war and I will show you a quick video clip of this character. He is, later to become Wing Commander, Rex Sanders who is just the most wonderful example of the understated RAF crew man, just a great character and he basically nominated himself for this. They get eleven air crew plus a doctor. They send them off to America where they are trained on these RB45s and they come back end of December 1951 and they are really impressed with the equipment. Now the interesting thing is that only 2 people on this eleven man unit knew what the actual mission was about and that was the guy who was running it called Crampton and this guy Rex Sanders. The others were none of them were volunteers, they had been assigned to the task, had no idea what this was all about. They thought that they were testing these aircraft for possible RAF use. They were to be shocked shortly. Anyway late in '51 in comes the Conservative government and in the documentation you can see the RAF side heaving a sigh of relief and basically is quite clear I am told, I have never found any documentation, that Churchill was approached and approved these flights. So they train, they train back in Europe, they are up at Sculthorpe. Then on 16 April 1952 Crampton and Saunders were called to bomber command HQat High Wycombe. There they met the Commander in Chief of Bomber Command and they were brought into a room, probably something like this and dramatically the curtain is pulled back to reveal a picture of the whole of the western side of the Soviet Union and Europe over here and three long lines going through it and these are the proposed routes. Now what these are is a way of getting as much coverage for radar reconnaissance purposes for strategic air command as possible and they are briefed on this, they go back and they brief virtually as they are about to fly the other people who are on the mission who are somewhat astonished by what they are going to do and not, as I discovered when I talk to some of the others, all entirely happy about this rather risky activity. So off they went and they re-fuelled, flew at night and they went in quite deep. They were over Soviet territory for 4 or 5 hours and took sort of yards and yards of film of these great radar reconnaissance missions, did the whole thing safely, got back and Crampton and Sanders asked to fly an aircraft back to America for overhaul and they meet LeMay. Now LeMay is a big figure in this because LeMay was in many ways seemed to be the father of air power or strategic bombing in the United States and is widely regarded as the role figure for General Jack de Ripper in Dr Strangelove, the mad bomber general and he is an amazing character, a real classic American air force general. He is taciturn, always got a cigar plugged in the side of his face, and a consummate leader in many ways. I have interviewed dozens and dozens of American air force people who all swear absolute allegiance to him as the greatest general they ever worked for. And at this time in the Cold War he is becoming one of the most powerful military figures in America. The reason for this is that really in many people's minds it was air power that finished the second world war and LeMay was the person who really was the main architect of the destruction of Japan by bombing. Not by the A-bombs because they were actually rather peripheral but by fire bombing and on the night of 9/10 March 1945 LeMay set of the first firebombing raid that he had specifically designed which fire bombed Tokyo and killed, by LeMay's own estimate, 200,000 men women and children in the fire bombing which almost dwarfed Dresden and remains the most devastating 6-hour act in military history. So that's where he learnt his craft and he stays in the air force and Strategic Air Command is set up in 46. In 1947 the air force in America was only a sort of junior brother of the army and in '47 it is given independent status. By 1955 the United States air force and Strategic Air Command are consuming a huge part of the defence budget. One of the great things that air force people say about LeMay, he was the first person to get the budget to swing round to the point where the air force was consuming, I think it was 50% of the defence budget from what had been a relative fraction some years before and this was his great achievement because the nuclear force was seen to be the way to deal with warfare in the future and air power was absolutely in the ascendancy. So LeMay has become an enormously powerful figure and he is the central figure in all these overflight missions which I run through here with one exception and you can see how he is thinking as we progress which I will just come back to. So these flights were flown in 1952 and they were very successful. Later that year and the British unit that do it, are disbanded, sent back to their own units. Then about 4 or 5 months later they are called up again, trained again but there seems to have been a security leak because they were, things suddenly come to a halt and the suspicious is it is some kind of Cambridge spy ring leak picked up by the other side so that they knew that they were expected. So they drop the whole thing for two years. Early '54 the team are called back up again, with a few modifications but Crampton and Sanders are still there. Strategic Air Command needs some more of these reconnaissance missions done and they train again and in early April '54 off they go. What I would just like to say about this is it is hard to see now just how significant this was but for what is effectively three nuclear-capable bombers to fly deep into Soviet territory at a period when really that the Americans, the West are the only people really with nuclear weapons, it is hard not to perceive that would be seem as a very provocative and potentially triggering situation. If this was misinterpreted who knows what might have happened. And on the second time actually it got much hairier and for instance I interviewed some of the Russians who tried to shoot, deal with these aircraft and by this time the Russians had MIG 15s which were very much more effective than the things they had 2/3 years earlier and were being much more effective in their defence capabilities. So basically this time the Russians threw up everything they could and one of the things that was clearly described by Crampton and Sanders was the anti aircraft fire. They had both been over Germany during the Second World War and they had seen their fair share of anti-aircraft fire. But they said that the Soviets sent up anti-aircraft fire. Now remember this is theoretically peace-time, this aircraft is meeting the heaviest flak that they have ever encountered and it was they describe as predicted flak which means that it's estimated where you are, and very concentrated. But fortunately they were estimating that it was about 100 yards ahead of the aircraft so that they were being preceded by this, if they ran into it, it would have just knocked them out of the sky. And it's quite a daunting thought. There you are 1954, our former allies, you have got this kind of thing going on. So it was quite a dramatic event but the mission was success, the crews all got back, they produced the radar reconnaissance photographs which enabled Strategic Air Command and to a lesser extent, bomber command, to be able to work out which cities they were going to wipe off the face of the earth if it was necessary if nuclear war broke out. So what you have there is the British really acting in a way quite separate from the Americans. The Americans aren't going to do it themselves because of the political tensions and I can't tell you at this point, because I have never seen the debate, I have never seen any documents, as to how the British perceived what they were doing. Whether it was because they were a smaller now a lesser power and therefore if their people were caught. The crews were briefed on what to do if they were caught and they were supposed to say they had gone off course and that they had a whole set of false flight paths. But as Fl SgtAnstey, the first guy there, said, they wouldn't have believed us for a moment. What the British thought their role was and why they were doing it, we just don't know because we haven't got access to the documents. Anyway there is another little corollary to this. There is another mission or missions that I call the Canberra flights. By 1954 the British had actually an aircraft that was in many ways better than the RB45 although it did not have radar reconnaissance capability. The Canberra, which was medium bomber that have variants that were converted for reconnaissance and actually it was much faster. The RB45 had to fly at night because it couldn't actually outpace the MIG. And the Canberra could. And in the mid-50s the west had began to realise that there was a testing site called Kapustin Yar near the Volga where a lot of the German scientists that the Russians had got, were testing out sort of B2 variants in the embryonic missile capacity and they wanted to know what was going on. They had picked this up from refugees and scientists coming back over to the west and they wanted to know what was there. And the people who wanted to know primarily were the CIA and they put a request into the United States Air force who basically, as my understanding is, said we couldn't do it and the way I came across this was a very tantalising clue. The Americans have a much greater tradition of oral history. Nearly everybody in a senior position there gets asked to do loads of oral histories and they produce all sorts of little snippets that are quite fascinating and in fact Bob Amery who had been the Deputy Director of Intelligence at the CIA during the 50s gave this interview in 1964 and it was actually sort of classified but the word got out a bit that there was this particular reference because it was referred to by 1970. When I read this I thought it was really quite fascinating. Amery says, "when we first heard of the Russian missile centre in 1952 or about then at Kapustin Yar on Volga we demanded that we get photographs of it. We can't ignore it. It would just be a major new thing, this whole missile development and we've got to get on top of it at the beginn ing and judge it. and Nathan Twining at the air force said it couldn't be done. The RAF actually did it for us with the Canberra all the way from Germany to the Volga and down into Persia, a risky thing but they got some fair pictures and then we said well this is fine but the British said God never again, veto speak. The whole of Russia has been alerted to the thing and damn near created a major international incident but never made the papers." Well I did everything I could to try and work out who had flown this mission. There is a squadron in the RAF at that time who looked like the most likely contenders and the book actually goes into some detail about who might or might not have done it. they certainly took place, because the Russians say that there were flights. They identified and they tried to shoot down and sent aircraft but they couldn't catch these. And it looks like these Canberras flew more than just one mission. Probably two or three so. Again the documents are withheld from the Public Record Office. They were reviewed and they still refused to release them, This is forty years on. We cannot find out what occurred at that period. Now SAC hated the fact that the British were doing these flights. It got up their noses in the inter-rivalry sense. And something occurs because in 1954 about 8 days after the last of the Sculthorpe missions three B47 reconnaissance aircraft take off from RAF Fairford in Oxfordshire and they head off round the Norwegian coast, come up to Murmansk, two of the aircraft peel back to go back to England, the third darts straight through, over the Kola peninsula. It's a three man crew, medium bomber, basically in appearance. But this one was full of cameras and it was filming airfields, anything that they thought would be of interest. And the Kola Peninsula was an incredibly important strategic area, It was where a lot of long range bombers were believed to be. It's an area where a lot of defence aircraft are based to deal with, the incoming US bombers over the pole a lot of the American bombers would have come in that way so they needed to know what was there. And there was a lot of research and development places in the area so there was a lot to be photographed. And I tracked down the whole crew of this plane in one way or another. And they told me their story. And it was a pretty hair-raising run because they were told that all they would come up against were MIG15s and they could outrun MIG15s. And they had been flying along for about an hour taking photographs and they see some MIG15s, peel away. A few minutes later some more MIG15s come up. Still can't get to them. And a few minutes later, suddenly an aircraft starts to come towards them. It is obviously capable of overtaking them. It's the new MIG17. And they suddenly find themselves being chased being chased by a MIG 17 and they come under attack. And they are actually hit. There is a long account of the narrow escape which they had. They managed to. They get hit once by a cannon shell, which partly knocks their radio out and starts losing fuel. They get out over Finland and the Russians actually follow them across Finland. But anyway, the aircraft gets back to Britain. It's really quite an exciting story in its way. And it delivers the photographs and again this is mission completely under the control of General LeMay. Now what makes this interesting is it seems to me that this mission is a test run and what it is a test run of is a thing called Project Control. I came across Project Control in a an academic paper written some years ago. And the person who wrote it was very intrigued by it. What it is, is in the early 50s the Air War College is really getting into stride in America. The Air War College is the intellectual heartland of the new air force. In 1947 air force had been something gone from being the junior service, the junior brother of the army into a full service of its own and then is rapidly becoming the most powerful, the biggest budget consumer and it is really on the ascendancy. There is this tremendous sense that we have got the answers. We are the people that know how to deal with war, we know about foreign policy, we know how to deal with this. And what they actually come up with in this thing called Project Control is a revamped foreign policy for the United States. At that point there had been containment and Eisenhower had really, with a few modifications, had continued with the policy of containment to effect. I mean it isn't always containment. There are lots of other things going on. Agents being poured into the Ukraine and everywhere else, but to all intents and purpose the general position is containment. Project Control is a blue-print for the roll-back of the Soviet Union, basically requiring, using air power, the capitulation of the Soviet Union and it is drawn up by a Colonel and I found the papers which again this person who did the original academic research wasn't aware of, but LeMay's close involvement with this. Now basically what it says is, we go to the Soviet Union and we say, right if you don't, because at that point you have to remember the Americans are the only people really with a major nuclear force capable of serious destruction. And what you do is you say, you've got six months and then they produce a wish list of American foreign policy at that point. Closure of the COMITERN, free democratic elections in the satellites states, a cut in the Soviet-Sino relationship, you name it, it's in the list. What you do to persuade them in this six-month period is you use reconnaissance overflights. What you do is you run these missions which are called the persuasion phase and it's all laid out there. What you do is you use reconnaissance missions to keep coming in and putting the pressure on the Soviet Union. What you are saying is that this is, a) you are gathering intelligence obviously which enables you to drop these bombs, but b) you are saying we can do this with impunity. If we cm ran a reconnaissance mission over your cities we can ran nuclear bombers over your cities, now do what we say, The second phase is after six months if they don't you then go to a series of attacks and it doesn't rule out nuclear attacks. The project doesn't actually say we should launch a full out nuclear war but it is basically is saying there should be a rapidly escalating. The whole premise is, is that the Soviet Union will immediately back down. All you then do is go to the third phase which is in fact effectively policing by air. You use these aircraft now to fly over to make sure they are dismantling all their nuclear bomb manufacturing sites, they have dismantled all their defence capabilities, so they are basically doing what you say. Now this sounds like quite an extraordinary plan. But it actually went a long way in Washington. It was very favourably received by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Admiral Radford who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that time was a big fan of it. LeMay was in there from the beginning with it and it goes all the way up. And this overflight does have all the indications of being a test run. And what I would like to do. This is the. As I say I found the pilot who did this mission and after he had a briefing with LeMay and you will see he makes a very interesting remark which I will just follow up with in a second. The courageous pilot of this provocative and daring mission, Colonel Hal Austin, had been briefed before the mission. LeMay said, 'Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War Three started.' If Austin, an amiable Texan, thought at the time LeMay's comment might be a joke, an encounter thirty years later showed it was not. Austin again met his hero, LeMay. "His comment there again was, 'Well, we'd have been a hell of a lot better off if we'd got World War Three started in those days.' of course he doesn't know that the Cold War is over now but he made that comment one day - Maybe we'd all have been better off if we'd got it over with then," Austin says. And its the most remarkably chilling comment. And Hal was very uncomfortable with it because on the one hand be has this. He's a big. LeMay was his hero and he modelled his military life after LeMay. On the other hand obviously this comment unsettled him somewhat. Gen Goodpaster who was like Eisenhower's close defence aide and he says that Eisenhower's attitude to over flights was that they were too risky and he was very much against them by and large, except the U2 which is a different issue and has to be seen in a certain way, which I will come to in just a moment. In April 1956 in my book I point out that LeMay. Project Control goes up to Washington in 54/55 and it gets a lot of support: Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA, a lot of people like it. It goes to the State Department which are always seen as the dangerous 'pinkos' of the administration and they say no-way, absolutely no-way. This is crazy, we don't want to have anything to do with this. And so they block it at the political level. It also gets another set-back. Throughout '54 and '55 the Air Defence College are busily war-gaming Project Control and after a year it all goes horribly wrong when the Blue Team are the Americans who are putting all these over flights, all these mock over flights round against the Red Team, the Soviets, when the red team gets so fed up with these overflights they suddenly launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Blue and there is some wonderful correspondence in the files from the Air College, really being apologetic saying, we have obviously got our parameters wrong about how we set this war game out. They are trying to back-pedal quickly. We are now going to try it again with a different, not so many overflights. So by 55 this went out to the military and everybody thought oh my God, you can't round doing this except, it seems, LeMay. Because what I then discovered. And at the time I wrote the book I became, I knew enough about these flights. From March through to May 1956 one of the reconnaissance units was moved up to Thule in Greenland and proceeded, over a two month period, launch a large number of flights against the Soviet Union and it is stunning how in line with Project Control they are. My conception is, I have never ever seen anybody produce a piece of paper that indicates that LeMay had fully informed Eisenhower. What he was doing, what this was all about. There is a real interesting question over authority. As far as I can see this is LeMay, in conjunction with other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, exceeding their authority. This, when I say this, upsets terribly US Air Force historians who say no American Air Force General would ever do this and that Eisenhower must have been informed there must have been some kind of authorisation. Right from March through to April 1956 1 thought there had been 27 over flights over the northern sector of the Soviet Union. I discovered two weeks ago there had been 156. You have got to compare this against U2 which Eisenhower, when Eisenhower did U2s he was reluctant in many ways and you can read the correspondence which he has released and it shows that everything is incredibly scrupulously authorised by Goodpaster in clear contrast with the air force statements and he is extremely hesitant, says it is all going to come unhinged. It is only because the intelligence value is so great and in fact in the four year period between 1956 to the point when Gary Powers gets shot down in 1960 and the U2 things finish there were only 24 flights. U2 is what most people think of, of over flights and all that and 24 to many people seems a lot but US Air Force did 156 flights into the northern sector and they were pursued by MIGs and there are some great stories about this of the dering-do and the courage of the pilots and I talked to General Mikhailov who was a defence aid to the Kremlin in that period in charge of the air force and he relates a long conversation when Krushchev getting very angry at Twining who is on a visit about a month later and basically saying don't you fly any more of, they always describe all these aircraft as Canberras. You know, you do this again and they are going to be a coffin. And it was only a week later that the first U2 actually took off and the Kremlin did not know about the difference and who was actually flying the U2. They did not know the U2 was a CIA operation separate from the Air Force and the Kremlin took it as a major insult. What is interesting is that the Soviets never did react militarily. Diplomatically they were furious but they never reacted militarily which is probably why we are still here. LeMay however never gave up on Project Control. I would just like to finish off with a couple of quotes from his 1965 autobiography. He never mentions Project Control but what it is quite clear. This is what he says, "It would have been possible, I believe, for American to say to the Soviets here is blueprint for your immediate future. We'll give you a deadline of 5 or 6 months, something like that to pull out of the satellite countries and in fact a complete change of conduct. You will behave your damn selves from this moment forth. We could have done this, but whether we should have presented such a blueprint was not for me to decide. That was a question of national policy. All I can repeat is at the time we could have done the job as described. Whether we should have done it or not, then or not, whether you quarter-back"." You can discuss the pros and cons of such a situation from now until doomsday. You might argue whether it would be desirable to present such a challenge to the Russians even at this stage of the game". This is 1965 and he is saying let's do Project Control. It just defies belief. And really l think the whole Project Control overflights thing has many levels to it but the most chilling and sinister thing is how it seems to have become a tool of this US Air Force and LeMay in particular to engage in their own foreign policy for a period which is seemly independent of the civilian authority of the President with potentially terrifying consequences which fortunately the Soviets didn't react to in the way that they were expected to and one last point I would like to make is that LeMay is dead so I couldn't ask him about this. He has been dead since 1990 but I interviewed a professor called Michael Sherry who is at North-Western University who did interview LeMay for a book he was writing and he didn't know that the overflights were significant and he said that he was interviewing him about air power generally and he had no idea that overflights were significant. So he wasn't really very interested in what then happened. And he says, LeMay started bragging to him and saying that they have flown all these flights into the Soviet Union and Sherry says that there's a real strong hint in the conversation LeMay would not have minded if it had provoked the Soviet Union into some kind of major confrontation with the United States. I think it is surprising that we are here today. Back to Main Index ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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