“Bill Bailey didn’t come home.” That was CIA code for a U-2 pilot who did not arrive at his appointed destination and that was the message delivered to CIA deputy director Richard Bissell on May 1. Eisenhower, staying at Camp David, received the news by telephone that afternoon. While obviously concerned, Bissell and other members of the administration did not think an international crisis was at hand for a number of reasons.
First, at the time administration officials did not know if the plane had gone down over the Soviet Union or not. Washington had not received any communication from the Soviets. Perhaps the U-2 had gone down over a neighboring country. Second, Bissell and CIA director Allen Dulles had told the president that the chances of a pilot surviving a U-2 crash were “a million to one.” The loss of a pilot was tragic, of course, but any fears of a live pilot captured behind Soviet lines were believed to be misplaced. Third, as for the chance of seeing sensitive equipment falling into the hands of a Cold War adversary, it was believed that any valuable hardware would simply be obliterated on impact, considering the U-2’s fragile design and its remarkable ability to fly so high (the plane had a cruising altitude of 70,000 feet).
After nearly two days, the US still had heard nothing from the Soviets. The administration then released a cover story, prearranged in the event that the U-2 ever went down. Approved secretly by Eisenhower, it was agreed that NASA should put forth the following story: that a U-2 plane used for weather research had gone down in the Lake Van area of Turkey after the pilot had reported oxygen difficulties. Now it was Khrushchev’s turn. He announced on May 5 before the Supreme Soviet that a US plane on a mission of “aggressive provocation” had violated Soviet airspace and been shot down. He made no mention that the pilot was alive.
The Americans made their next move. While Eisenhower preferred sticking to the NASA cover story and saying nothing more, Secretary of State Christian Herter and other advisers pressed him to release another statement. Eisenhower relented and the administration released a second story, conjecturing that since the pilot had been experiencing oxygen problems, perhaps he had lost consciousness and strayed into Soviet airspace.
On May 7, Khrushchev threw down his trump card. As Fursenko and Naftali described it, Khrushchev, “squeezing out every ounce of drama,” told the Supreme Soviet that not only had their defense forces shot down the U-2, but that they had captured the American pilot, who was “alive and kicking” and in the hands of Soviet authorities. While the assembly exploded in shouts and applause, Khrushchev, with a melodramatic flourish, waved aerial photographs purportedly taken by the pilot. The pictures turned out to be fakes but the gesture achieved its desired theatrical effect. Khrushchev then went a step further, saying, “I am quite willing to grant that the President knew nothing about the fact that such a plane was sent into the Soviet Union” and speculated that CIA and Pentagon “militarists” looking to torpedo the upcoming Paris summit were responsible for the U-2 incursion.
In Washington, administration officials were in shock, Eisenhower was angry and the news media were baying for reaction. So another story was put forth on May 7, acknowledging that a U-2 plane had “probably” flown over Soviet airspace, but declaring that “there was no authorization for any such flight.” But instead of settling matters, the statement only further inflamed things. After all, the reasoning went, if there was no authorization for the flight, that meant that Eisenhower – already under attack by political rivals as a detached leader – was not really in charge of his own administration. After all, a flight over another country’s airspace is considered an act of war. In the New York Herald Tribune, Walter Lippmann wrote, “In denying that it authorized the flight, the Administration has entered a plea of incompetence.”
With the Paris summit just days away, Eisenhower finally addressed the U-2 story directly. Appearing before a news conference on May 11, the president confirmed that he had, indeed authorized the U-2 flight on May 1. (In fact, the first U-2 mission in 1956 caused such consternation for Eisenhower that he ordered that all subsequent flights must be undertaken only with his direct authorization.) Eisenhower told reporters that given the secrecy of the Soviet Union and Khrushchev’s rejection of Open Skies, such flights were a “distasteful but vital necessity.” The president refused to apologize for resorting to espionage in order to protect his country’s interests, saying, “no one wants another Pearl Harbor.”
Khrushchev was furious. By saying that he presumed that Eisenhower did not know of the U-2 incursion, the Soviet premier believed he had offered the president an out – admit your ignorance to the flight and save the Paris summit in return. Beyond the realpolitik of such an offer, there was something more fundamental at play: Khrushchev fervently believed that the CIA and the military really were solely responsible for the May 1 flight.
After poring over recently released files, Fursenko and Naftali believe that the Soviet premier “suspected that Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence, had intentionally ordered the U-2 mission to disrupt the improvement of relations between Eisenhower and him.” By taking responsibility for the U-2 flight, Eisenhower may have taken some measure of responsibility in the eyes of the American public but he had inadvertently put Khrushchev in a corner.
Hardliners inside the Kremlin had long criticized Khrushchev for taking a too conciliatory approach to Eisenhower and now, with the US president admitting to such a brazen act of espionage, Khrushchev’s critics could point to a prime example of what they considered the premier’s naiveté. “This clearly bewildered and angered Khrushchev, making him look a fool for having so loudly insisted on his ‘trust’ in Eisenhower,” Khrushchev biographer Edward Crankshaw wrote just six years later. In the topsy-turvy world of Cold War politics, the Soviet premier became more infuriated at the US president for telling him the truth than he did for telling him lies.
The Summit Collapses
Just four days after Eisenhower’s news conference, Khrushchev arrived in France for the summit in a surly mood. He came to Paris and promptly told British and French officials that he demanded three things from Eisenhower: first, an apology; second, a vow that the US would never again use air reconnaissance over the Soviet Union; and third, an expectation that Eisenhower would punish those “directly guilty of the deliberate violation” of Soviet airspace. The British and French passed on the demands to the president when he arrived later in the day. Eisenhower responded by saying that he was “firmly against giving an apology, even at the risk of losing the state visit to Moscow.”
The next morning, the summit officially started. Eisenhower had previously met with Charles de Gaulle and had told the French president that he wanted to read a brief statement once the summit was convened “so that I might promptly reply to the accusations already put before my two Western associates.” In Eisenhower’s opening remarks, he would not offer an apology, but promised to never again to send the U-2 over the Soviet Union. De Gaulle agreed to allow Eisenhower to make his statement, but Eisenhower never got the chance to make his remarks.
After the French president made some perfunctory remarks to open the session, he then asked, “Does anyone therefore wish to say anything?” Eisenhower prepared to speak but before he could utter a word, Khrushchev sprang to his feet, saying he wanted the floor. De Gaulle said Eisenhower should speak first, but Khrushchev objected: “I was the first to ask for the floor and I would like my request to be granted.” According to Michael Beschloss in his 1986 book Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the Cold War, De Gaulle turned to Eisenhower, who “nodded with faint disgust.”
Khrushchev took the moment by the throat, going on a 45-minute diatribe about the U-2 incident, enunciating his three demands while inveighing against the sinister attempt by the US to violate Soviet borders and honor. Eisenhower quietly seethed through the lecture as the Soviet premier called for a postponement of the conference “for about six to eight months” (by which time Eisenhower would be out of office). Khrushchev also said he would postpone his invitation to host a visit by Eisenhower to the Soviet Union. Eisenhower contained his anger, responding that U-2 flights would not resume but adding that he refused to issue an apology. The president also suggested resurrecting the policy of Open Skies, proposing that the flights be sanctioned and carried out by the United Nations instead of the US and the USSR.
After a rough first day, de Gaulle and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan met privately with Khrushchev, urging him not to scuttle the summit on the specific grounds of a personal apology and on the general grounds of intelligence gathering. All countries spy on one another, de Gaulle had told Khrushchev before the summit had even begun and, besides, Macmillan added, “There are microphones hidden in every embassy …. So let’s not be hypocrites.”
As Soviet diplomat Anatoly Dobrinyn recalled in his memoirs years later, Macmillan practically pleaded with Khrushchev that the Soviet leader was putting Eisenhower in an impossible position. “But try to understand,” Macmillan said, “Can a head of state censure himself and his nation?” Khrushchev replied, “We want to condemn the guilty.” Barely a day old, the summit was about to collapse.
The next day, Eisenhower reiterated his position. He would not accept a Soviet ultimatum. De Gaulle set up a meeting for the principals at 3 p.m. but Khrushchev had spent the morning sightseeing with defense minister Rodion Malinovsky in the village of Pleurs-sur-Marne, where Malinovsky had served in World War I. As villagers gathered around them, Khrushchev and Malinovsky started drinking, with Malinovsky bantering with the locals and recalling a “beautiful young woman who had worked in the local tavern.” Khrushchev returned to the Soviet Embassy that afternoon but did not receive the message regarding the 3 p.m. meeting at approximately 2 p.m. “It is fair to wonder how sober he was at that moment,” authors Fursenko and Naftali say. Regardless of his condition, Khrushchev did not show up for the 3 p.m. meeting. Instead he instructed a low-level diplomat to convey a message that no meeting would be acceptable before 5 p.m. Then, just moments later, the ax fell. At 2:15 p.m., Khrushchev cabled the Presidium that “we have decided to leave Paris.” Macmillan was crestfallen: “The Summit … has blown up, like a volcano!”
Eisenhower was so angry with Khrushchev he could not even utter his name, simply calling the Soviet leader “this man.” For Khrushchev, the feeling was mutual. During a farewell visit with de Gaulle, Khrushchev called Eisenhower “a second-rate fellow, a pawn in the hands of his services, incapable of commanding.”
Analyzing the Summit Collapse
In the aftermath of the collapse, Eisenhower and many American officials maintained their belief that Khrushchev had already planned to undermine the summit in Paris before the U-2 was ever shot down and that the spy plane incident merely gave the Soviet leader a pretext for doing exactly that. In a letter written just two days after the summit ended, Eisenhower wrote that Khrushchev “embarked on a calculated campaign, even before it began, to insure the failure of the conference and to see to it that the onus for such failure would fall on the West, particularly the United States.”
There is some justification for this school of thought. Khrushchev was under extreme pressure from hardliners inside the Kremlin to take a more aggressive tack. Months earlier, he had announced that the Soviet Union would scale back its military force by 1.2 million, a dramatic reduction that greatly upset his more conservative critics. They feared that the Soviet leader’s personal affection for Eisenhower would lead the Soviet Union into a reckless embrace of the Americans and the West.
There was also pressure from Mao Zedong, who felt that the Soviets under Khrushchev were not sufficiently loyal to communist ideology. Serious strains had developed between the Mao and Khrushchev, and the Chinese were fast on their way towards developing their own atomic weapons. So perhaps Khrushchev came to Paris with the intention of distancing himself from any earlier, implied agreements with the West.
Others felt that Khrushchev came to Paris eager to put the United States on the defensive but let his emotions get the better of him. The Soviet premier took the repeated U-2 incursions into Russia as a personal affront. While there was a degree of political theater in Khrushchev’s protestations, “he was allowing himself to be carried away, and to one who was there it was clear that behind this act . . . there was a very real welling up of rage,” the Khrushchev biographer Crankshaw said.
Longtime Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, in his 1995 memoirs, sees Khrushchev’s actions as a combination of personal anger and, ultimately, a miscalculation. Dobrynin believed that while the Soviet leader had every justification for being angry with Eisenhower, Khrushchev overreached by demanding a personal apology. Dobrynin wrote that Khrushchev was convinced that Eisenhower would not let the summit collapse and would simply fire a general or high-ranking intelligence official “who had gone too far.” If that was his strategy, Khrushchev badly misread Eisenhower. Years later, Dobrynin recalled the scene at Paris with regret, saying, revealingly, that the summit fell apart “because of Khrushchev’s emotional attempt to bluff an apology out of Eisenhower by threatening to ruin the summit. He failed. So the Big Four summit, the last in history of the four wartime allies – should be remembered as a summit of lost opportunities.” (Incidentally, years later, Dobrynin insisted the demand for a personal apology from Eisenhower never came from the Politburo. It came strictly from Khrushchev himself, something that Fursenko and Naftali confirm after examining recently released Soviet files.)
But ultimately, it was the downing of the U-2 that created the circumstances for the summit to collapse and therefore, a close examination is required of the decision-making process inside the Eisenhower administration. Authorizing a spy plane flight so close to the summit was certainly a risky – some would argue reckless – thing to do, but upon further examination, Eisenhower had his reasons.
Just as Khrushchev was under fire from hardliners inside the Kremlin, Eisenhower was feeling intense pressure from opposition Democrats and hard-right Republicans for supposedly allowing the Russians to establish a “missile gap.” They believed the Soviets had been rapidly developing a lopsided advantage in nuclear weapons that justified a large increase in US defense spending. A large part of the value of the U-2 program, however, came when the spy plane’s remarkable, high-resolution photographs revealed there was no such “missile gap” – that fears of a Soviet nuclear advantage were greatly exaggerated. But Eisenhower was stuck in a no-win situation. If he confronted his critics with the fiction of a “missile gap,” the president would have compromised the secrecy of the U-2 program. On other hand, if he kept the program under wraps, he had to absorb a political pounding. In the end, Eisenhower had no choice. He had to keep his mouth shut about the U-2 program and rely on his military prestige to quiet critics and reassure a sometimes fearful American public that the old general had not become too genial, detached and sanguine about a possible Soviet threat.
Eisenhower also felt mounting pressure from officials in his own administration who pushed him to authorize more U-2 reconnaissance flights. Dulles and Bissell were confident that the Soviets could not shoot the plane down and, in their defense, in the plane’s twenty-three previous flights before May 1, 1960, the Soviets had not. In fact, there was no evidence to think the Soviets had even come close to knocking the U-2 out of the sky. Was there really a credible risk in authorizing a twenty-fourth flight? Dulles made a persuasive argument to counter Eisenhower’s concerns, which Michael Beschloss summarized neatly in his book Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair: “Allen Dulles later noted that in times of tension, people said that ‘flights should be stopped because they increase tension. In times of sweetness and light, they should not be run because it would disturb any ‘honeymoon’ in our relations with the Soviet Union.’ By that logic, he said, one would never fly at all.”
Yet while the administration can, even in retrospect, make a credible defense for green-lighting a U-2 mission so close to the summit, there appears to be practically no excuse for the lack of a credible contingency plan should a plane go down. Bissell had only one plan in place in case of mission failure – the cover story regarding a weather plane that NASA put out on May 3. But there were no plans in place in the event that a) the pilot survived, b) the plane and some of its sensitive equipment managed to remain intact after a crash, or c) both the pilot and the equipment made it through relatively unscathed. Most damning, there were plenty of examples to indicate that such scenarios could happen.
During the plane’s testing phase, a number of pilots had survived U-2 mishaps. As for the equipment surviving, the U-2 had a history of flameouts, in which the plane rapidly lost altitude, requiring the pilot to attempt to restart the aircraft at a much lower altitude. Naturally, if the U-2 were to crash at its normal cruising altitude of 70,000 feet, the chances of the plane disintegrating on impact were quite good. But if the plane crashed at half that altitude, the possibility of an adversary finding something of value became much more likely.
Despite all that, Bissell and Dulles had no other contingency plan beyond the presumption that the pilot would be killed and that the aircraft and its valuable photographic images would be reduced to useless rubble. Eisenhower had raised his concerns prior to the U-2’s inaugural launch in 1956, but Dulles had “absolutely, categorical[ly]” assured the president the pilot would not survive a U-2 crash. Even at the remove of some twenty-five years since the U-2 incident, Eisenhower’s son John, who was also a presidential advisor at the time, “got into a war dance” when reflecting on the poor advice he felt the president had received.
Compounding matters, issuing and retracting multiple cover stories severely wounded the administration’s credibility. “The big error we made,” Eisenhower said in his memoirs, “was, of course, in the issuance of a premature and erroneous cover story.” Eisenhower may be guilty here of selective memory in this case because the administration did not issue one false cover story, it issued three, and that does not even count Eisenhower’s own news conference in which he asserted that he had authorized the U-2 flight himself. “Eisenhower’s instincts were to stick to the NASA cover story and not say any more,” the Russian authors Fursenko and Naftali believe, but time and again, his advisers pressed him to authorize a new statement.
With Khrushchev skillfully playing his hand, Washington was constantly on the defensive, with each successive cover story undermining the administration’s reliability and putting Eisenhower in a weaker political position as the Paris summit loomed. The instincts that had served Eisenhower so well in his past – whether it was during his time as a poker player at West Point, or as the supreme allied commander, or as a nimble politician who got himself elected president in his first bid at electoral office – were for some reason sublimated during those two critical weeks in May.
During this time, John Eisenhower told his father that he believed Dulles should be fired. And while it is true that Eisenhower was badly served by his advisors during the U-2 crisis, it should be pointed out that the president himself signed off all the critical decisions – beginning with the authorization of the May 1 flight itself. The ultimate responsibility lay with Eisenhower and, in all likelihood, he knew that better than anyone else. As the U-2 cover stories unraveled and the Paris summit disintegrated, Eisenhower’s temper flared. He was angry at his staff, furious with Khrushchev, and must have been completely frustrated that that this last U-2 flight – after twenty-three sorties with no problems at all! – had gone so wrong in every way possible that it caused maximum political and, potentially, historical damage. And in his quiet moments, the person Dwight David Eisenhower was probably most angry at was himself.
Aftermath
The entire history of the Cold War was filled with ironies and the U-2 incident was rife with them. Eisenhower and Khrushchev each genuinely wanted to ease superpower tensions and harbored optimism that the two adversaries could develop better relations. But when the spy plane incident unraveled, the two sides’ mutual distrust and secrecy kept them from realizing those goals.
Coming from a political culture where paranoia was literally equivalent to survival, Khrushchev was thoroughly convinced that the US military and the CIA were acting in concert to torpedo any breakthroughs he and Eisenhower seemed poised to achieve. The idea that the president actually controlled his military and intelligence agencies simply did not compute with the Soviet premier. When Khrushchev met with John F. Kennedy in June of 1961 in Vienna, Khrushchev still maintained that Eisenhower assumed responsibility for the U-2 flight out of a “spirit of chivalry,” to protect his advisors.
While Eisenhower understood the negative implications of a potential U-2 downing to a much greater degree than Bissell or Dulles ever did, the American president never quite grasped how much the repeated incursions over Soviet airspace infuriated Khrushchev. More than its political implications, every U-2 flight over the Soviet Union cut at Khrushchev’s sense of pride and enflamed his own insecurities. Three and a half years of it simply drove him to distraction. After the cover stories were exposed, Eisenhower knew he had to own up and admit he had authorized the flights. “I’m the one who’s going to have to take the beating” he told his son said before his news conference on May 11.
But Khrushchev perceived Eisenhower’s admission as an insult. In Khrushchev’s mind, the Soviet premier had offered the president a perfectly reasonable deal: simply admit you knew nothing of the flight, fire some subordinates, and we can do business at the Paris summit. When Eisenhower refused the offer, Khrushchev interpreted the move as a personal slap that embarrassed him in front of his Kremlin critics.
This fundamental misunderstanding is underscored by an observation Henry Kissinger once made about the Cold War in general, when he said that the US and the USSR were often “like two heavily armed men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each tends to ascribe to the other consistency, foresight and coherence that its own experience belies.”
In the summit’s aftermath, Khrushchev simply waited to see who would succeed Eisenhower. The Soviet premier recalled in his memoirs that upon meeting John Kennedy in Vienna, “I joked that we had cast the deciding ballot in his election to the Presidency over that son-of-a-bitch Richard Nixon. When he asked me what I meant, I explained that by waiting to release the U-2 pilot Gary Powers until after the American election, we kept Nixon from being able to claim he could deal with the Russians; our ploy made the difference of at least half a million votes, which gave Kennedy the edge he needed.”
Francis Gary Powers was released in 1962 in a prisoner exchange. His return to the United States never proved to be a happy one. Many considered him a coward for allowing himself to be captured in enemy territory (Powers had a poison-tipped pin at his disposal), even though CIA instructions never suggested that captured pilots were expected to commit suicide. In fact, the agency told pilots they had every right to cooperate with foreign authorities should they be captured. Upon gaining access to Soviet records, authors and researchers Fursenko and Naftali later discovered that Powers actually withheld many U-2 secrets from the Soviets during his long interrogation sessions. By the 1970s, Powers wrote his memoirs, saw a made-for-television movie based on his story telecast on ABC, and learned how to fly helicopters. He got a job at KNBC-TV in Los Angeles as a traffic reporter but died when his chopper crashed in 1977.
Perhaps the most intriguing question centers on what may have been accomplished at the Paris summit meeting if not for the U-2 flight. Believing that Khrushchev came to Paris looking for an excuse to ruin the summit, Eisenhower maintained in his memoirs that the meeting “would have brought the Free World only further disillusionment.”
Research into previously unreleased files by Fursenko and Naftali indicate what the Soviets had actually planned to offer if the summit had gone as scheduled. Their book, Khrushchev’s Cold War, speculated that the Kremlin intended to take a hard line on Berlin and disarmament, which led the authors to believe that the chances of a diplomatic breakthrough would have been remote, although they proffer that simply holding a summit “where the Soviet Union would have been treated as an equal might have alleviated the fears of the mercurial Soviet leader. The aftermath of the U-2 incident, however, made this impossible to know.”
After the summit collapse, Eisenhower flew back to Washington. He was met by his wife Mamie, who had tears in her eyes. The president’s eyes began to mist up as well. There would be no glorious exit from public life, no crowning diplomatic achievement. Shortly afterwards, Ike reflected on what could have been: “I had longed to give the United States and the world a lasting peace. I was able only to contribute to a stalemate.”
Meanwhile, a half a world away, workers put the finishing touches on a hunting lodge. Built along the shore of majestic Lake Baikal in Russia, it was specially constructed to house a sitting American president making a grand tour of Mother Russia. It was christened “Eisenhower’s Cottage.” But it sat empty the entire summer and the man it was named for would never step foot in it.
