The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance; the U-2 and Oxcart Programs, 1954-1974

Secret NOFORN
Chapter 4

This statement had been prepared for a "best case" scenario, that is to say, one in which neither the pilot nor the plane and film survived. However, pilots had bailed out from extremely high altitudes and survived, and there was even evidence from previous U-2 crashes that much of the aircraft itself could be salvaged. The small destructive charge aboard the U-2 was not sufficient to destroy much more than the camera. The tightly rolled film, which could reveal the exact purpose of the mission even if the pilot and aircraft did not survive, was very hard to destroy. Kelly Johnson later conducted an experiment that revealed film taken out of a completely burned-out aircraft could still provide usable imagery. $ ^{33} $ After almost four years of successful U-2 missions, Richard Bissell and the rest of the Development Projects Division had become overconfident and were not prepared for the "worst case" scenario that actually occurred in May 1960. This failure played directly into the hands of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who shrewdly decided to release information about the downed U-2 a little at a time, thereby encouraging the United States to stick with its vulnerable cover story too long. As he later wrote, "Our intention here was to confuse the government circles of the United States. As long as the Americans thought the pilot was dead, they would keep putting out the story that perhaps the plane had accidentally strayed off course and been shot down in the mountains on the Soviet side of the border." $ ^{34} $ The first word from the Soviet Union came on Thursday, 5 May, when Premier Khrushchev announced to a meeting of the Supreme Soviet that a US "spyplane" had been downed near Sverdlovsk. He made no mention of the fate of its pilot.

Khrushchev's announcement aroused considerable interest in the media in the United States, and that same day the State Department and NASA issued another statement that continued the "weather plane" cover story, adding that the pilot became lost during a routine mission near the Caucasus Mountains. Soon afterward, the US Ambassador to Moscow cabled a report to the State Department indicating that the pilot might be alive after all. Two days later, on 7 May 1960, Khrushchev confirmed this report by revealing that the U-2 pilot was alive and had admitted his mission of spying on the Soviet Union.