Presidential Predicaments: Eisenhower (VI of VIII)--Ike Gets Bluffed
The Soviet Union was a closed society. We were open.
Well, not exactly “open.” We has lots of secrets we were trying to keep. Nobody knew how many and you couldn’t find out for sure why. We knew what people often said about why. “National security.” You had to take their word for it.
We were more open than the Soviet Union was anyway.
Because the Soviet Union was so closed, President Eisenhower didn’t know in the early- to mid-1950’s much about what was going on over there, especially when it came to nuclear weapons. Starting in 1957, after they orbited the first satellite, the Soviets started claiming they had lots of ICBMs. Did they? None of us knew for sure, including our Central Intelligence Agency.
After the Soviets launched that Sputnik satellite in 1957, which we all knew about from that annoying beeping it made as it orbited the earth, their leader, Nikita Khrushchev, said that they were making ICBMs “like sausages.”
They’d tested an atomic bomb in 1949, we knew that for sure, and a much bigger bomb some three years later. Because of the radioactive fission products that spread around the world when you detonate an atomic bomb, you can’t keep that kind of information from getting out. But how many nuclear warheads did they actually have? For the longest time, Ike just didn’t know.
When you don’t know something about someone you think of as your mortal enemy, you can imagine the worst. Fear has big eyes, says a Russian proverb.
Even before the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949 and again before they exploded their first true hydrogen bomb in 1955, our military leaders had been making plans for preemptive first strikes on them. After 1949, our military leaders really wanted to know what the Soviets had because they wanted to know if we could attack them “preemptively” in a first strike without getting attacked back with nuclear weapons.
As time went by, a preemptive attack seemed less and less like a good idea.
In 1956 when I was a sophomore in high school, our Central Intelligence Agency had been able to start flying over Russia in secret, not to the Russians but to rest of us, a very high-flying airplane called the U-2 that could fly at 70,000 feet, an altitude the Soviet fighter jets of the time couldn’t reach. The U-2 carried a camera that could take pretty good pictures of what was down on the ground. “Photoreconnaissance” this was called.
After that, if we didn’t care about violating Soviet airspace, and we didn’t, we could learn more. From the pictures returned by the U-2 flights, Ike eventuality learned that there was less capability over there than he had feared, much less than the leaders of the armed forces, especially the Air Force, had been estimating. The different armed forces had been making very different estimates. The Navy’s was the lowest by far.
President Eisenhower had classified the U-2 operations at a level of secrecy above what had been our highest level of secrecy. He hadn’t told anyone about the U-2 and its findings, not even the leaders of our Air Force.
In 1960, we learned that the Soviets had developed an anti-aircraft missile that could shoot down the U2. We learned this when they shot one down. The news got out now, the Soviets made sure it did. President Eisenhower told us it was a weather plane that had gotten off course. But the pilot from the CIA had survived and the Soviets had captured him. They hadn’t mentioned this part when they announced the shoot-down. After Ike lied to us, they showed us pictures of the pilot, Francis Gary Powers. That was the first time any of us had heard about the U-2.
We couldn’t fly it over Russia any more, unfortunately.
That same year, though, President Eisenhower got the first returns from another source of photoreconnaissance intelligence—satellites we’d been launching into orbit that had cameras in them that could drop film cannisters back to us that we finally figured out how to snag out of the air. This program, called Corona, was classified at an even higher level than the U-2 program had been. The pictures the U-2 got were still classified but after that one got shot down and its pilot got captured and put on trial in Russia, there was no point in classifying the program any more. Actually, there was no point in the U-2 program anymore, not over Russia anyway.
Maybe we could use the U-2 over other countries.
Satellites couldn’t be shot down by anti-aircraft missiles. Since they were in space, they weren’t violating Soviet air space either, or that’s what we argued. In any case, the Soviets couldn’t do anything about it.
What President Eisenhower was finding out from Corona was that the Soviet leaders had been bluffing. They had gotten him and our own intelligence services to think they had lots and lots of nuclear weapons and ICBMs when they didn’t.
Not a bad strategy if you want keep someone from doing a preemptive first strike, is it?
Ike was reputed to be a good poker player. In this case, he’d gotten bluffed.
Next: Presidential Predicaments-Eisenhower VI (of VII): Let’s Make a Plan