Operation Overflight (5 page)

We also, rather late in life, had to learn new bathroom habits. This wasn't quite as bad as might be imagined. Not drinking coffee or other fluids prior to a flight lessened the need. Too, because there was no ventilation in the suit, no way for the skin to breathe, perspiration was constant, with much moisture eliminated this way, rather than through the kidneys. But this also meant there was no way for perspiration to evaporate. Following a flight, you wrung the water out of the long johns; during the flight, you had to live with it.

Before each flight we put on the suit and helmet and began what was called prebreathing. This was a denitrogenization process during which we were given pure oxygen, under slight pressure, to avoid getting the bends.

In normal breathing it takes a little effort to inhale, while exhaling is automatic. Under pressurization this is reversed. Inhaling is automatic, while exhaling is an effort. It was literally necessary to learn to breathe all over again.

As if the process weren't tiring enough, the long use of pure oxygen often had as side effects painful head and ear aches. After two hours of prebreathing before each flight, plus actual flight time, a pilot was so exhausted that he wasn't allowed to fly again for two days.

Each aircraft has its pecularities, most of which can be simulated in a trainer. Because the U-2 was so new, however, some phases of the testing still in progress, many of these had to be first experienced in actual flight. And, as a unique aircraft, designed for the specific purpose of high-altitude flights, the U-2 had some decidedly unusual characteristics.

Ascent was rapid and spectacular. The U-2 required very little runway for takeoff; a thousand feet would suffice. Within moments after the pogos dropped, you could begin climbing—at better than a forty-five-degree angle. (On the first couple of flights, you were sure you were going to continue right over on your back.) Within minutes, in the time most planes took to reach a few thousand feet, the U-2 had disappeared from sight.

Once in flight, other peculiarities manifested themselves. One was that at maximum altitude the fastest the plane could go was very close to the slowest it could go. This narrow range was known as the “coffin corner”; a slight miscalculation either way, and you were in trouble. If you went too slow, the plane would stall; if you went too fast, it would go into “Mach buffet” and could become unmanageable. To keep the plane at the exact speed required a great deal of attention and personal control. Although it was equipped with an autopilot, you couldn't place too much reliance on it because of what could happen if it malfunctioned.

There was also—especially before the technical bugs were worked out—the problem of flameouts, which occurred with some regularity. During a flameout the jet engine loses its fire, and the pilot must bring the plane down to a lower altitude to restart it.

Navigation was also a challenge. Since we couldn't depend on the Russians to provide radio fixes, we had to learn to navigate completely on our own, without radio aids of any kind.

Landing the U-2 was even more difficult than we had guessed. There was an either/or situation. A regular airplane can land while still flying. The U-2 had to be through flying to stay on the ground, as a result of which it was necessary to stall it before touching down. If you stalled it a little high, it would drop down. If you hit the ground before it stalled, it would bounce back up in the air. You had to gauge it exactly.

Once touched down, however, one problem remained. Because of the bicycle landing gear and the long wings, the plane had a strong tendency to ground-loop. Should you start turning, however slightly, the plane would try to keep turning.

These were only a few of the special problems of flying the U-2.

The pleasures were far greater.

Whatever initial worries we had about the plane soon vanished. It was not an easy plane to fly, but it was not dangerous. Once its idiosyncrasies were mastered, so long as you stayed alert, the plane behaved beautifully, so much so that you looked forward to each new flight.

And there was the excitement of pioneering a new frontier, something I had wanted to do all my life.

On August 29, 1955, British Wing Commander Walter F. Gibb, piloting a Canberra B. Mark II, had set an international record for altitude, reaching 65,889 feet.

We broke that record every day. And could stay higher for hours at a time.

If the weather below was good, the view from this altitude was unsurpassed, the country a huge map come to life. On one flight, while crossing the Colorado River in Arizona, approaching California, I could see clearly from Monterey Peninsula on the north, halfway down Baja California on the south.

Being so high gave you a unique satisfaction. Not a feeling of superiority or omnipotence, but a special aloneness.

There was only one thing wrong with flying higher than any other man had ever flown.

You couldn't brag about it.

Like the U-2, Watertown hadn't been built to last. Everything about it was temporary. The pilots lived in house trailers, four to a trailer. There was no PX, no club. As if to compensate for the lack of other creature comforts, there was an excellent mess, the food exceptional by any standard. But recreation consisted of a couple of pool tables and a 16-mm nightly movie. It is probably unnecessary to add that we played a lot of poker.

Weekends we deserted the base en masse, via shuttle flight to Burbank on Friday afternoon, returning on Monday morning.

Off base we used our real names and carried our own identification, plus a card identifying us as employees of Lockheed on loan to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). This enabled us to cash checks or establish credit. Arrangements had been made to verify our employment.

On returning to the base, we turned in our identification and resumed our cover names. Since we would revert to our own names once training was finished, it was a further security measure, since
many of the personnel at Watertown wouldn't be going overseas with us.

On flights we carried no identification, this being unnecessary inasmuch as we took off and landed at the same base.

Just as we had learned never to call the Central Intelligence Agency the CIA, but “the agency,” Watertown Strip became “the ranch.”

We were an unlikely-looking bunch of cowboys.

Much later, for reasons which will become obvious, it would be widely reported that the U-2 pilots were largely uninformed about the specialized equipment they carried, that they were merely “airplane jockeys” who, at points designated on the map, snapped on and off switches with no real knowledge of what they were doing.

Our job would have been simpler, had this been true, but it wasn't. We were thoroughly checked out on all the equipment. It was essential, since if a piece of equipment broke down in flight we had to do what we could to get it working again. With a radar signal recorder, for example, we might shut it off and recycle it, this sometimes correcting the condition. Having attended photo school and worked as a photo lab technician in the Air Force, I was especially interested in the cameras and other photographic apparatus, and studied them whenever I got the chance.

Throughout our training, equipment tests continued. One piece was especially exotic. This was the destruct unit.

If it became necessary to abandon the aircraft over a Communist country, the plane carried a two-and-a-half-pound explosive charge. This would not have totally obliterated the aircraft, only the portion of it containing the cameras and electronic equipment. There was some doubt as to whether it would have even completely succeeded in this, since it is almost impossible to destroy a tightly wound reel of film or recording tape. Nor was there a worry that if the Russians captured the plane they would copy it or steal valuable technical secrets. It was common knowledge that Russian aviation was quite far advanced, equal to, in the opinion of some, if not better than our own. The only danger of having the U-2 captured intact was that it would constitute physical proof of our spying.

The destruct mechanism was arranged so that once activated by the pilot it would allow him a small but supposedly sufficient margin of time to bail out before the explosion occurred.

Testing to see how long it would take us to get out of the aircraft,
we decided to try seventy seconds on the timer. We could have given ourselves longer, up to one and one-half minutes, but we wanted to make absolutely sure the plane exploded in the air. Should it crash, there was always the possibility that the charge would not go off, or if it did, that the earth would cushion some of the blast.

The destruct unit was operated by two switches. One, marked ARM, activated the circuits. To trigger the unit, however, a second switch had to be flipped. Marked DESTRUCT, this started the timer. At any time during the seventy seconds the switch could be flipped back and the whole process halted. Once done, however, the timer couldn't be reset to compensate for the lost time. So we were instructed not to flip either switch until the last possible moment.

There was one more complication. Testing the timers on the different units by stopwatch, we discovered they did not work uniformly. On some there was a variance of as much as five seconds. This made testing the timer prior to each flight a must.

While we were at Watertown, the destruct unit was of minor interest, since the charge itself would be placed in the plane only when we arrived overseas, and then only on the actual overflights.

There was, however, during our training, some discussion as to switching from the pilot-actuated-type mechanism we were using to an impact device, to explode automatically when the plane hit the ground.

It was a short discussion. Pilots are leery of impact devices, for good reason. On returning to base, if there were some problem with the landing gear and it was necessary to belly-land, the result could be disastrous.

We quickly ruled out the proposed switch, preferring to stay with the pilot-actuated type.

One question was never asked, one subject never discussed.

It was approached only two times, and then obliquely, never directly.

The first time was when we were briefed on the destruct device. The second occurred toward the end of our training, when a group of us were flown to the East Coast and put up in one of the agency's special facilities.

This was my first introduction to a “safe house,” a carefully guarded, maximum-security residence, from the outside resembling an ordinary home or estate, but inside manned entirely by agency personnel. In this instance, the cover was a farm, though unlike
any farm I had ever seen. Its fences, some fourteen feet high, and some electrified, were identical to those found along the borders of all Communist countries. We were taught how to get through or over or under the fences. Some of its fields were mined, some weren't. We were taught how to spot the ones that were and circumvent them. Even its ordinary plowed fields were special, similar to the plowed strips along the borders; we were taught how to walk through them without leaving telltale footprints.

It was strictly evasion training, no survival training being given, the presumption apparently being that our Air Force training was sufficient.

It was also a quickie course, lasting less than a week, and was, I suspect, intended more than anything else to build up our self-confidence.

And it was also the closest anyone actually came to mentioning the unmentionable: What were we to do if for some reason we did come down in Russia?

There was, at this time, little concern about being shot down. We knew the altitude at which the U-2 flew. Agency Intelligence sources were firm in their assurances that the Russians possessed neither aircraft nor rocketry capable of reaching us. But an airplane is a complicated piece of equipment. One loose electrical connection, one stalled engine, one unforeseen malfunction . . .

No one from the agency briefed us on what procedure to follow if we were forced to come down in Russia.

None of the pilots, to my knowledge, asked for such a briefing, nor, as if to do so would be to tempt fate, did we discuss it among ourselves.

It was a bad mistake.

One thing not ignored was actual flying. While at Watertown we flew the U-2 far more than we would have if we'd been in the Air Force and checking out in a new aircraft. As a result, on completing our training we had the utmost confidence in its reliability. It was a remarkable piece of equipment; perhaps it was this, more than anything else, that rendered less immediate whatever doubts we had.

Our group, the second to go through Watertown, was fortunate. We came through “clean.” No washouts, all pilots qualifying on the aircraft. No accidents, no crashes.

Three U-2 groups went through Watertown. The last class, which followed us by some months, had a fatality. A pilot, taking off on
a night mission, apparently was confused by the bright lights at the end of the runway and flew directly into a telephone pole.

Another class there at the same time as we were fared less well. Shortly after our arrival at Watertown the agency brought in four Greek pilots to be checked out on the U-2.

Presumably they were mercenaries, in the program on their own and without the knowledge of their government. At least this was what it seemed to be. We were never told otherwise. There was some speculation that, being Mediterraneans, they could pass more easily and attract less attention than Americans in some of the countries from which we would be flying. And there were other theories. But all were merely speculation; we were never informed as to why they had been included.

Whatever the reason, it didn't work out. Inconspicuous they were not, at least not in Hollywood, where they spent most of their weekends, always with an agency escort. It was no secret that none of the CIA men relished the escort job. Like playing nursemaid to four Zorbas, each intent on his own devilment. Their zest for enjoying themselves was epic.

At flying they did less well. Without exception, they failed to qualify on the aircraft. Not wanting them to return to Greece with their knowledge of the U-2 project, the agency was forced to keep them in the United States. Two, we heard later, were sent to college, at government expense, while one, it was rumored, had attempted to blackmail the agency. Unsuccessfully.