High Altitude Diplomacy

...Once it was in the open, anything less than an adroit response would have left him struggling for his political life (which expired anyway some four years later...

...Reviewed by Herbert Parmet Professor of history, Graduate Center, City University of New York...

...As early as December 1956 he told CI A Director Allen Dulles that he was "going to order complete stoppage of the entire business...

...Had the Powers flight not been downed, Khrushchev might have been able to conceal that the U-2 surveillance program had ever existed...

...So Gary Powers took off from Pakistan and came down near Sverdlovsk on May Day...

...Information from U-2s also enabled Ike to discount Khrushchev's attempts to deceive the West into believing a massive Soviet arms build-up was under way...

...was tricked into at first lying and soon having to confess the real nature of the flight, the author recalls, maintaining that the President was wary of being caught in another lie...

...Throughout, however, fear of exposure made him nervous...

...government documents, and assiduous use of files in Presidential libraries...

...a closer view of the preparations for the 1956 Suezinva-sion than has hitherto been realized...

...Indeed, the President's threat to call off "the entire business" coincided with private protests from the Kremlin in December 1956...

...Finally, since this was not the first intelligence (light the Russians knew about, why did it become a cause celebrel These questions and others are exhaustively explored by Beschloss...

...Emerging from Beschloss' account is a curiously symmetric picture of the superpowers' actions...

...His concern was well founded...

...The book dispels any lingering doubts that Eisenhower's role went beyond mere acquiescence...

...Michael R. Beschloss, whose well-received Kennedy and Roosevelt was published in 1980, abstains from broader speculation mMayday...

...Indeed, its enduring value lies not so much in a masterful unraveling of particulars that were important at the time, but in showing how years of Cold War tensions had pressed both Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nikita S. Khrushchev into positions that left them with little maneuverability during the episode...

...Thus he could rej ect arguments for military projects predicated on a looming "missile gap...

...What Eisenhower did not understand, suggests Beschloss, was "that Khrushchev might be actually trying to save detente from Kremlin militants who were seizing the opportunity offered by the U-2 downing...

...But at least one more flight was deemed important, since the previous one had uncovered evidence of the deployment of the first operational ICBMs...

...and Russian publics," Bissell told Beschloss in an interview...

...Allen Dulles' confidence that they could never capture one alive was an important factor in the program's continuing as late as the spring of 1960...

...He knew rivals within the Kremlin were ready to pounce at any opportunity to replace him...

...Particularly worrisome was the matter of what would happen if the Russians got hold of a downed U-2 pilot...

...For the American people, the incident was a revelation: They learned that their government could and did lie...

...Beschloss argues that Khrushchev's information-management ruse was a principal reason for Ike's assumption of responsibility...

...Beschloss points out that such surveillance gave the U.S...

...Responsible or not, why didn't he take advantage of the opportunity Khrushchev gave him to deny personal involvement...

...How much did President Eisenhower know about the surveillance operations...

...The President, in fact, acted as virtual "project manager" of the U-2 program, closely controlling flight authorizations from its inception in mid-1956...

...One of the few things they weren't sure of was the extent of Eisenhower's participation...

...Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson...

...His being captured was one thing, the President's accepting personal responsibility was quite another...

...The spy plane, in his view, was "a flaming javelin unwittingly thrown into the dry forest of suspicions and misperceptions that surrounded American-Soviet relations in May 1960...

...Beschloss himself finds it "difficult to escape the conclusion that both the American and the Soviet governments participated in the shattering of detente" during the U-2 episode...

...Eisenhower felt virtually invited to authorize the climactic flight on the eve of the summit when Khrushchev failed to even privately protest a mission a few weeks earlier...

...Precisely what might have been accomplished had the Paris summit taken place as scheduled cannot, of course, be known...

...You have to get me off it...

...and the USSR governments collaborated in keeping this program secret from the U.S...

...planes were flying over its heartland with impunity...

...The U.S...

...At this stage, what secrecy the program still enjoyed was becoming increasingly difficult to preserve...

...The Soviet leader's aim may well have been the dual one of keeping detente on track while simultaneously extricating himself from the embarrassing situation created by the downed plane...

...The proposal was approved by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Eisenhower, but did little to allay the President's misgivings...

...This U-2 thing has put me in a terrible spot," KhrushchevtoldU.S...

...Whatever the case, if it really was Khrushchev's intention to create an escape for Eisenhower by refraining from personal accusations, then—contrary to the President's suspicion—he must not have wanted to sabotage the Paris summit...

...The result reflects the effort: A more complete history of the whole undertaking than Mayday is unlikely to appear in the foreseeable future...

...The Soviets, Beschloss makes clear, knew about the flights almost from the very beginning...

...For years, the President resisted unnecessary defense spending almost singlehandedly against almost unbearable pressure," writes Beschloss...

...It always distressed Eisenhower that he was doing this," observed his aide, General Andrew Goodpaster...

...Eisenhower later explained that he did not take the opportunity offered by Khrushchev to play ignorant because he felt it important to demonstrate that he knew what was going on...

...The reader is inevitably led to wonder, though, about the impact the experience had on Khrushchev and the men hovering behind him in the Kremlin when the showdown with John F. Kennedy came over the missiles in Cuba two-and-a-half years later...

...author, "Eisenhower and the American Crusades," "JFK" This superb account of the 1960 U-2 incident will fascinate lovers of espionage tales, and it should be required reading for students of U.S.-Soviet relations...

...In aborting Eisenhower's would-be detente, it brought his Presidency and the decade to a close with a return to the chilliest temperatures of the Cold War...

...Until now, the U-2 legacy had also consisted of many gray areas...

...The U-2 affair's immediate consequences were grave enough...

...This was perhaps the principal achievement of the U-2 program and of his Presidency...

...If they were under his control, why did he authorize an "overflight" so close to the scheduled Paris conference...

...In addition to interviews with key figures possessing knowledge of the affair, his intensive research included securing access to the diaries of John Eisenhower, who served as as White House assistant to his father, studying recently declassified U.S...

...But as things turned out, the major issues of the day—Berlin, arms control, superpower relations with the People's Republic of China, and threats posed by "wars of national liberalization"— languished unaddressed...

...The USSR could not go public because that would entail the embarrassing admission that U.S...

...The shooting down of Francis Gary Powers' high altitude spy plane, and the subsequent botched coverup, initiated a long series of events that dispelled illusions of innocence and made Americans increasingly skeptical of their leaders...

...Eisenhower's trepidations were overcome most of all, though, by his appreciation of the missions' intelligence value...

...Why did Khrushchev leave that door open to the President...

...Ike's reluctance to sanction further flights prompted Richard Bissell, the CIA's deputy director for planning, to suggest that the effort be turned into a joint project with the British, who had been in on the secret from the start...

...The President was further bolstered by the absence of public complaints from Moscow...

...You can almost say that the U.S...

...A second set of aerial photographs was needed for a more precise determination of Soviet progress...