attack. It was a dangerous game of aerial chicken and on many occasions the planes were met by anti-aircraft fire or Soviet fighter planes.

In both 1950 and 1951, an espionage airplane with a crew of ten was shot down, with no survivors. In 1969, a crew of 31 was lost, this time to North Korean fighters over the Sea of Japan. During the intervening years, there were dozens of air incidents involving American aircraft and Communist firepower, arising from hundreds, if not thousands, of espionage flights. Some of the spy planes made it safely back to base (which might be Turkey, Iran, Greece, Pakistan, Japan or Norway) after being attacked, and even hit; others were downed with loss of life or with crew members captured by the Soviets.1

There has been considerable confusion concerning the number and the fate of US airmen captured by the Soviets after their planes made forced landings or were shot down during the 1950s and 60s. Russian president Boris Yeltsin stated in 1992 that nine US planes had been shot down in the early 1950s and twelve American survivors had been held prisoner, their ultimate fate not yet discovered. Five months later, Dmitri Volkogonov, former Soviet general and co-chairman of a Russian-US commission investigating the whole question of missing Americans, told a US Senate committee that 730 airmen had been captured on cold war spy flights, their fate likewise unclear.2

The most notable of these incidents was of course the downing of the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers on 1 May 1960. The ultra high-flying U-2 had been developed because

of the vulnerability to being shot down of planes flying at normal altitudes. The disappearance of Powers and his U-2 somewhere in the Soviet Union ensnared the United States government publicly in an entanglement of a false cover story, denials, and amendments to denials. Finally, when the Russians presented Powers and his plane to the world, President Eisenhower had no alternative but to admit the truth. He pointedly added, however, that flights such as the U-2s were distasteful but vital , given the Russian fetish of secrecy and concealment .3 One of Eisenhowers advisers, Emmet John Hughes, was later to observe that it thus took the administration only six days to transform an unthinkable falsehood into a sovereign right. 4

On several occasions, the United States protested to the Soviet Union about Soviet attacks on American planes which were not actually over Soviet territory, but over the Sea of Japan, for example. Though engaged in espionage, such flights, strictly speaking, appear to be acceptable under international law.

The most serious repercussion of the whole U-2 affair was that it doomed to failure the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting which took place two weeks later in Paris, and upon which so much hope for peace and detente had been placed by people all over the world.

Was the U-2 affair the unfortunate accident of timing that history has made it out to be? Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, US Air Force, Ret. has suggested otherwise. From 1955 to 1963, Prouty served as the liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon on matters concerning military support of special operations . In his book, The Secret Team, Prouty suggests that the CIA and certain of the Agencys colleagues in the Pentagon sabotaged this particular U-2 flight, the last one scheduled before the summit. They did this, presumably, because they did not relish a lessening of cold-war tensions, their raison detre.

The method employed, Prouty surmises, was remarkably simple. The U-2s engine needed infusions of liquid hydrogen to maintain the planes incredible altitude, which placed it outside the range of Soviet firepower and interceptor aircraft. If the hydrogen container were only partly filled upon takeoff from Turkey, it would be

simply a matter of time-calculable to coincide with the plane being over Soviet territory-before the U-2 was forced to descend to a lower altitude. At this point, whether the plane was shot down or Powers bailed out, allowing it to crash, is not certain. The Soviet Union claimed that it had shot down the U-2 at its normal high altitude with a rocket, but this was probably a falsehood born of four years of frustrating failure to shoot a single U-2 from the sky. In any event, the Russians were able to present to the world a partially intact spy plane along with a fully intact spy pilot, complete with all manner of incriminating papers on him, and an unused suicide needle. The presence of identification papers was no oversight, says Prouty: deliberately, neither pilot not plane were sanitized on this flight as was required on other flights .5

Powers, in his book, doesnt discuss the liquid hydrogen at ad. He believed his plane was disabled and forced to descend by the shock waves of a Soviet near-miss. But he recounts technical problems with the plane even before the presumed near-miss.6

In light of the furor raised by the shooting down of a South Korean commercial airliner by the Soviet Union in 1983, which the Russians claimed was spying, it is interesting to note that Prouty also makes mention of the United States at one time using a seemingly clean national commercial airline of an unspecified foreign country to do some camera spying or other clandestine project .7

To the Russians, the spy planes were more than simply a violation of their air space, and they rejected the notion put forth by the US that the flights were just another form of espionage- intelligence collection activities are practiced by all countries , said Washington.8 (At the time there had been no indication of Soviet flights over the United States.)9 The Russians viewed the flights as particularly provocative because airplanes are a means of conducting warfare, they can be considered as the beginning of hostilities, and may even be carrying bombs. The Russians could not forget that the Nazis had preceded their invasion of the Soviet Union with frequent reconnaissance overflights. Neither could they forget that in April 1958, US planes carrying nuclear bombs had flown over the Arctic in the direction of the USSR due to a false warning signal on American radar. The planes were called back when only two hours flying time separated them from the Soviet Union.10

No American plane dropped bombs on the Soviet Union but many of them dropped men assigned to carry out hostile missions. The men who fell from the sky were Russians who had emigrated to the West where they were recruited by the CIA and other Western intelligence organizations.

The leading emigre organization was known as National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, or the National Union of Labor (NTS). It was composed largely of two distinct groups: the sons of the Russians who had gone to the West following the revolution, and those Russians who, through circumstance or choice, had wound up in Western Europe at the close of the Second World War. Members of both groups had collaborated with the Nazis during the war. Although NTS was generally classified in the right wing of the various emigre organizations, their collaboration had been motivated more by anti-Stalinism than by pro-Nazi sentiments.

NTS was based primarily in West Germany where, throughout the 1950s, the CIA was the organizations chief benefactor, often its sole support. At a CIA school set up in Germany, under the imposing name of the Institute for the Study of the USSR, as well as at schools in Great Britain and the United States, the Agency provided NTS members with extensive training before airdropping them into Soviet territory. The men landed on their native soil elaborately equipped, with everything from weapons to collapsible bicycles, frogmen suits, and rubber mats for crossing electrically-charged barbed-wire fences.

The Russians were returned to their homeland for a variety of reasons: to gather intelligence about military and technological installations; commit assassinations; obtain current samples of identification documents; assist Western agents to escape; engage in sabotage, for which they were well trained (methods of derailing trains and wrecking bridges, actions against arms factories and power plants, etc.); or instigate armed political struggle against Communist rule by linking up with resistance movements-a wholly unrealistic goal given the feeble state of such movements, but one which some NTS fanatics swore by.

It will never be known just how many men the CIA infiltrated into the Soviet Union, not only by air but by border crossings and by boat as well; many hundreds at least. As to their fate ... the Soviet Union published a book in 1961 called Caught In the Act (=CIA), in which were listed the names and other details of about two dozen infiltrators the Russians claimed to have captured, often almost immediately upon arrival. Some were executed, others received prison sentences, one allegedly was an individual who had taken part in a mass execution of Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory. The book asserts that there were many more caught who were not listed. This may have been a self-serving statement, but it was a relatively simple matter for the Russians to infiltrate the emigres ranks in Western Europe and learn the entire operation.

The CIA, to be sure, was not naive about this practice. The Agency went so far as to torture suspected defectors in Munich-using such esoteric methods as applying turpentine to a mans testicles or sealing someone in a room and playing Indonesian music at deafening levels until he cracked.11

The Russians further claimed that some of those smuggled in were furnished with special radio beacons to guide planes where to land other agents, and which could also be used to direct US bombers in the event of war.

Some of the emigres made it back to Western Europe with their bits and pieces of information, or after attempting to catty out some other assignment. Others, provided with a complete set of necessary documents, were instructed to integrate themselves back into Soviet society and become agents in place . Still others, caught up in the emotions of being home , turned themselves in-once again, the human factor , which no amount of training or indoctrination can necessarily circumvent.12

No American operation against the Soviet Union would be complete without its propaganda side: bringing the gospel to the heathen, in a myriad of ways that displayed the creativity of the CIA and its team of emigres.

Novel mechanisms were developed to enable airplanes and balloons to drop anti-Communist literature over the Soviet Union. When the wind was right, countless leaflets and pamphlets were scattered across the land; or quantities of literature were floated downstream in waterproof packages.

Soviet citizens coming to the West were met at every turn by NTS people handing out their newspapers and magazines in Russian and Ukrainian. To facilitate contact, NTS at times engaged in black market operations and opened small shops which catered to Russians at cheap prices. From North Africa to Scandinavia, the CIA network confronted Soviet seamen, tourists, officials, athletes, even Soviet soldiers in East Germany, to present them with the Truth as seen by the Free World , as well as to pry information from them, to induce them to defect, or to recruit them as spies. Hotel rooms were searched, phones tapped, bribes offered, or blackmail threatened in attempts to reach these ends. Actions were also undertaken to entrap or provoke Soviet diplomatic personnel so as to cause their expulsion and/or embarrass the Soviet Union.15