Approved for Release: 2013/06/25
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Secret NOFORN
Chapter 3
98
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[figure]
*Colonel Goodpaster with President Eisenhower*
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> take it as a certainty that no pilot would survive . . . and that although they would know where the plane came from, it would be difficult to prove it in any convincing way.¹¹
CIA assurances that the U-2 would probably not be detected, and that a crashed U-2 could not be traced back to the United States, helped overcome the President’s worries about overflights. The most important reason why President Eisenhower decided to send reconnaissance aircraft over the Soviet Union, however, was the urgent need for accurate intelligence to confirm or disprove claims of Soviet advances in long-range bombers and missiles. The initial sighting of the new Soviet Bison bomber in the spring of 1954 had been followed by reported sightings of more than 30 of these bombers in the spring and summer of 1955 (in reality these were sightings of the same group of 10 aircraft that circled around out of sight and made several passes during a Soviet air show). Soon members of Congress were calling for investigations into the relative strength of the US and
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¹¹ Quoted in Beschloss, *Mayday*, p. 118.
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Secret
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Approved for Release: 2013/06/25