Approved for Release: 2013/06/25
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Secret NOFORN
Chapter 3
124
surgery), JCS Chairman Adm. Arthur Radford, DCI Allen Dulles, and Richard Bissell, Eisenhower explained why he refused to allow overflights of the Soviet Union: “Everyone in the world says that, in the last six weeks, the United States has gained a place it hasn’t held since World War II. To make trips now would cost more than we would gain in form of solid information.” Hoover agreed and noted, “If we lost a plane at this stage, it would be almost catastrophic.” Torn between his desire to maintain a “correct and moral” position and his wish to know what the Soviet Union was up to, the President finally authorized several overflights of Eastern Europe and the Soviet border, “but not the deep one,” adding that the aircraft should “stay as close to the border as possible.”⁶¹
The first of these flights, mission 4016 on 20 November 1956, was the first overflight of Soviet territory since 10 July. This mission left Adana and flew east over Iran, then reversed and flew west along the Soviet-Iranian border to Soviet Armenia, where it crossed into the Soviet Union and photographed Yerevan. An electrical malfunction then forced the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, to return to Adana. Soviet interceptor aircraft made several unsuccessful attempts to reach this U-2, and the Soviet Government sent a secret protest note to Washington.⁶²
On 10 December, Bulgaria was the target of two U-2 missions, one (4018) from Detachment B at Adana and another (2029) from Detachment A at Giebelstadt. Bulgarian fighter aircraft made 10 different attempts to intercept the first mission, but the flight proceeded without difficulty.⁶³
The second flight came close to crashing but not through the efforts of interceptors. The pilot of mission 2029 was Carmine Vito, who had flown the first U-2 mission over Moscow on 5 July. He was known to his colleagues as the Lemon-Drop Kid because he always carried these hard candies in the knee pocket of his flight suit. Despite
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⁶¹ Andrew J. Goodpaster, Memorandum of Conference with the President, November 15, 1956, WHOSS, Alpha, DDEL (TS): Ambrose, *Eisenhower: The President*, p. 374.
⁶² Mission folder 4016, 20 November 1956, OSA records, job 67-B-972, box 7 (TS Codeword).
⁶³ Mission folders 2029 (10 December 1956) and 4018 (10 December 1956), OSA records, job 67-B-328, box 7 and job 67-B-972, box 7 (TS Codeword).
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Secret
Approved for Release: 2013/06/25