Approved for Release: 2013/06/25
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Secret NOFORN
Chapter 4
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deployed SS-6 site because it could provide exemplars for photointerpreters to use in searching subsequent overhead photography for similar installations.²³
The two proposed overflights that would cover the northern railroad lines received the strongest consideration. Both plans contained new features. Operation TIME STEP called for a U-2 to take off from the USAF base at Thule, Greenland, which would be the first overflight staged from this base. The aircraft would then fly over Novaya Zemlya on its way to cover the railroad lines from the Polyarnyy Ural Mountains to Kotlas. The return flight would be over Murmansk with the landing to take place at either Bodo or Andoya on Norway’s northeast coast. The other proposed overflight, Operation GRAND SLAM, was the first U-2 mission planned to transit the Soviet Union; all previous missions had penetrated not more than halfway and then left in the general direction from which they came. GRAND SLAM proposed to fly across the Soviet Union from south to north, departing from Peshawar, Pakistan, and landing at Bodo, Norway. The mission would overfly Tyuratam, Sverdlovsk, Kirov, Kotlas, Severodvinsk, and Murmansk.
The two preferred missions both required the use of the airfield at Bodo, which had been authorized by senior Norwegian intelligence and military officers. Because the Bodo airfield was involved in NATO maneuvers taking place in the Barents Sea area, Bissell informed the White House that neither mission could be flown before 19 April. Once the maneuvers ended, bad weather over the Soviet Union kept the mission from taking place when it was originally scheduled. Richard Bissell, therefore, asked President Eisenhower for more time, and, on 25 April, General Goodpaster relayed the President’s instructions to Bissell that “one additional operation may be undertaken, provided it is carried out prior to May 1. No operation is to be carried out after May 1.”²⁴ The President did not want to fly missions any later than that because the Paris Summit was scheduled to begin on 16 May 1960.
By this time, CIA planners were concentrating on Operation GRAND SLAM as the most likely route for the proposed mission because it offered the best chance of photographing suspected locations
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²³ *OSA History*, chap. 12, pp. 35-36 (TS Codeword).
²⁴ Ambrose, *Eisenhower: The President*, p. 569; Beschloss, *Mayday*, p. 10.
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Approved for Release: 2013/06/25