SAC Seizes the CIA’s U-2s

Seventy-fourth Chapter in a Series Chronicling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

SAC Seizes an Opportunity

The short title of this chapter refers to a ramification of the President’s October 9th decision to send a single U-2 reconnaissance mission over northwestern Cuba. What we did not reveal in yesterday’s post was the President’s decision that this single mission would be flown “by a Strategic Air Command [SAC] pilot, or a military pilot attached to the Central Intelligence Agency.…”

The President’s decision gave the Air Force a prime opportunity to seize command and control, not only of the next mission, but of all future reconnaissance missions over Cuba. If Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis E. LeMay and SAC commander Thomas Power played their cards right, the Air Force could also grab the CIA’s J-75 model U-2s, far superior to the U-2s flown by SAC.

SAC, the preeminent U.S. military command beloved of Congress, feared by presidents, and hero-worshiped by the American people, was finally poised to kick its hated rival, the CIA, out of the photo reconnaissance business—at least over Cuba.

Three Days of Furious Alley Fighting

The CIA, with Army General Marshall Carter acting as director, did not go gently into that good night. Three days of intense struggle ensued over whether the CIA or SAC would control the CIA’s U-2s and those vital photo recon missions over Cuba. The tale is told in a 64-page packet of TOP SECRET CIA documents approved for release in December 2005 and obtained from the CIA’s Freedom of Information website (http://www.foia.cia.gov).

The Documentary Evidence

This packet of documents begins with a cover memorandum to DCI McCone from deputy Carter dated October 15, 1962, attaching “the basic papers with reference to the weekend discussions on Cuban overflights.”

The rest of the packet is 13 Tabs, A-M, with attachments to some of the Tabs, detailing Carter’s doomed struggle to retain control of the CIA’s U-2s. 

Tabs B and C are the transcripts of two marathon telephone conversations between Carter and USAF General William McKee, Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff under Chief of Staff General Curtis E. LeMay.

The October 12th Phone Call

In the second of the two calls, on Friday, October 12, Carter throws up every objection he can think of to McKee, who outranks him. Carter objects, for example, that

• Air Force pilots don’t know how to fly the J-75s; they’ll need at least a week’s training before they’re ready;
• the Air Force has no experience in running such missions;
• the Air Force doesn’t have the communications know-how;
• it doesn’t know how to plan such missions; there are ground support issues; and so on.

McKee answers all of Carter’s objections with the patience of a cat toying with a mouse, obviously aware that Carter’s objections are doomed. Toward the end of the conversation, his voice oozing hypocritical sympathy, McKee said, “You and I are sitting here commiserating with each other having been told to do something by a high-level decision, and I don’t think there’s a God damn thing we can do about it besides go ahead and do the best we can.”

“Commiserating,” indeed. McKee was “gloating.”

Beaten, Carter says, “I won’t fight the problem anymore. All I’ve got to do is get something from [Kennedy aide McGeorge] Bundy or from some authority…telling me I no longer have the responsibility for [U-2 reconnaissance] except to render all possible support to the Department of Defense. That’s all I need.”

When McKee says he can’t provide that written authority, Carter replies, “I’ll call Bundy and see if he can give it to me.”

SAC Jumps the Gun

As Carter was in the middle of his phone call with McKee on the 12th, he was handed a classified Air Force signal saying that SAC now had authority to execute operation BRASS KNOB, the code name for U-2 reconnaissance over Cuba.

Before Carter received authorization to cede the U-2 missions to the Air Force, Curtis Lemay seized control of them as if by Divine Right—which was pretty much how LeMay had thought of himself and the Air Force ever since it became a separate service in 1947.

Making Everything Legit

In the end, Carter himself had to send Bundy, on October 13, a directive written by Carter for Bundy’s signature ordering the Director of Central Intelligence (Carter) to turn over the CIA’s U-2s and “command and control” of its Cuban photo reconnaissance missions to the Strategic Air Command.

To make everything perfectly legit, Bundy’s memo would be back-dated the 12th, the day of SAC’s high-jacking.

Carter now had the written authority he needed from the White House to surrender the CIA’s U-2s and their reconnaissance missions to the Strategic Air Command.

And the CIA was out of the U-2 reconnaissance business—at least over Cuba.

Email your questions to phufstader@sbcglobal.net or post a comment.

Sources and Notes

Carter was acting director because DCI John McCone, married in late August, was in Seattle making arrangements for the funeral of his step-son, who had just died from injuries sustained in an automobile race.

The quotation in the first paragraph concerning the President’s decision about who would fly the next U-2 mission comes from document 11 in Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath (http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/frusXI/01_25.html).

Space did not permit me to discuss in this chapter another under-current to the struggle over who controlled U-2 photo recon over Cuba. Ever since the CIA built and started flying the U-2s, they had effectively snatched the lead in photo recon away from SAC, which thought it owned it. Now SAC had a chance, not only to take the lead in photo recon away from the CIA, but to snatch the CIA’s planes as well and put the CIA right out of photo recon all together.

One of the CIA’s main “issues” after the loss of its planes was inevitable was retaining its important role in photo interpretation. After some haggling, the Air Force agreed to rush the film from each U-2 mission directly to Washington so Dino Brugioni and his colleagues at the National Photographic Interpretation Center could “exploit” it. Each U-2’s “tracker” film, shot solely of the ground the plane flew directly over, was flown to Offutt Air Base near Omaha for exploitation by Air Force analysts.

The initial rationale for using an Air Force pilot on the first post October 9th over-flight: if the U-2 was shot down, claiming that this was a USAF peripheral mission that had been blown off course would be a better cover story than the CIA’s, namely that the pilots were Lockheed employees ferrying a U-2 to Puerto Rico. See Norman Polmar, Spyplane: The U-2 History Declassified. Osceola, WI: MBI Publishing Company, 2001, 186.

The pdf version of the Air Force OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE signal to SAC giving it control of the “Brass Knob” operation is based on a photocopy of a carbon copy of the original signal on p. 33 of the CIA 64-page packet. The carbon was so badly smudged as to make it all but unreadable, even with a magnifying glass. But enough can be made out to make clear the timing of the Air Force’s power grab.