THE COLD WAR: Nikita & the RB-47

Nikita & the RB-47

Once the nations of the world were fortresses lying snugly behind their three-mile limits, a tradition established 250 years ago, when three miles was the span of a cannon’s shot. In the modern world of atoms, rockets, and planes swifter than sound, the wall of the fortress is invisible. The wall is electronic—an outthrust barrier of radars, direction-seeking radios and — aiming instruments. For both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, it has become vital to spot and plot the ever-shifting shadows and strengths of the adversary’s invisible frontier.

Amid deepest secrecy, U.S. and Allied planes and ships have long prowled the air and sea approaches to the Soviet fortress. Such so-called “ferret” fights probe the Russian radar fences in the Pacific, in the Middle East and in the Arctic north. The Russians, for their part, send a weekly fight of radar-snooping planes along Japan’s northeast coasts with such unfailing regularity that it is known as the “Tokyo Express.” Three months ago, the Soviet trawler Vega made a much-photographed nuisance of herself oT the U.S. Atlantic Coast—taking bearings on U.S. coastal radars, barging boldly into the midst of fleet and Air Force maneuvers. On one occasion, in a practice session off Long Island, the U.S. nuclear sub George Washington fired a dummy Polaris, and a Navy tug churned over to recover the missile. Before it got there, the Vega steamed over the horizon, headed straight for the floating missile.

Last Call. But the ferret flight that left from the U.S. base in the English town of Brize Norton on July 1 was destined to become a brief but acrimonious international incident. The plane was an RB-47, the reconnaissance version of the Air Force’s workhorse medium jet bomber. It was scheduled to fly the routine ferret run off the Soviet Arctic coast, a triangular course (see map) around the Barents Sea plotted to keep the ferret plane at least 75 miles away from Soviet territory. At 3:03 p.m., upon reaching the appointed spot about 300 miles northeast of Norway’s North Cape, the RB-47 signaled the start of its triangular patrol. It was the ferret’s last call. After waiting overnight, the U.S. Air Force announced that the plane was missing and organized a search.

The searchers were wasting their time. Somewhere along the run, a Soviet fighter had intercepted the plane and shot it down. For the Russians, the kill presented no problem. It was broad daylight. The weather was clear. The plane presumably was flying at its assigned altitude of 12,000 ft., within easy reach of the most obsolete fighter, and on the course other U.S. ferret planes had regularly flown before. But the Russians must have planned carefully. U.S. monitors listening in on Soviet command channels heard no messages transmitted between Russian bases and the plane.

With Khrushchev away touring Austria, First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and his lieutenants in the Kremlin dithered for ten days over what to do about the downed RB-47-For reasons best known to themselves, they said nothing. In fact, they sent a cruiser out to play a grisly farce of helping the U.S. and Norwegian air forces look for the survivors.

Then Khrushchev returned and fired off an abrupt note informing the U.S. that a Soviet fighter plane had shot down the RB-47 near the Kola Peninsula, committing “a gross violation of the Soviet Union’s frontier.” A Soviet vessel, the note said, had rescued two of the six airmen, and the Soviet government was holding them for “trial under the full rigor of Soviet law.”

The U.S. replied with a bristling note rejecting as a “willful misinterpretation and misstatement of fact” Khrushchev’s assertion that the U.S. plane had been shot down inside Soviet airspace. “At no time was the plane closer to Soviet land territory than about 30 miles,” said the U.S. But Nikita Khrushchev did not wait for any facts. He called a press conference. Some 300 correspondents, photographers and TV and newsreel cameramen jammed the Kremlin’s newly air-conditioned Sverdlov Hall for the show. But this time Khrushchev’s spy-plane story did not stand up.

Busted Penny. Almost as if his heart were not quite in it, Nikita monotoned through his prepared statement about the RB-47. “This new act of American perfidy shows that the assurances of President Eisenhower in Paris last May on the discontinuation of spy flights over the Soviet Union are not worth a busted penny.” He stressed that this time “the intrusion” had been cut short “in the very beginning” —a point obviously intended to register among Soviet citizens who have been wondering why their vaunted armed forces let the U-2 fly 1,400 miles into the Russian heartland before downing it last May. But Khrushchev was unwilling to give details of the RB-47’s course. He was extremely evasive about whether the U.S. flyers admitted making a “spy flight.” Most unconvincing of all was his explanation of why Russia had for days gone through the motions of searching for the missing plane. “We trapped them on May 1, we wanted to trap them again on July 1—and to a degree we succeeded.” Whose Right? Nikita was obviously intent on belaboring the West. But he acted like a man who wished he had a better club. When someone asked him about Cuba, he seized on the question with obvious relief. “The U.S. President said the U.S. would not let” Communism take over the country, he roared. “Will not let? Who gave it such a right? What right has the U.S. to dispose of the destinies of other countries and other peoples?” Thundered Khrushchev: “We consider that the Monroe Doctrine has outlived its time, has outlived itself, has died, so to say, a natural death. Now the remains of the doctrine should be buried as every dead body is buried, so that it should not poison the air by its decay.”

Next, Khrushchev’s rhetorical indignation was trained on the Congo. “It is not only Belgium, it is NATO,” he shouted, “that is dispatching troops to suppress the people of the Congo by force, on the pretext of alleged disorder. This is an attempt to reduce them to colonial status again.”

Easy Kill. Nikita’s shouts about Cuba proved a real boomerang, helping to line up almost all of Latin America against Castro (see HEMISPHERE). And no one took his bombast about the Congo very seriously. Kremlinologists were most fascinated by his preposterous explanation of the ten-day delay in announcing the downing of the RB-47. They suspect that the armed services, still smarting from the disclosure that for years the U-2 had ranged freely across their skies, had taken matters into their own hands, and during Khrushchev’s absence in Austria, intercepted and shot down the RB-47 on the Arctic milk run as proof that the Russian defense system could at least do something. Tempted to hush up the whole affair because of the flaws in the military’s account, Mikoyan & Co. temporized. Only on his return did a fairly disgruntled Khrushchev, by this account, decide that the only thing was to avow the deed and try to forestall troublesome questioning from the U.S. by brazening the whole business out as another spy-plane case.

Picking Holes. But with the memory still fresh of the U.S.’s admission that it had been caught in a lie over the U2, Khrushchev’s crude improvisations struck some international sparks. “Another U-2 incident,” shrilled the London Daily Mail. The British House of Commons gave Prime Minister Macmillan a bad half-hour because the flight had originated in Britain, and a Tory backbencher asked Macmillan to tell President Eisenhower that “one of the great anxieties” in Britain is that “the military machine” in the U.S. will “become the dictator of political policy.” Macmillan, well aware that specially equipped Canberras had been flying comparable missions for years, soothingly promised to consult with the President. Next day, Washington sent assurances that fuller information about every U.S. flight would henceforth be available to the British government.

Soon British second-thought editorialists were picking holes in Khrushchev’s story, and even in Moscow, citizens were asking whether it was credible that the Americans could be such fools as to send a plane with a six-man crew on what by Khrushchev’s own account could only be a suicide mission. The Kremlin’s campaign of officially sponsored mass meetings and resolutions utterly failed to rouse anything like the popular Russian indignation stirred up by the U-2 affair. And when Khrushchev duly sent a demand for a U.N. Security Council meeting to consider this “new aggressive action by U.S. military aircraft,” Press Secretary Jim Hagerty confidently promised to produce evidence (perhaps from long-range radar tracking) that the RB-47 had been well within international waters.