|
 cene:
Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Off-the-record speaker,
Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence.
Background:
Our pilot, Gary Powers, has been shot down
flying a U-2 on
a routine spy mission over the heart of Russia. Premier Khruschev
is having an apoplectic fit and the upcoming summit in Paris (DeGaulle,
Macmillan, Khruschev, Eisenhower) is threatened, the scheduled visit
by Ike to Moscow almost certainly doomed.
Question from
the floor to Director Dulles, who is onstage, smoking a pipe: "The
report during the weekend that the United States would no longer
fly U-2s over Russia is pretty dismaying to those of us who believe
that the sovereign responsibility of the CIA is to bring in data
critical to understanding what's going on in the Soviet Union so
that we can hope to cope with it."
Dulles: "Yes.
Well, er " — puffs on his pipe, the smoke eddies out —
"we'll have to resort to other means to bring in our . . .
data."
Translation:
We had developed the technology of microphotography from satellites
that would give us as intimate a view of Soviet missile development
as we had been getting from our U-2s. They had been flying happily,
insouciantly, at 70,000 feet, which was higher than the range of
Soviet antimissile firepower. But on that critical day, Soviet technology
had caught up. President Eisenhower told the press that our flights
were "a distasteful but vital necessity." And that the
Soviet reaction "to a flight of an unarmed non-military plane
reflects a fetish of secrecy." Even so, not much later, Eisenhower
said that such flights would end, and much of America blushed with
shame.
Ike did not
apologize. Why should you apologize to Moscow for monitoring its
aggressive capabilities? Which capabilities they were forever threatening
us with and which, two years later, they transported to Cuba, to
diminish the exigencies, for their missiles, of transatlantic flight.
Why should
we apologize to the People's Republic of China for collecting such
material as we think is needed to keep pace with their advances
in missile technology?
Answer: We
do not need to apologize. This we should make plain. On the other
hand, it may be that we do not need to resume the EP-3E flights
— on the grounds that, even as in 1960 we developed a sufficient
alternative technology, so in 2001 have we done, avoiding the need
for cheek-by-jowl surveillance of the kind that has got us into
the current mess.
There is, of
course, the critical difference between Gary Powers and our EP-3E
crew in Hainan. Powers was caught and tried by a Soviet court for
crimes against the state. There is no doubt that that was exactly
what Powers was doing: taking unauthorized pictures of secret Soviet
missile development. He had no right to overfly Soviet territory.
The penalty for doing so became whatever the Soviet Union specified
as the appropriate penalty.
In the case
of China, our EP-3E pilot and crew were not overflying China. They
were 50 miles off the coast, and PRC claims that the dribbles of
land south and east of Hainan extend Chinese territoriality to where
our plane was flying are hogwash, to be treated with the same disdain
history authorizes toward such Maoist claims as that retention of
a wedding ring is evidence of bourgeois disaffection, meriting public
execution.
The proposition
that our plane initiated aerial maneuvers that brought down the
peaceful PRC fighter plane is derided by elementary knowledge of
the separate characteristics of our plane and of their plane. To
augment these, we have auxiliary evidence of the Chinese pilot's
all but holding up his middle finger, doing a fico at our
own pilot, which is heady stuff done at about 300 miles per hour.
But our crew
are members of our armed services and undergo the risks of their
profession. The United States must on no account lose sight of the
crew, as we did not lose sight of the crew of the Pueblo
when in 1968 its crew were kept imprisoned by the North Koreans,
or of the diplomatic hostages kept 14 months by the government of
Iran in 1979-1981. The goal of the return of the EP-3E crew should
be high on our agenda, but not highest.
Highest we
place the strategic interests of the United States. And these demand
that the PRC should feel the high cost of reckless behavior. Peking
chose to make a huge public case out of the incident, telling lies
and inflaming public opinion. Perhaps it is time to turn to more
sophisticated means of gathering intelligence, but it is never time
to apologize for looking after the national defense, or to conceal
from the PRC the uses of American resources, on which they so heavily
depend.
|
