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From: wdstarr@athena.mit.edu (William December Starr)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: U-2 shootdown--not a shootdown?
Message-ID: <11244@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 8 Nov 89 04:41:26 GMT
References: <11124@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
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Approved: military@att.att.com



From: wdstarr@athena.mit.edu (William December Starr)


In article <11124@cbnews.ATT.COM>, Michael Tighe said:

> Those really interested in this tale should check books by Gary Powers
> ("Operation Overflight"), Kelly Johnson ("Kelly: More than my share"), and
> another author whose name eludes me at this moment but the title is
> "Mayday".

It's "Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair," by Michael
R. Beschloss (Harper & Row, New York, 1986).  Not a bad book -- it was
invaluable when I had to write a paper on the affair for my American
Presidency class last term -- but of interest more for its view of the
political events than the military or technical details of the U-2
itself or of the shoot-down.  

It does mention that there was a switch in the cockpit that the pilot
of a doomed U-2 was supposed to throw before bailing out.  Allegedly,
the switch would start a seventy-second countdown to the detonation of
a self-destruct charge that would reduce the plane to tinsel, to coin
a phrase (it was Eisenhower's certainty -- based on CIA assurances
based on the self-destruct switch -- that there was no identifiable
wreckage in Russia that led him to screw up the handling of the affair
so badly).

Unfortunately, the CIA pilots to a man believed that the switch would
actually start a *zero*-second countdown, and, despite the fact that
the CIA offered to allow them to watch while the timer mechanism was
installed and set by mechanics of their (the pilots') choice, there
wasn't a one of them, Powers included, who would have thrown that
switch for all the tea in China.  (Powers, incidentally, claimed that
centrifugal force in the spinning fuselage threw him out of the
cockpit after he popped the canopy and unstrapped but before he could
throw the switch.  Belief of this claim was not universal. . .)