Chapter 17

What There Is In The CIA For Hersh To Trust

What it is capable of, what it does, is conspire in cold-blooded murder.

The Congo, almost half-way around the world from the United States, represented no danger to the United States, no possible danger.

It had been a colony of a European country, Belgium, and it had, after World War II, as had many other countries, particularly in Africa, broken free of colonial ownership.

But it was not free of colonial interest.

Nor was it free politically, to be whatever it wanted to be.

It wanted to have the Congo for the Congolese, and that the colonial power, Belgium, and those who supported it did not want. The opposition was often in Cold War terms, that if a colony earned its freedom it was certain to turn communist. This baseless belief was the excuse for the interventions, like that of the United States, indicated above.

In countries like the Congo, where there were tribes that were traditional enemies, enlisting one against the other was commonplace.

Killing Lumumba was a crime, a capital offense. Being an accessory was also a crime under United States law. Accessory in murder is a serious offense. Under United States law, knowing that there is to be a murder and doing nothing about it is a also a serious offense. All of these were CIA offenses, CIA crimes in any country, not only inside the United States. But as can be seen, the CIA did not regard its crimes as crimes and it was unhidden in them, as Mahoney among others makes clear.

When the record is this clear, that the CIA engages, often openly, in the most serious crimes, not telling the truth is a minor offense in comparison.

Sometimes, however, with the passing of time, the CIA does tell the truth without awareness of what that truth means. With the passing of time those who had the political knowledge of political crimes retire or die and those who replace them lack that knowledge. They, seeing no harm in the truth being told, even as in what follows, seeing a benefit in the truth, tell it or permit it to be told by a retiree who submits his manuscript for the CIA approval required by his CIA employment contract.

The CIA has done much it believes it is entitled to boast about. After the passing of time CIA operations some of that can be told safely, without harm to ongoing CIA operations or sources.

The work of its National Photographic Interpretation Center is what it has been justified in bragging about. That work, at the time of the Cuba missile crisis of 1962, could justly be called what Hollywood used to call "super-spectacular." It was, without question, a large and difficult job done rapidly and superbly well.

This brings us back to Dino Brugioni and his excellent book to which Hersh made that one lone reference in one of his relatively rare footnotes when he used it as the basis for one his endless slurs of Robert Kennedy. Hersh had to read Brugioni's book for his footnote slur. So, he knew the contents of that book and it is both fair and safe to say that if there is in that book what raises or can raise questions about the dependability of the CIA when it was so quintessential, so absolutely necessary a source for him in what he wrote, Hersh had to face that. The honest, responsible writer has the obligation to indicate the possibility of prejudice and of reasons to believe that there can be questions about the dependability, the honesty of his sources.

Sources have been known to lie. As we have seen, some of Hersh's lied. Hiding that from readers may help a book make the best-seller lists but it is not honest writing and honest writers do not hide, lies, use lies, use liars, protect them or copy them.

Two days after finishing the draft (in a different manuscript), of what the CIA can and does get away with and how the major media covers up for it and defends it, for all the world as though the major media is part of it, The Washington Post had almost a half page of an unreported indecency that I'd never believed the CIA, for all its history including of planned if not actual assassinations, would have dreamed of.

It had an exhibit in honor of one of its employees it had intended to get killed as part of its successful effort to manipulate and control United States policy. That he was not killed was a fluke, not the CIA intention.

He was Francis Gary Powers, of the U-2 plane shot down May 1, 1960 about thirteen hundred miles inside the Soviet Union.

Peter Finn's article is headlined, "A Cloak-and Dagger Debut at CIA." The subheading is "Exhibit on U-2 Pilot Gary Powers [sic] Remains Under Wraps for the Time Being."

The illustrations with the story are of "The poison pin that Powers carried in case he was tortured had been dipped in curare," and a photo of Francis Gary Powers, Jr. possibly at the exhibit with the caption, "Gary Powers, Jr. says he began collecting memorabilia about his father five years ago in an effort to learn more about him. His father died in a 1977 helicopter crash in Los Angeles."

The father then flew a chopper to provide radio reports on traffic.

A picture on the front page of that section is of the younger Powers standing in front of the American flag near a larger than life cutout image of his father. Of this the caption states, "Powers, Jr. has mounted an exhibit on his father at CIA headquarters but the public will have to wait for a change of venue to see it."

The CIA, Finn writes, was denying access to it but finally did permit him and a Post photographer "in from the cold to bring back a sneak preview" from "the ultra-exclusive little museum at the Central Intelligence Agency."

What seems strange is what Powers has at that museum exhibit is not CIA property.

After he removes the exhibit from the CIA headquarters he plans to let people see it without restraint. In fact he plans to create a Cold War memorial of which that will be part.

His father was very much part of the Cold War.

What the CIA was up to was ending the beginning of detente in the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War meant the end of most of what the CIA did and was doing and many jobs in it as well as opportunities for promotion.

Of all the incredible days the CIA picked for that Powers overflight of the Soviet Union on which he was to photograph military secrets for about five thousand feet of film, it was the Soviet national day, May Day. The year was 1960. That Powers was shot down created a major international scandal. It resulted in secret hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They were executive sessions, which means almost everyone was excluded and the transcript was secret. It was twenty years before any of that transcript was disclosed and it then was disclosed with heavy censorship eliminating much. As the title pages states, it was "made public in 1982."

As general of the allied armies fighting Hitler, American General, later President Dwight Eisenhower formed a friendly and trusting relationship with the top Soviet commander, Marshall Zukov. When he was President, Eisenhower invited the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to visit the United States. Khrushchev practically took the country by storm. The friendly relationship developed even more into what became known as the "spirit of Camp David," where Eisenhower and Khrushchev had gotten together at the end of Khrushchev's trip and had begun to work on detente. They planned for a summit that summer in Paris. That is what the CIA wrecked by sending Powers and that U-2 over the USSR on that day of days most important to it, a deliberate and humiliating insult.

It broke the summit up when Eisenhower, standing by those under him, in the military tradition, refused to apologize for that blatant, deliberate and most insulting transgression against the Soviet Union, what it could have taken as an act of war.

Khrushchev went to the Paris summit intending to go ahead with it and with detente if Eisenhower apologized. That Eisenhower would not do. So, Khrushchev packed up and went home, ending the beginning of detente, the latter what the CIA intended and succeeded in getting.

The probability is that had the U-2 not been shot down, if Khrushchev had wanted to he could have created a similar incident because United States U-2 planes had been flying over the Soviet Union for four years — violating Soviet air space for four years.

The situation is stated fairly briefly in the beginning of the short preface the Foreign Relations committee added to the transcripts.

While effective foreign policy is the product of long-range planning and carefully crafted diplomacy, the makers of foreign policy need always to expect the unexpected and to be prepared to react immediately to an unanticipated turn of events. For both the Eisenhower administration and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1960 was to have been a year devoted to lessening the tensions of the Cold War, finding means of suspending nuclear testing by the Soviet Union and the United States, reaching a new mutual security accord with Japan, shoring up old alliances with Latin American nations, and building new relations with the emerging nations of Africa and Asia. Instead the focus of the year became the crash of an American U-2 photo-reconnaissance plane. For nearly 4 years the United States had secretly conducted high-altitude flights across Soviet territory, taking photographs of objects as small as 12 inches from a height of 80,000 feet. Equipped with enough film to photograph an area 750 miles wide, each U-2 brought back a staggering amount of information for the Central Intelligence Agency to interpret, and provided invaluable data on Soviet missile launches and military activity. In effect, the U-2 flights permitted the United States to adopt unilaterally President Eisenhower's "Open Skies" proposal, which Soviet leaders had rejected at the 1955 Geneva Summit. Then on May 1, 1960, the Soviets announced that they had shot down a U-2 near Sverdlovsk.

Operating under the assumption that the pilot had died in the crash, American officials offered a pre-arranged cover-story to explain the incident. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) claimed that the U-2 had strayed off course during a routine weather research flight. State Department press officer Lincoln White insisted that there was "absolutely no-NO-deliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace." However, on May 7, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that the pilot was still alive and would stand trial for espionage. The administration was forced to react and repudiate its cover story.

The crash of the U-2 had immediate repercussions on the Paris Summit Conference between the heads of the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, scheduled to begin May 16, Premier Khrushchev refused to participate in the talks unless President Eisenhower apologized for the U-2 flights, ceased all future flights and punished those "directly guilty" for initiating the flights. President Eisenhower rejected this ultimatum saying that the flights had not been aggressive and had already been suspended. He also took personal responsibility for ordering the flights, for which he would not apologize. Khrushchev angrily denounced the United States and walked out of the Summit Conference. With his stormy departure came an end to the "Spirit of Camp David," the early thaw in the Cold War that had followed Khrushchev's visit to the United States the year before.

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had been closely following the events at the Geneva Test Ban negotiations and the preparations for the Paris Summit. Immediately following the Summit's collapse, the committee held closed hearings with Secretary of State Christian Herter, CIA Director Allen Dulles, Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates and NASA Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden to unravel the convoluted facts surrounding the U-2 crash and to assess the administration's response. So deeply did the incident divide committee members that it took seven difficult mark-up sessions to prepare the final report on the Summit fiasco. Never before during the 8 years of the Eisenhower administration had the committee's bipartisan approach to foreign policy been so shaken. These closed-door debates, often angry and accusatory, are included in full in this volume.(pp 111-16).

The committee itself states in its second sentence that detente had begun.

The CIA ended that, brutally but effectively.

John Kennedy returned to detente and had begun it. His assassination ended that restarting of the detente the CIA had ended with that Powers U-2 flight.

Then CIA director Allen W. Dulles was a committee witness. He had perfected lying, did it openly, brazenly, uninhibitedly and effectively. But as he admitted (page 282), the USSR knew all about those flights over its territory.

As he unloaded on the committee, what was important, what made that flight essential, was weather. We had to get good accounts of the weather! That alone was enough to end detente!

He also told the committee that "On the afternoon of April 30," the day before the USSR's national day, like the Fourth of July here, "After carefully considering the field reports on the weather and other determining factors affecting the flight then contemplated, General Cabell [his deputy] and other qualified observers in the agency and acting within the existing authority to make the flight at that time, I personally gave the orders to proceed with the flight of May 1" (page 283).

A month after the Soviets had told the world the truth, after it had the press of the world see that it had Powers a prisoner, alive and well, Dulles was still lying his head off to Congress:

The question, of course, arises as to what actually happened to cause this aircraft to come down deep in the heart of Russia. Let me remind you first that the returns are not yet all in, so our picture is not complete. However, we do have a considerable body of evidence that permits a reasonable judgment with a high degree of competence.

Our best judgment is that it did not happen as claimed by the Soviets; that is, we believe that it was not shot down at its operating altitude of around 70,000 feet by the Russians. We believe that it was initially forced down to a much lower altitude by some as yet undetermined mechanical malfunction. At this lower altitude, it was a sitting duck for Soviet defense, whether fighter aircraft or ground-to-air fire or missiles. As to what happened at the lower altitude, we are not sure. The pilot may have bailed out at any time or he may have crash landed (page 287).

I do not say he lied his head off to be shocking, or sensational or to insult him or anything like that. It is the plain and simple truth, as we see from a CIA source whose words had to have and did have official CIA approval. Without that Dino A. Brugioni could not have gone public. And he is the best of authorities.

Dulles' testimony is a lie in all particulars, as in saying the "Our best judgment is that it did not happen as claimed . . ." It also is a deliberate lie to say the Soviets could not shoot the plane down at 70,000 feet, that only at a lower elevation the plane was "a sitting duck" (page 287).

When Dulles says, a month after the wreckage of that U-2 was put on display (Son Francis Gary Powers Junior has a piece of it.) was from "a pile of junk," the Soviets did have that U-2, or what remained of it, and the pilot, alive.

William Fulbright, the chairman perceived that responsibility for that flight would be taken on a higher level, by the President (page 293), which was the case, Dulles said that if he had said he'd proceed on his own which he already testified he did, it "might not have been widely believed" (page 293).

Dulles then referred to "several instances of planes having strayed [sic] over Soviet territory which have been shot down" (page 296). "Several" is a large understatement, according to the "Special Investigative Report" in U.S. News and World Report of March 15, 1993. As its cover states in, "America's Top Secret Spy War in the '50s and '60s, the U.S. lost more than 150 airmen in missions against the Soviet Union. The truth never came out. Until now."

At the beginning of the afternoon session Vermont's Senator George Aiken asked Dulles, "How long before May 1 did you give that order?"

"The afternoon of April 30," Dulles responded. He added that "the flight had been planned for several days, and it was ready to go as soon as weather conditions permitted" (page 313).

Asked further about this, asked, although the words were not used, why in the world did you wreck the summit and detente, this was that exchange, the question coming from Ohio's Senator Frank Lausche:

Just one question: Knowing that the summit conference was to begin May 16 and recognizing its significance, did you, prior to issuing the order for the May flight, consider the possible adverse impact on the conference?

Mr. Dulles: All matters were considered, but I considered that my job, as the intelligence gatherer, was to carry out these flights within any permitted times (page 325).

Or, anything at all was much more important that the summit, than detente.

There is more but there is no need for more.

Peace was the CIA's enemy, peace, detente, the beginning of the end of the Cold War and what that meant or reduced usefulness of the CIA. So, peace was shot down.

It was not shot down over the Soviet Union.

It was shot down in Washington — by the CIA.

Now for the official proof referred to above.

Dino A. Brugioni was, as he says, on the inside of all of this at the CIA. After he retired he wrote a book on some of the more dramatic events of which he was apart. That book required and received the CIA's approval. This is part of the employment contract with each CIA employee. His book is titled, Eyeball to Eyeball. It has the subtitle, The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The title comes from what the Secretary of State Dean Rusk said when the Soviets agreed to the Kennedy proposal for settling that crisis, that the Soviet missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba and in return, the United States would protect Cuba from any invasion.

The book was published by Random House in 1990 and 1991. The first words in it are:

I was one of the original cadre of twelve people who, under the direction of Arthur C. Lundahl, organized the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in the mid to late 1950s. During the Cuban missile crisis, because of the current information the interpretation of reconnaissance photography was provoking, the center became the focal point of many related and diverse activities. I was the chief of a unit responsible for providing all-source collateral information to the photo interpreters as well as managing collation and processing of intelligence data derived from the exploitation of photography acquired by various national-level aerial reconnaissance programs.

What he says about his responsibilities during the Cuba missile crisis is not necessary to establish his authenticity, his coming from being on the inside at the CIA and his involvement in the matters of which he writes and published after the CIA review and approval.

With regard to the Soviet Union, Brugioni writes that the Soviets finally decided they had to do something about the overflights:

U-2 flights continued over the Soviet Union, and the information obtained continued to enhance national estimates that the United States had achieved a superior strategic position. Reports to Congress and statements by administration officials started to reflect that strategic strength. During the same period, Soviet military policy underwent far-reaching appraisals and innovations, culminating in a newly created Strategic Rocket Forces, and expanded Air Defense Force, and an expanded subsurface navy. On January 14, 1960, Khrushchev addressed the Supreme Soviet, and while he painted a rosy picture of the Soviets versus the United States in economic maters, he made note of the widening strategic gap between the U.S. and the Soviet Union" "Realization that the international situation had changed, that a basic shift had taken place in the balance of power between socialist and capitalist states, is increasingly spreading in the Western countries. Numerous statements by government and business leaders are devoted to this subject (pages 42-3).

What follows, nothing omitted in quotation here, is more than enough to end all the many myths invented by those who would commercialize and exploit the assassination of President Kennedy or those who present what they imagine is fact and isn't. One of these lingering myths was exploited by Curt Gentry, the ghost writer of the book that bears Francis Gary Powers' name. Gentry phoned me from his San Francisco home. My notes on that September 1, 1969 phone call report his intention of saying that "Oswald was sent to the Soviet Union to help bring a U-2 down." I thought I'd persuaded him that this was not true but probably the large number of books that invention could sell meant more to Gentry than the truth because he did say it in the book. In fact it was leaked in advance to stir up interest. Leaked by the publisher, from New York, this fabrication was published coast-to-coast. According to what Gentry made up it was "information supplied by Oswald" that made it possible "for the Russians to shoot down" Powers and his U-2. In one of many versions I have this fiction got fourteen column inches of space under the heading that proclaimed "Oswald Role in U-2."

There was not a thing Oswald knew or could have known that the Soviets needed. When he was stationed in Japan he had no knowledge of what the U-2s were doing the width of the Asian continent away. Besides which the Soviets did not need anything they did not have, as Brugioni makes clear, nothing here omitted in quotation:

The expanded Soviet air defense was noted in the deployment of surface- to-air missile sites. The first Soviet surface-to-air, missile, SA-1 (Guild), was deployed only around Moscow and fixed installations. Because of the threat posed by B-47 and B-52 bombers and reconnaissance missions by the U-2, the Soviets subsequently developed a more sophisticated mobile surface-to-air system, designated SA-2 (Guideline). Guideline missiles employed in the SA-2 system were first observed in the November 7, 1957, Moscow parade; operational deployment of the system began in 1958. Obviously, the state-of-the-art SA-2 system was such that it had the capability of downing a U-2. This deployment was disturbing to those of us who were involved in U-2 flight planning (page 43).

What this says is that long before that Powers flight the CIA was well aware of the fact that the Soviets had developed a mobile missile that could shoot a U-2 down, as high as it soared. Not only had the Soviets developed it, they even flaunted it for all to see at the annual 1957 military parade in Moscow, an event always covered on TV and carefully covered by the intelligence services of the rest of the world. That it was flaunted can be taken as that having been intended as a warning so that those flights would end and the world could turn toward detente.

Brugioni states what should have been obvious, that once the CIA got this knowledge of the new Soviet capability of shooting U-2s down it worried those who like Brugioni, were involved in the U-2 flight planning.

In plainer English, the CIA knew the Soviets could shoot the U-2s down and given the opportunity and desire, would do that.

Moreover, the CIA also knew where those advanced missiles that could shoot those U-2s down were both mobile and being deployed:

By 1959, SA-2 missile sites were not only being deployed around the principal Soviet cities but also at strategic industrial installations deep in the Urals and Siberia coincident with our intelligence interests and objectives. Flight tracks were adjusted so that the U-2 would come no closer than twenty-five miles to such a site (page 43).

However, with Powers this was not done. His planned route, over much of the Soviet Union after he left Peshawar, Pakistan, on his way from what amounts to the Indian Ocean to the Arctic, to Norway, he flew over many of the most important Soviet defense installations, including for its intercontinental missiles. It is necessary to read what Brugioni here says with care and again, to recall that publishing it had CIA review and approval:

On May 1, 1960, just fifteen days before a scheduled four-power summit conference was to convene in Paris, Gary Power's U-2 airplane was brought down by an indirect hit from a near-miss SA-2 missile near Sverdlovsk, in the USSR. Powers would later relate that there was an explosion behind him, followed by a brilliant orange light, while he was flying at an altitude of about 70,000 feet. Almost immediately, the nose of the aircraft pitched into a steep dive and Powers began procedures to escape the doomed U-2. Powers' flight had begun at Peshawar, Pakistan, passed over Stalinabad, the Tyura Tam Missile Test Center, the nuclear plants in the Urals, and was to proceed to the ICBM missile base under construction at Yurya, the missile test center at Plesetsk, the submarine shipyard at Severodvinsk, the naval bases at Murmansk, and then on to Bodo, Norway (page 43).

What this says is not that Powers was guided away from where the CIA knew those advanced missiles that could shoot him down were deployed. It says that his flight took him over a series of those missile deployments! Brugioni has already written that the CIA was worried about those advanced missiles and those U-2s getting shot down so "flight tracks were adjusted so that U-2 would come no closer than twenty-five miles to such a site." Rather was Powers flown into nests of those awaiting missiles, over a series of strategic places known to be defended by them. Look again at what Brugioni wrote Powers was routed to pass "over." The CIA deliberately routed him to those nests of "Guideline" missiles it knew could shoot him down!

But, Powers was lucky. His plane did not take a direct hit. It was wrecked by a near miss. He was hurt and he was able to get out of the plane as it fell. His parachute opened when it was supposed to and he was saved.

The Soviets did not announce any of this and the United States began a series of poorly- crafted lies that even when Dulles was before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a month later he was still repeating.

As Brugioni's account continues:

(Khrushchev was on the reviewing stand for the May Day parade when Marshall Biryuzov, head of the Soviet defense force, came up to the stand and whispered to Khrushchev that a U-2 had been downed in the Urals.) Four days later, Khrushchev, in a long speech before the Supreme Soviet, announced than an American plane flew into Soviet territory and was shot down. (In 1990, Red Star, the Soviet army newspaper, revealed there was some confusion among ground- control and air-defense forces at the time. They believed the missile exploded behind Power's U-2 had missed its target and fired a second missile. That missile struck a Mig-19 tracking the U-2, killing the pilot.) (page 44).

That the Soviets then shot down one of their own planes is confirmed by an Associated Press story published April 30, 1990. It quotes the Soviet army newspaper, Red Star.

The United States believed Powers was lost, killed in the explosion or the fall of some seventy thousand feet. Beside which he carried poison and had he survived he was to have killed himself with a prick from the curare needle referred to above on display with other Powers memorabilia a the secret CIA museum nobody can get into.

As American lies continued they made the bad situation worse. That was not unwelcome to the CIA that intended to end detente at its beginning:

On the day of Khrushchev's announcement, a State Department spokesman told the press that the department had been informed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that "An unarmed plane, a U-2 weather research plane based at Adana, Turkey, piloted by a civilian, had been missing since May 1. It is entirely possible that having a failure in oxygen equipment, which would result in the pilot losing consciousness, the plane continued on automatic pilot for a considerable distance and accidentally violated Soviet airspace." We at the Center had not been informed beforehand of the cover story, and when the State Department announcement was made, Lundahl shook his head. It could be embarrassing, since Power's U-2 was well into the mission and about half of the 5,000 feet of film had been exposed. Since the film was wound tight and safety-based, it therefore would be extremely difficult to ignite. Lundahl notified the CIA headquarters that even in a crash, he was sure the Soviets would have recovered some of the exposed film (page 44).

Eisenhower had been assured by the CIA that Powers had been killed and he had announced that. As Brugioni points out, the lying was entirely unprofessional and it worried him and others at the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC).

It was a stupid lie to pretend that by accident that U-2 had flown a thousand and three hundred miles into Soviet Union without radio contact being made to warn it and have it return to its supposedly proper flying. It makes no sense that a weather plane would be without contact for all that time and great distance.

Then of course, all that film that Powers had exposed, hundreds and hundreds of feet of secret Soviet installations that would not be destroyed in any crash. It was proof that Powers' was a spying flight in a spy, not a weather, plane.

Brugioni does claim minor successes for the CIA but they really meant nothing and amounted to nothing other than when they enticed the United States into more lying:

I was put in charge of a damage-control unit established at the Center to receive and evaluate all the press reports and photographs that the Russians were issuing. One such photo depicted Khrushchev holding an aerial photo purportedly from the downed U-2. Lou Franceschini and I examined the photo. It had the unique 9 x 18 inch format of the B camera used in the U-2, and when it was examined under the high-power optics we could authenticate the clock imprint in one corner. Although the Russians had printed the photo backward, there was no doubt they now had positive proof that Powers was on a reconnaissance mission and was not merely flying a weather mission and off-course, as the State Department maintained. Lundahl again notified headquarters of our findings (pages 44-5).

The Russians then did a foolish thing. They released a photograph purportedly of the crashed U-2. When I viewed the photograph, I knew it wasn't the U-2 because the U-2 is flush riveted and I could clearly see several rows of prominent rivets on the plane in question. Lundahl called that information to headquarters. The Soviet photo was forwarded to Kelly Johnson, who held a press conference describing in detail why the plane in the photo was not a U-2 but probably a Russian IL-28 (page 45).

"Foolish" like a fox as the Soviets enticed the United States into even more lies to embarrass it all around the world:

On May 6, a State Department spokesman again denied that any American plane had deliberately violated Soviet airspace and said it would be "monstrous" to claim that the U.S. was trying to fool the world about the real purpose of Power's flight. But the U.S. had fallen into Khrushchev's carefully laid trap. On May 7, Khrushchev again spoke to the Supreme Soviet: "Comrades, I must tell you a secret. When I was making my report I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and in good health and that we have got parts of the plane. We did so deliberately because had we told everything at once, the Americans would have invented another version." Khrushchev demanded an immediate apology from President Eisenhower, which was not forthcoming. Eisenhower instead said that although activities such as the U-2 flight over Russia were distasteful, they were "a vital necessity in the world that is today." The downing of the U-2 cast some doubt as to whether the scheduled four-power meeting in Paris between the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France would be held (page 45).

It was not the downing of that U-2 which "cast doubt on whether the scheduled" summit would be held. It was Eisenhower's standing by his spooks who had deliberately created the situation in which he found himself, of saying that what could have been taken as an act of war was right and proper for him and for the United States, that it was for him and for the United States "a vital necessity" but would be wrong for the Soviet Union and for all other countries.

It did kill detente at what would have been its birth. It did set off a massive and bankrupting arms race that bankrupted both countries and led to one losing much of its industrial preeminence — to our importing what we had always exported to the rest of the world and with that exporting money and escalating the national debt to where it now is.

And it did save the CIA from at the least a major downsizing, with the loss of as many lifetime jobs in it, the loss of enjoyed political careers and the social benefits from them and from having all those secrets that in the last analysis really meant nothing at all.

What the CIA reviewed and approved for Brugioni to publish leaves it without any real question at all: the CIA sent Powers to be killed and with his being killed to kill detente as what would have been its birth.

There is and there can be no question about it, the CIA knew all about those advanced Soviet Guideline missiles and that they had the capability of shooting the U-2s down — had been designed for that purpose.

There is and there can be no question about it, the CIA knew that they were not only being deployed around the principal Soviet cities but also at strategic military and industrial installations "deep in the Urals and Siberia." So the CIA had Powers begin where he had to go over those parts of Siberia and Urals, in Pakistan rather than as what had been his base, at Adana, Turkey. Doing that he would have to fly over what to the Soviets were some of its most "strategic installations," including its intercontinental missile center and base, and then to do the same inside Russia, which is where he was shot down, after thousand and three hundred miles of flying over and photographing those "strategic installations."

What the CIA could not figure on is that Powers would survive being shot from seventy thousand feet up. It therefore could and did lie its head off and get the President to join in the lies that all involved federal agencies also told, new ones made up as soon as those told were proven to be lies.

Especially with all that film he had been instructed to expose, there was no possibility of any real question, he had been spying, not on a weather flight, and his plane was not a weather plane but was a CIA spy plane.

The embarrassment from all of this was not the CIA's. It had and achieved its objective and the lies were told by others.

The CIA had ended detente up before it could be started and saved itself as well as the Cold War that was its main reason for existing after Hitler and Tojo were defeated.

To do this it had sent Powers to what it believed would be his death, the certain death Dulles assured Eisenhower poor Powers had suffered.

When it could, as it did, send an innocent man who trusted it and was loyal to it — who risked his life regularly for it — to what it believed would be his certain death so that it could obtain an improper political objective, is it not obvious that the CIA would be capable of doing that with others, getting them killed to attain the same or similar objectives to be able to and actually control national policy?

That was the reason President Kennedy was killed, to control national policy and end the changes in its direction he had already begun with the solution of the 1962 Cuba Missile crisis, the direction of the change he enunciated, especially at his June of 1962 speech at the American University in Washington, his one-world speech.

And, as we have seen, the CIA had a record of doing what it regarded as necessary to prevent policy changes not to its liking — to control policy, the national policy that under our constitution the President sets.

With the different President from that assassination, a different policy than the one Kennedy had announced was set.

With all of history since then changed by it.

The benefit was to the CIA alone — to those who did not want the peace policy Kennedy had stated was his.

It is not likely that those doing the reviewing of the Brugioni book manuscript had Powers and his flight in mind. If they had what we have quoted from Brugioni's approved manuscript, it would not have been approved by the CIA's censors.

However, the obvious, and as we have seen it is very obvious, was not picked up by the major media.

Hersh says he writes history. That is what Hitler and Stalin said about what they wrote. Hersh wrote history as they wrote history.