The Price of Vigilance: Attacks on American Surveillance Flights. By Larry Tart and Robert Keefe. Ballantine Books, 2001.

Alongside Greenland’s North Star Bay, thick with pack ice, a US bomber taxied up to a 10,000-foot runway. Seconds later, the plane knifed gracefully skyward. It was the spring of 1956 and perhaps the most serious and risky espionage operation ever undertaken by the United States was launched. Despite appearances, the bombers were not carrying nuclear weapons. Instead, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower had authorized a full-scale espionage mission, and the planes flying into Soviet airspace were filled with spy gear.

Nicknamed Project Home Run, the mission was to penetrate virtually the entire northern landmass of the Soviet Union, a bleak, white, 3,500-mile-long crescent of snow-covered permafrost stretching from the Bering Strait near Alaska to Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula in European Russia. For months, nearly 50 of the converted bombers flew back and forth across the border deep into Soviet territory. The single most daring air operation of the Cold War took place on May 6, 1956. On that day, six converted bombers, flying abreast, crossed the North Pole and penetrated Soviet airspace in broad daylight, as if on a nuclear bombing run. Any Soviet radar operator seeing the bombers would have no way of knowing that the mission was an act of espionage and not of war. Despite the enormous risks of igniting a global conflict, Eisenhower had secretly approved the operation.

Details of this extremely dangerous clandestine air war, which lasted more than a decade, are only now beginning to emerge. In all, more than 40 aircraft were downed and 200 US servicemen were killed; their families were told lies about how they died. Most were aboard eavesdropping planes flying along the Soviet border and sometimes crossing it. Their mission was to locate potential entry points for US bombers in the event of war. Air crews on the spy planes would note areas of weak radar coverage and tape-record the telltale electronic beeps from the various radar systems. This intelligence would enable analysts to find ways to jam or evade surveillance. At times, the only way to activate some of the important air-defense radar systems—and thus have the opportunity to record the signals—was to actually penetrate the border.

The Price of Vigilance: Attacks on American Surveillance Flights by Larry Tart and Robert Keefe, both veterans of early Air Force reconnaissance missions, is one of the first books to closely examine these activities.

The centerpiece of the book is the Soviet downing of a C-130 electronic intelligence plane that killed all 17 US servicemen on board. One of the most dramatic and deadly of the Soviet attacks, this incident occurred when the plane accidentally flew into Soviet-occupied Armenia while on a routine eavesdropping mission along the Turkish side of the border. The Soviet Air Force had been tracking the plane and was just waiting for it to “cross the fence.” When it did, fighters easily shot down the lumbering, unarmed craft. Upon hitting the ground the plane burst into flames, killing all on board. At the time, however, it was unclear whether anyone had survived. Behind the scenes, the Eisenhower administration began quietly pressuring the Soviet government to provide details. The Soviets denied that they had shot down the plane. This led to an extraordinary decision by President Eisenhower to release the transcript of the Soviet fighter pilots discussing the shootdown as it was taking place. The voices were secretly intercepted at an National Security Agency listening post in Turkey. “It is going toward the fence,” said one of the fighter pilots as the commander of the C-130, finally realizing his fatal mistake, turned back to the border. “Open fire,” the fighter pilot shouted. “The target is burning.... The tail assembly is falling off the target.”

The strength of The Price of Vigilance is in its level of detail. Using scores of previously classified documents, Tart and Keefe go to great lengths to describe, minute by minute, many of the chilling and deadly attacks; they also outline the origins of the still largely classified Air Force overflight program. Unlike the Central Intelligence Agency’s single-seat U-2 spy plane, a glorified glider flying high above Soviet MIGs and air-defense systems, the Air Force program used heavy, low-flying bombers outfitted with cameras and listening gear rather than bombs. To the average Soviet missile base, the hostile aircraft would appear to be on a bombing run.

As Tart and Keefe note, throughout the late 1940s the Air Force could never get White House permission for dangerous operations. “I am looking forward to the day when it becomes either more essential or less objectionable” to conduct overflight missions, one Air Force intelligence chief is reported to have said at the time. All that changed, however, in 1950. With the start of the Korean War, permission was granted to begin overflying the Soviet Union. Once the war ended, Eisenhower had to decide whether to continue the program. Despite its illegality, say the authors, “from a national security perspective, overflights could alert him to a potential surprise atomic attack. That in itself was worth the political risks, and President Eisenhower chose to continue overflights, but on a mission-by-mission basis.”

The book’s principal weakness, however, is the lack of debate over the wisdom of some of the flights. For example, while briefly describing Operation Home Run and the “massed overflight” of reconnaissance bombers in 1956, the authors never discuss the most critical issue: weighing the value of the intelligence brought back against the very real possibility that the Soviets could easily have mistaken the missions for a nuclear bombing run, thus precipitating World War III.

The authors also avoid the question of whether the secret air war, while valiant in its efforts to produce critical intelligence, may actually have been counterproductive. Former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, wrote that the frequent illegal penetrations of Soviet air space by US heavy bombers convinced many in the Soviet military that the United States was making plans for an eventual attack. After all, what would the Pentagon think if Soviet bombers were constantly flying deep into the United States? This led the Soviet brass to constantly push for expanding the production of Soviet bombers and undertake other war preparations. Seeing this buildup, US intelligence officials were convinced that the Soviet Union was making preparations for war. This led to an endless spiral of increased flights leading to greater Soviet anxiety and more buildup leading to more aggressive espionage missions.