Seoul, South Korea
CNN
—
When a Chinese high-altitude balloon suspected of spying was noticed over the United States just lately, the US Air Force responded by sending up a high-flying espionage asset of its personal: the U-2 reconnaissance jet.
It was the Cold-War period spy airplane that took the high-resolution images – to not point out its pilot’s selfie – that reportedly satisfied Washington the Chinese balloon was gathering intelligence and never, as Beijing continues to insist, learning the climate.
In doing so, the airplane performed a key function in an occasion that despatched tensions between the world’s two largest economies hovering, and shone a world highlight on the strategies the two governments use to maintain tabs on one another.
Until now, most of the media’s focus has been on the balloon – particularly, how a vessel popularly seen as a relic of a bygone period of espionage might presumably stay related in the modern spy’s playbook. Yet to many army historians, it’s the involvement of that different image of a bygone time, the U-2, that’s way more telling.
The U-2 has a protracted and storied historical past with regards to espionage battles between the US and China. In the 1960s and 1970s, at least five of them have been shot down whereas on surveillance missions over China.
Those losses haven’t been as extensively reported as is perhaps anticipated – and for good purpose. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was accountable for all of America’s U-2s at the time the planes have been shot down, has by no means formally defined what they have been doing there.
Adding to the thriller was that the planes have been being flown not by US pilots nor beneath a US flag, however by pilots from Taiwan who, in a hanging parallel to at this time’s balloon saga, claimed to be concerned in a climate analysis initiative.
That the CIA can be tight-lipped over what these American-built spy planes have been doing is hardly shocking.
But the company’s continued silence greater than 50 years later – it didn’t reply to a CNN request for touch upon this text – speaks volumes about simply how delicate the subject was each at the time and stays at this time.
The US authorities has a normal rule of 25 years for computerized declassification of delicate materials. However, one of its often-cited causes for ignoring this rule is in these circumstances the place revealing the data would “cause serious harm to relations between the US and a foreign government, or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the US.”
Contemporary accounts of what the planes have been doing – by the Taiwan pilots who have been shot down, retired US Air Force officers and army historians amongst them – depart little doubt as to why it could have triggered a stir.
The planes – based on accounts by the pilots in a Taiwan-made documentary movie and histories printed on US authorities web sites – had been transferred to Taiwan as half of a top-secret mission to eavesdrop on Communist China’s rising army capabilities, together with its nascent nuclear program, which was receiving assist from the Soviet Union.
The newly developed U-2, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, appeared to supply the excellent vessel. The US had already used it to spy on the Soviet’s home nuclear program as its high-altitude capabilities – it was designed in the 1950s to achieve “a staggering and unprecedented altitude of 70,000 feet,” in the phrases of its developer Lockheed – put it out of the vary of antiaircraft missiles.
Or so the US had thought. In 1960, the Soviets shot down a CIA-operated U-2 and put its pilot Gary Powers on trial. Washington was pressured to desert its cowl story (that Powers had been on a climate reconnaissance mission and had drifted into Soviet airspace after blacking out from oxygen depletion), admit the spy airplane program, and barter for Powers to be returned in a prisoner swap.
“Since America didn’t want to have its own pilots shot down in a U-2 the way Gary Powers had been over the Soviet Union in 1960, which caused a major diplomatic incident, they turned to Taiwan, and Taiwan was all too willing to allow its pilots to be trained and to do a long series of overflights over mainland China,” Chris Pocock, writer of “50 Years of the U-2,” defined in the 2018 documentary movie “Lost Black Cats 35th Squadron.”
Like the U-2, Taiwan – also referred to as the Republic of China (ROC) – appeared an ideal selection for the mission. The self-governing island to the east of the Chinese mainland was at odds with the Communist management in Beijing – because it stays at this time – and at that point in historical past had a mutual protection treaty with Washington.
That treaty has lengthy since lapsed, however Taiwan stays some extent of main tensions between China and the United States, with Chinese chief Xi Jinping vowing to convey it beneath the Communist Party’s management and Washington nonetheless obligated to offer it with the means to defend itself.
Today, the US sells F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan as half of that obligation. In the 1960s, Taiwan bought the US-made U-2s.
The island’s army arrange a squadron that might formally be often called the “Weather Reconnaissance and Research Section.”
But its members – pilots from Taiwan who had been educated in the US to fly U-2s – knew it by a unique identify: the “Black Cats.”
The writer Pocock and Gary Powers Jr., the son of the pilot shot down by the Soviets and the co-founder of the Cold War Museum in Washington, DC, defined the pondering behind the squadron and its mission in the 2018 documentary movie.
The different CIA unit in Taiwan
“The Black Cats program was implemented because the American government needed to find out information over mainland China – what were their strengths and weaknesses, where were their military installations located, where were their submarine bases, what type of aircraft were they developing,” mentioned Powers Jr.
Lloyd Leavitt, a retired US Air Force lieutenant normal, described the mission as “a joint intelligence operation by the United States and the Republic of China.”
“American U-2s were painted with ROC insignia, ROC pilots were under the command of a ROC (Air Force) colonel, overflight missions were planned by Washington, and both countries were recipients of the intelligence gathered over the mainland,” Leavitt wrote in a 2010 private historical past of the Cold War printed by the Air Force Research Institute in Alabama.
One of the first males to fly the U-2 for Taiwan was Mike Hua, who was there when the first of the planes arrived at Taoyuan Air Base in Taiwan in early 1961.
“The cover story was that the ROC (air force) had purchased the aircraft, that bore the (Taiwanese) national insignia. … To avoid being confused with other air force organizations stationed in Taoyuan, the section became the 35th Squadron with the Black Cat as its insignia,” Hua wrote in a 2002 historical past of the unit for the journal Air Force Historical Foundation.
At the Taiwan airbase, Americans labored with the Taiwan pilots, serving to to take care of the plane and course of the data. They have been know as Detachment H, based on Hua.
“All US personnel were ostensibly employees of the Lockheed Aircraft Company,” Hua wrote.
The ROC air drive and US representatives inked an settlement on the operation, giving it the code identify “Razor,” Hua wrote.
He described the intelligence gained by the flights as “tremendous” and mentioned it was shared between Taipei and Washington.
“The missions covered the vast interior of the Chinese mainland, where almost no aerial photographs had ever been taken,” he wrote. “Each mission brought back an aerial photographic map of roughly 100 miles wide by 2,000 miles long, which revealed not only the precise location of a target, but also the activities on the ground.”
Other sensors on the spy planes gathered data on Chinese radar capabilities and extra, he mentioned.
Between January 1962 and May 1974, based on a history on Taiwan’s Defense Ministry’s website, the Black Cats flew 220 reconnaissance missions overlaying “more than 10 million square kilometers over 30 provinces in the Chinese mainland.”
When requested for additional touch upon the Black Cats, the ministry referred CNN to the printed supplies.
“The idea was that black cats go out at night, and the U-2 would usually launch in the darkness. Their cameras were the eyes, and it was very stealthy, quiet, and hard to get. And so combining the two stories, they became known as the Black Cats,” the writer Pocock mentioned in the documentary.
The squadron even had its personal patch, seemingly drawn by one of its members, Lt. Col. Chen Huai-sheng, and impressed by a neighborhood institution frequented by the pilots.
But the Black Cats, like Powers Sr. two years earlier than, have been about to search out out their U-2s weren’t impervious to antiaircraft hearth.
On September 9, 1962, Chen turned the first U-2 pilot to be shot down by a People’s Liberation Army antiaircraft missile. His airplane went down whereas on a mission over Nanchang, China.
See pictures displaying US Navy recovering spy balloon from water
In the following years, three extra Black Cat U-2 pilots have been killed on missions over China as the PLA found out the right way to counter the U-2 missions.
“The mainland Chinese learned from their radars where these flights were going, what their targets were, and they began to build sites for the missiles but move them around,” Pocock mentioned.
“So they would build a site here, occupy that site for a while but if they thought the next flight would be going over here, they would move the missiles. It was a cat-and-mouse game, literally a black cat and mouse game between the routines from the flights from Taiwan and those air defense troops of the (Chinese) mainland, working out where the next flight would go.”
In July 1964, Lt. Col. Lee Nan-ping’s U-2 was shot down by a PLA SA-2 missile over Chenghai, China. According to the Taiwan Defense Ministry he was flying out of a US naval air station in the Philippines and making an attempt to achieve data on China’s provide routes to North Vietnam.
In September 1967, a PLA missile hit the U-2 being flown by Capt. Hwang Rung-pei over Jiaxin, China, and in May 1969, Maj. Chang Hsieh suffered a “flight control failure” over the Yellow Sea whereas reconnoitering the coast of Hebei province, China. No hint of his U-2 was ever discovered, based on Taiwan’s Defense Ministry.
Two different Taiwanese U-2 pilots have been shot down however survived, solely to spend years in Communist captivity.
Maj. Robin Yeh was shot down in November 1963 over Jiujiang, Jiangxi province.
“The plane lost control when the explosion of the missile took out part of the left wing. The plane spiraled down. Lots of shrapnel flew into the plane and hit both of my legs,” Yeh, who died in 2016, recalled in “The Brave in the Upper Air: An Oral History of The Black Cat Squadron” printed by Taiwan’s Defense Ministry.
He mentioned that following his seize Chinese docs eliminated 59 items of shrapnel from his legs, however couldn’t take all of it out.
“It didn’t really affect my daily life, but during winter my legs would hurt, which affected my mobility. I guess this would be my lifelong memory,” Yeh mentioned.
Maj. Jack Chang’s U-2 was hit by a missile over Inner Mongolia in 1965. He, too, suffered dozens of shrapnel accidents and bailed out, touchdown on a snowy panorama.
“It was dark at the time, preventing me from seeking help anyway, so I had to wrap myself up tightly with the parachute to keep myself warm … After ten hours when dawn broke, I saw a village of yurts afar, so I dragged myself and sought help there. I collapsed as soon as I reached a bed,” he recalled in the oral historical past.
Neither Yeh nor Chang, who have been assumed killed in motion, would see Taiwan once more for many years. The pilots have been ultimately launched in 1982 into Hong Kong, which at the time was nonetheless a British colony.
However, the world into which they emerged had modified significantly in the intervening years. The US not had a mutual protection treaty with Taiwan and had formally switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
Though the Cold War US-Taiwan alliance was not, the CIA introduced the two pilots to the US to reside till they have been lastly allowed to return to Taiwan in 1990.
Indeed, by the time of their launch CIA management of the U-2 program had lengthy since ceased. It had turned the planes over to the US Air Force in 1974, according to a US Air Force history.
Two years later, the Air Force’s 99th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron and its U-2s moved into Osan Air Base in South Korea. Commander Lt. Col. David Young gave the location the “Black Cat” moniker.
Today, the unit is called the fifth Reconnaissance Squadron.
But US U-2s proceed to be concerned in what is perhaps characterised as “cat-and-mouse” actions and their actions proceed to make waves sometimes in China. In 2020, Beijing accused the US of sending a U-2 into a no-fly zone to “trespass” on live-fire workout routines being performed by China under.
The US Pacific Air Forces confirmed to CNN at the time that the flight had taken place, however mentioned it didn’t violate any guidelines.
Meanwhile, for these concerned in the authentic Black Cats, there are few regrets – even for many who have been captured.
Yeh informed the documentary makers he had fond recollections of life at 70,000 toes.
“We were literally up in the air. The view we had was also different; we had the bird’s eye view. Everything we saw was vast,” he mentioned.
Chang too felt no bitterness.
“I love flying,” he mentioned. “I didn’t die, so I have no regrets.”