On January 10, 1956, nine translucent, polyethylene balloons billowed up from the ground and climbed away from the American bases at Incirlik, Turkey (8 launches) and Giebelstadt, Germany (1 launch), initiating an ill-fated attempt to obtain intelligence on USSR using unmanned, free-flying balloons. Projects with names like Moby Dick, Grayback, Genetrix, and WS-461L inaugurated the polyethylene balloon technology recently used in the first manned circumnavigation of the globe (unmanned WS-461L balloons were routinely circumnavigating the globe in the late 1950s) and, in all likelihood, sparked the UFO craze that has given rise to conspiracy theories and television series worldwide. But they seem to have produced little in the way of useful intelligence, at least compared to the political and diplomatic damage they did. And, fatefully, they spurred the Soviet Union to pour resources into a high-altitude air-defense system that would eventually claim Francis Gary Powers, the overflight programs, and whatever chance there was for an early, negotiated resolution of the Cold War.
The Genetrix program took its impetus from what has arguably been America's greatest intelligence weakness, a tendency to see every real or potential enemy as a more powerful and still more capable version of itself. The United States ended World War 2 as the largest and most productive economy in the world. It had the world's most powerful navy and air force and the demonstrated ability to overwhelm even technically superior enemies with vast quantities of more reliable, better-made equipment. Most importantly, it had nuclear weapons and an enormous lead in the science and technology needed to produce and deliver them. Yet America was afraid, certain that it was out-gunned and out-numbered by a moribund socialist state that had suffered the highest human and material losses of any of the combatant powers. However good America's bombers, submarines, carriers, rockets, and tanks might be, Americans always believed that the Soviets' had something better and more numerous.
As we now know, the much-vaunted military superiority of the Soviet Union in the 1950s and early 1960s was an enormous bluff. The "bomber gap," the "missile gap," and the supposed hordes of tanks that exercised the imaginations of apprehensive Western defense planners were largely or entirely nonexistent. But, in the 1940s and 1950s, the United States had no way of knowing this for sure. The Soviet Union was, as Churchill put it, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Military attaches, trade delegations, commercial and cultural secretaries, tourists, visiting scholars, even foreign Communists were kept on a very short leash when behind the Iron Curtain and barred from seeing much of the country. To a society that is open to a fault (one remembers President Johnson exhibiting his surgical scars to all and sundry and doctors giving a detailed description of the state of Reagan's colon in the interest of forthrightness and completeness), the Soviet attitude was downright threatening. America felt that it had to see what the Russians were hiding in there and that it had a right to see, as a matter of self defense.
The Russians saw things very differently, of course. The Soviets saw themselves as the peaceable victims of unending Western aggression. The West kept the workers' paradise poor and defenseless through an unending campaign of sabotage, subversion, economic blockade, and open warfare, from the Intervention of 1919 through the Anti-Comintern Pact and the all-too-recent German invasion. By 1945, the Soviet Union was determined to put an end to this threat once and for all, by establishing a strong defense rooted in a sound, socialist economy. To achieve this, it desperately needed a breathing space, a chance to recover from the horrific losses of the war years unhndered by Western harassment. Yet such a breathing space could had only if Western aggression were deterred for a while. How do you deter an aggressor when you re, in reality, all but powerless? You bluff.
Bluffs were the USSR's only viable deterrent in the immediate post-war years. To maintain them, it would go to almost any lengths. To keep the actual state of its military and industry secret, the Soviet Union closed its borders, restricted the movements of foreign visitors, and kept its own citizens from traveling (and talking) abroad. It maintained an aggressive and capable counterintelligence service. Above all, it did everything possible to prevent overflights of its national territory.
The Genetrix and WS-461L missions thus put the US and the USSR at loggerheads for reasons neither side really understood. The US felt threatened by Soviet secrecy and entitled to respond to the perceived threat. The USSR saw secrecy as its only effective, defensive weapon and Western calls for greater openness (from requests for cultural exchanges to Eisenhower's "Open Skies" proposals) as attempts at disarming it. Such considerations explain the enormous effort, expense, and energy that the United States and the Soviet Union expended on the balloon program.
As many cover stories would emphasize, the balloon reconnaissance program began with a series of stratospheric research and meteorologic data-collection programs in the 1930s. These small aerostats, 12- to 16-foot diameter, showed that free-flying balloons could fly predictable courses over long ranges at considerable altitudes, while carrying useful payloads.
During the Second World War, Britain and Japan extended the pre-war work to produce long-range, offensive weapons. Japan's Fu-Go program launched about 9,300, 33 ft-diameter, paper balloons against the US from bases in Japan between Novembe 1944 abd the end of the war. Each carried four 5-kg incendiary bombs and one 15-kg fragmentation bomb or or 12-kg thermite incendiary bomb. The Japanese balloons tied down some USAAF abd USN fighters, but achieved little of note otherwise. One killed a woman and five children in Oregon. But Fu-Go did show that a simple control system could allow a balloon to ly over intercontinental distances at a consistent height. Britain's Outward program was rather more successful, from a military point of view. Outward targeted the Nazi power grid, an objective peculiarly vulnerable to balloon attack. Britain launched 99,142 balloons, 53,543 loaded with incendiaries and 45,599 trailing a long, thin, copper wire. On July 12, 1942, one of the latter short-circuited a 110,000-volt line near Leipzig and paid for the entire program. Overload protection at the Bohlen power plant could not respond rapidly enough to a short of such magnitude. A generator oversped, caught fire, and destroyed the plant, along with its irreplaceable generators.
In the post-war period, strong, light-weight, polyethylene plastic allowed much larger, higher flying balloons. At first these were used primarily for high-altitude research, under the US Air Force's Project Skyhook. But the growing secretiveness of the USSR and escalating international tensions soon made their intelligence-gathering potential of primary concern. By the time that the USSR rejected Eisenhower's Open Skies proposal at Geneva in 1955, balloon reconnaissance had a priority level equal with the development of the hydrogen bomb. This cast a mantle of secrecy over the balloon programs that was soon to give rise to an entire UFO subculture.
After a series of test and development flights had been performed, under the codenames Grandson and Grayback, the first operational flights, codenamed Genetrix, were undertaken shortly after the New Year, 1956. The Genetrix balloons were far larger than any weather balloon and larger than anything tried during the war. Each was 100 feet (30 m) in diameter or more, at altitude. While the silvery plastic envelope made the craft highly visible in good weather, it also made them hard to track with radar. At their planned cruising altitude of 72,000 ft (22,153 m), they would be essentially invulnerable to Soviet defenses. Operational balloons would be launched from bases in Turkey and Germany, as well as from USN aircraft carriers and would be able to fly for 5 to 7 days, more than enough time to transit the Soviet Union. When they returned to friendly airspace, a coded radio signal would cut the gondola loose, to descend by parachute. A specially modified C-119F transport plane would then snag the payload at 20,000 feet and reel it in until handlers could wrestle it into the cargo hold of the aircraft.
Unfortunately, much did not go according to plan. For reasons that have never been explained, the USAF restricted the operational ceiling of Genetrix balloons to 55,000 ft (16,925 m) rather than the 72,000 ft (22,153 m) planned. This brought the craft down to a height where Soviet defenses could engage them. Since they attained their maximum ceiling only at midday and descended in the afternoon, as they began to cool, they flew lower still for several hours during daylight. By planning their fighter attacks for dawn and late afternoon, the Soviets were able to intercept them relatively easily. The ill-considered addition of a metal "recovery pole" (to facilitate retrieval of gondolas that fell into the sea) greatly increased the radar cross-section of the balloon, making it readily visible to Soviet early warning and tracking radars. Ground control-intercept officers could use the advance warning to optimally position fighters for attacks during the vulnerable periods. The lower altitude decreed by the Air Force also caused unforeseen design problems. More unsettled, lower altitude winds forced the balloons to jettison ballast and vent gas more rapidly than planned. When the ballast was gone, the balloons would vent gas steadily until, while still over the Soviet Far East, they sank below their 30,000-ft safe altitude and self-destructed. Of 219 balloons launched in the two-week time period at the start of the project, when the Soviets were still unprepared, 167 were lost before reaching the recovery areas. After that, losses rose steeply until, in one four-day period, none of the 112 aerostats launched made it across the USSR. Even when they did, they were often not recovered successfully. The radio cutdown device proved highly unreliable and mid-air snatches proved difficult and occasionally dangerous. The C-119 was aerodynamically ill-suited to the mission, even after the normal swinging tail had been replaced by a beavertail and ramp arrangement. With the heavy load of extra fuel carried, its performance at 20,000 ft was poor.
Worse, what had been meant to be a clandestine, low-visibility effort had proved anything but. At the 35,000- to 55,000-ft altitudes the balloons typically flew at, their polyethylene envelopes were easily visible by both daylight and moonlight. Their size alone was enough to explode the pretense that they were weather balloons. But balloons were also captured intact. Genetrix envelopes and payloads came down in Russia and in neutral countries. Gondolas and their incriminating payloads were recovered, in spite of the assurances of project specialists, who guaranteed that they would be destroyed. Eisenhower feared that the US had given the USSR a potentially devastating propaganda weapon and a ready excuse for aggressive moves against the Western allies. Spying in peacetime was still generally regarded as an act of war and a violation of international law. So, despite the valuable photographs that were occasionally recovered (8% of the USSR and China were mapped using Genetrix imagery), the program was not worth the continued risk, and Eisenhower stopped it—for the moment.
Limited balloon reconnaissance resumed in 1957, using a new aircraft, WS-461L. WS-461L was designed to cruise reliably at altitudes above 100,000 ft (30,770 m), where no known aircraft or missile could reach. Instead of transiting the USSR from west to east in a matter of days, it was designed to circle the globe from east to west in just under a month, after launch from an aircraft carrier at sea. A revised control system continuously matched the balloon's internal temperature to the external, atmospheric temperature in order to maintain altitude with minimal use of ballast and minimal venting of lift gas. This let mission planners use far fewer balloons for a given level of photographic coverage, greatly reducing the operation's visibility and the chances of detection. The craft's payload was the new, Itek HYAC-1 panoramic camera, a revolutionary, high-resolution camera that combined a 12-in (30.5 cm) focal length with an F/5 lens and a 120º field of view. The quality of HYAC imagery and the need for intelligence on Soviet ICBM development played a large part in winning an initially reluctant President Eisenhower's approval for the operation. In mid-summer, 1958, Operation Melting Pot, the WS-461L launch program, began.
Between July 2 and July 14, 1958, a total of seven WS-461L balloons were launched from the escort carrier USS Windham Bay. The first six carried meteorological instruments, so that the likely course of the balloons could be charted and cover stories established. Then three HYAC balloons were released—S-430, 431, and 432. Unfortunately, to overcome failures in the radio cutdown device the WS-461L team had included a backup, a cutdown timer that would release the gondola at a predetermined elapsed time. This effectively the negated the operational security provided by the encoded, radio cutdown procedure. Despite this, Melting Pot planners informed neither the President nor the senior staff of the USAF of what they had done. Worse still, they set the timers for 400 hours, assuming that all launches would take place in mid-June, when predicted strong winds would easily carry the balloons out of Soviet-controlled territory within the prescribed time. Unfortunately, the planners did not allow time for the military and civilian approvals required prior to every overflight mission. By the time the operation was approved, the winds had changed. But no one thought to change the 400-hour timer setting.
Just as crises in Lebanon and Jordan were beginning to ease, S-430's timer ran out and cut the gondola loose over Poland. S-431 and S-432 followed in a matter of days, on July 30 and 31. Eisenhower was livid. Typically, the Soviets waited until September to lodge a protest, just when the US intelligence community began to think that the crisis had passed. Washington stuck to the cover story and insisted the balloons were USAF meteorological craft tasked with photogaphing cloud formations. Again the Soviets waited. Then, in October, they displayed portions of the WS-461L envelope, part of a recovery parachute, and a complete, undamaged reconnaissance payload, complete with the exposed film. At a stroke, the United States had been publicly embarrassed and its newest, most sensitive intelligence gathering hardware had been delivered to the enemy. The balloon program was over.
To combat the balloon flights, the Soviets had at first turned to their many and powerful antiaircraft guns and to conventional interceptors. The air-defense branch of the Soviet armed forces, the PVO-strany, was reasonably well-equipped for its mission, by the standards of the times. Its 100-mm and 130-mm guns could reach most Genetrix balloons, which flew between 40,000 and 73,000 ft (12,307-22,462 m), though at a considerable cost in accuracy and considerable expense in shells. The guns could not reliably engage the higher flying aircraft. The latest Soviet interceptor fighter, the MiG-17, was an outstanding high-altitude performer. With the afterburning VK-1 engine, it could climb to 54,460 feet. But endurance and maneuver at high altitude were both necessarily limited, and engaging a slowly drifting balloon from a fast, swept-wing jet was no easy matter. Often, the MiG pilot had to fly at maximum throttle and best climbing attitude just to maintain height, while flying only a few knots above his airplane's stalling speed. Something new was clearly needed.
If reconnaissance balloons strike the reader as a throwback to the First World War, the Soviet Union's first dedicated countermeasure will more than confirm the impression. To intercept the Genetrix overflights, the Soviets produced a fighter biplane, the Antonov An-2A. The quintessential Soviet bush and agricultural aircraft would seem an unlikely choice for a stratospheric interceptor. But its speed range was just about ideal for safe, effective balloon interceptions, and the ample wing area that the biplane layout provided offered good high-altitude maneuverability. So, in 1958, the Antonov design bureau was ordered to produce an An-2 derivative designed for high-altitude interception of aerostats.
The An-2's usual, 1000-hp Shvetsov ASh-62 radial was a low-altitude engine altogether unsuited for the mission. However, a special, turbocharged, high-altitude ASh-62IR had already been developed for the An-6, an odd-looking variant of the basic design that included a separate, observer's cockpit on top of the fuselage immediately ahead of the fin. The An-2ZA (Zondirovshchik Atmosfery, "atmospheric sounding"), as the An-6 was also known, was officially intended for air-sampling and meteorological observation, although some sources suggest a connection with the Soviet ballistic missile program or, perhaps, with nuclear testing. A TK-19 turbocharger (derived from the General Electric units on B-29s interned by the Soviet Union in 1945) boosted the output of the ASh-62 at 31,000 ft (9500 m) to 850 hp. Since the tips of a propellor can easily exceed the local speed of sound at high altitude and lose enough efficiency to negate any increase in power, RTK-1 reduction gearing was added as well. With the new powerplant and with the observer's cockpit removed, the An-6 design set the world altitude record for piston-engined Class-C airplanes at 36,905 ft (11,248 m) in 1953. Flight endurance was about 3 hours.
With more-or-less adequate flight performance in hand, the Soviet designers set about finding an efficient armament. The polyethylene balloons were hard to shoot down, as many USAF pilots had found during fruitless attacks on myriad rogue weather and Grayback balloons. Two ensure the targets' destruction, pilots had to engage them with sustained gunfire, no easy task at altitudes where aerodynamic control surfaces were reaching the limit of their effectiveness. Accordingly, the design team armed their fighter with a modified version of the remotely aimed, B-29 derived turret fitted to many Soviet bombers. The turret mounted powerful, long-ranging, 23-mm cannon. The remote sight was a periscopic device mounted in the roof of the pilot's canopy. An elaborately faired, remotely controlled searchlight was provided for acquiring and tracking the target (while an airborne searchlight might seem a primitive, almost First World War touch, it would probably have been effective given the highly reflective, silvery surface of the balloons and the relative lack of clouds at high-altitude). With this weapon system, the An-2A fighter could engage slower-moving targets operating well beyond its effective ceiling. For, while the airplane's 36,000-ft height record approached the normal operating altitude of the early, problem-plagued, Genetrix series of reconnaissance balloons, the Soviets were aware that balloons were potentially capable of substantially greater heights than this.
To boost the spectacular but still marginal altitude performance of the An-2A, the designers proposed a monoplane version of the fighter, the An-3 (a designation frequently repeated for other, unrelated projects). The An-3 design combined the fuselage, powerplant, and armament systems of its predecessor with a new, shoulder-mounted, high-aspect ratio, monoplane wing and revised tail surfaces. The new wing spanned 90 ft 3 in (27.5 m). The new fin and rudder design greatly increased the area of both, to improve control at height. Climbing time would have been reduced with this design, and enduracne increased to 4 hours. But ceiling only rose to 39,400 ft (12,000 m), hardly a worthwhile improvement given the extent of the redesign.
Neither the An-2A nor the An-3 were ever built, because Soviet officials realized that the threat would come at ever greater altitudes and speeds, where the An-2 fighters could not follow. Like the An-2ZA and the record aircraft, the fighter variants were unpressurized. Heat and oxygen were provided. But these were not enough at heights where low atmospheric pressure was at once highly uncomfortable and extremely risky for the pilot. Even if engine performance could have been improved (through exhaust-gas recirculation and oxygen injection, for instance), pilots could not go higher in the basic, An-2 airframe.
The imminent appearance of Canberra PR.9s, Martin RB-57Ds and Fs, Lockheed U-2s, and higher performance WS-461L balloons in the skies over Russia drove the USSR onto a new track in its search or a high-altitude fighter. The jets routinely operated at heights of 60-70,000 ft (18,461-21,538 m), while the WS-461L could circumnavigate the globe at altitudes in excess of 120,000 ft (36,923 m), far beyond anything that piston engines could achieve. Accordingly, Soviet authorities ordered the development of new, specialized balloon and reconnaissance-plane interceptors, essentially armed versions of their fixed-wing Western opponents.
The Yakovlev design bureau offered an armed version of its Yak-25RV, a straight-winged, long-span derivative of the Yak-25 all-weather fighter intended for reconnaissance (NATO codename "Mandrake"). The proposed Yak-25PA (Perekhvatchik Aerostatov, "Balloon Interceptor") would have combined the standard Yak-25RV engines and fuselage with a 10% larger wing. It was hoped that the this change would allow interceptons at altitudes up to 63,000 ft (19,400 m). But the 8598 lb-st Tumansky R-11V-300 engines proved unequal to the task, and the project was abandoned at an early stage.
The Myasishchev design bureau achieved better success with a significantly more powerful aircraft. Design Subject 34 was a large, jet-propelled, twin-boom, glider-type aircraft with straight, high aspect-ratio wings. The center section had pronounced anhedral, which gave the airplane its popular name, Chaika ("gull"). Subject 34 retained the gun turret of the An-2 fighter projects, but replaced the twin cannon with one of the new, twin-barrelled, 23-mm GSh-23 weapons. This gun was lighter, yet offered a higher rate of fire (3600 rpm vs 1300 rpm). Should this prove inadequate for dealing with the U-2 and the Canberras, provision was made for a pair of air-to-air missiles. Fitted with a 44,090 lb-st Kolesov RD-36-52 turbojet and an advanced, supecritical wing, Subject 34 was probably expected to achieve about 450 mph (725 kph) at 66,000 ft (20,000 m). Service ceiling would be about 72,000 ft (22,000 m).
The advent of the SA-2 surface-to-air missile and the capture of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers removed the immediate need for a highly specialized interceptor like Subject 34, and the aircraft was, in all likelihood, never built as such. It did, however, form the basis for the well-known M-17 (NATO code: Mystic) series of strategic-reconnaissance and environmental monitoring aircraft, which combined the extensively modified fuselage of the Subject 34 with an altogether new wing. The M-17 appeared in the early 1980s in both single and twin-engined versions.
In parallel with the development of specialized, ultra high-altitude interceptors, the Soviet Union sought various means of radically improving the performance of existing fighters, so that they could engage extremely high-flying intruders. The Mikoyan-Guryevich design bureau concentrated on boosting the altitude capabilities of its latest MiG-19 design.
MiG's first attempt, the SM-9V, was in most respects the most sensible and successful aircraft to result from the entire program. The MiG group increased the basic MiG-19's wing area by 2 square meters and made provision for using 10º of flap at full power above 48,750 ft (15,000 m), a first for a Soviet aircraft. Two of the three NR-30 30-mm cannon were removed, along with all armor protection. The permissible turbine-inlet temperature for the twin, 7165 lb-st AM-9Bs of the standard MiG-19 was raised to 730º C in the SM-9V's AM-9BFs, giving an increased output of 7260 lb-st. To protect the rear fuselage structure from the increased heat, a plethora of cooling-air inlets had to be added, a feature that distinguishes the SM-9V/MiG-19SV from other models. With the new VSS-04A pressure suit and helmet, KKO-1 pressurized oxygen system, and the extended flaps, the SM-9V reached 68,048 ft (20,740 m) on 6 December 1956. The SM-9V went into limited production as the MiG-19SV, with a maximum speed of Mach 1.336 and a service ceiling of 62,340 ft (19,000 m). It was issued to selected PVO regiments stationed near likely intelligence targets.
The AM-9BF pushed the metallurgical and thermal limits of the AM-9 engine to the very limit, yet produced only a few hundred pounds of additional thrust. To better the SM-9V's performance, unconventional power sources would be needed. Accordingly, the MiG team augmented the standard jet engines with a rocket, D.D. Sevruk's RU-013. The RU-013 was a throttleable, liquid-fueled engine that burned kerosene propellent with a high-test peroxide oxidizer. It could produce 6614 lb-st (2000 kg) for acceleration and 2860 lb-st (1300 kg) for cruise, the thrust level being selectable by the pilot. For fighter use, the RU-013 was installed in the streamlined, 1984-lb (900-kg) U-19 pack, which fitted flush against the aircraft's belly. Several rocket-boosted MiG-19 variants were produced.
The SM-50 prototype was essentially a MiG-19S with the U-19 auxiliary rocket pack and 7040 lb-st (3200 kg) AM-9BM jet engines. The U-19 rocket could be throttled back or accelerated at the pilot's discretion, but it could only be fired once and could not be restarted in flight. With the rocket at maximum thrust, the aircraft's maximum speed reached Mach 1.695, and ceiling increased to 78,740 ft (24,000 m). Five were built as the MiG-19SU.
The SM-51 was a MiG-19P all-weather fighter airframe re-engined with Sorokine R3M-26 jets (experimental developments of the AM-9) and an improved U-19D rocket pack. The U-19D could be stopped and restarted in flight up to five times, a modification that greatly increased the tactical flexibility and general usefulness of the extra thrust. The SM-52 and SM-53 were similar, but added Almaz range-finding radar.
The SM-12PMU was a more advanced, all-weather interceptor equipped with a large intercept radar and RS-2US command-guided missiles instead of guns. The missiles limited the aircraft to the same maximum speed as the standard MiG-19PM, Mach 1.17, but the aircraft retained the ceiling and rate of climb of the other rocket-boosted interceptors.
None of these clever Russian countermeasures was ever needed, however, and, in time, the impetus behind their development faded. The capture of Francis Gary Powers effectively ended all overflights of the Soviet Union. No subsequent American administration was prepared to risk the humiliation that any further exposure would bring. Soon, overflights of China were also banned, at least for American pilots (Taiwanese were used instead until the 1970s). More importantly, the success of the secret, reconnaissance satellite, Corona, undercut the more vulnerable, airborne systems. Satellites could not be intercepted, at least not with the technology available in the early 1960s. So, when the HYAC cameras developed for Melting Pot at last took usable pictures of the Soviet Union, they did so from space and not from a balloon.