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Easy Kill. Nikita's shouts about Cuba proved a real boomerang, helping to line up almost all of Latin America against Castro (see HEMISPHERE). And no one took his bombast about the Congo very seriously. Kremlinologists were most fascinated by his preposterous explanation of the ten-day delay in announcing the downing of the RB-47. They suspect that the armed services, still smarting from the disclosure that for years the U-2 had ranged freely across their skies, had taken matters into their own hands, and during Khrushchev's absence in Austria, intercepted and shot down the RB-47 on the Arctic milk run as proof that the Russian defense system could at least do something. Tempted to hush up the whole affair because of the flaws in the military's account, Mikoyan & Co. temporized. Only on his return did a fairly disgruntled Khrushchev, by this account, decide that the only thing was to avow the deed and try to forestall troublesome questioning from the U.S. by brazening the whole business out as another spy-plane case.
Picking Holes. But with the memory still fresh of the U.S.'s admission that it had been caught in a lie over the U2, Khrushchev's crude improvisations struck some international sparks. "Another U-2 incident," shrilled the London Daily Mail. The British House of Commons gave Prime Minister Macmillan a bad half-hour because the flight had originated in Britain, and a Tory backbencher asked Macmillan to tell President Eisenhower that "one of the great anxieties" in Britain is that "the military machine" in the U.S. will "become the dictator of political policy." Macmillan, well aware that specially equipped Canberras had been flying comparable missions for years, soothingly promised to consult with the President. Next day, Washington sent assurances that fuller information about every U.S. flight would henceforth be available to the British government.
Soon British second-thought editorialists were picking holes in Khrushchev's story, and even in Moscow, citizens were asking whether it was credible that the Americans could be such fools as to send a plane with a six-man crew on what by Khrushchev's own account could only be a suicide mission. The Kremlin's campaign of officially sponsored mass meetings and resolutions utterly failed to rouse anything like the popular Russian indignation stirred up by the U-2 affair. And when Khrushchev duly sent a demand for a U.N. Security Council meeting to consider this "new aggressive action by U.S. military aircraft,'' Press Secretary Jim Hagerty confidently promised to produce evidence (perhaps from long-range radar tracking) that the RB-47 had been well within international waters.