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Tommy Thompson swiftly relayed Khrushchev's message to Washington, and it was up to Jack Kennedy to make the decisions. The demand for simultaneous announcements offered no substantive problems. Neither did the requirement for declaring against U-2 flights; President Eisenhower had ordered such overflights discontinued shortly after U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers crashed on Soviet soil last May, and President Kennedy had already determined to maintain the ban. The third Soviet stipulation was much more difficult to accept, and it was to become a major reason for the strict security set up around the two U.S. airmen. But Kennedy had no choice but to agree, since it meant freedom for Olmstead and McKone.
For as long as the two airmen remained in Russian cells, there could be no more than cold and formal conversation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Diplomatic communication leading to even the slightest relief in tension between the two countries had been all but destroyed by the crash of the U-2 and Khrushchev's foaming conduct at the summit last May. The return of the RB-47 flyers was only a gesture toward relaxing tensions. It was still winter on the cold war frontier, and RB-47 flights were still necessary along the enemy's outposts.
Rigid & Regular. When their six-jet modified bomber lifted clear of the airbase at Brize Norton, England last July, Olmstead and McKone and their four crewmates were beginning a mission that was vital to U.S. security. Their bomb bays were crammed not with high explosives but with delicate electronic gear designed to measure the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet radar defenses. Theirs was a flight far different from that of Francis Powers. Theirs was a "ferret mission" of a sort that has been carried out for years by U.S. ships and planes patrolling the long coastline of the Russian heartland. The Navy bomber shot down over the Baltic in the spring of 1950 was on a ferret mission. So was the Air Force C-130 transport that was lured by false radio beams into Soviet Armenia and shot down in September 1958. (Of the 17 men on board, the Russians eventually returned six bodies; they still insist that they have no knowledge of the remaining eleven.) During the past ten years, at least 75 Americans have been killed on ferret missions near the Soviet border.
The purpose of such flights is well known to the Russians. Soviet trawlers carry out the same sort of missions off the coast of the U.S.; Soviet planes constantly probe the DEW line radars that reach from Alaska across Canada. And since the ferrets must come as close as possible to coastal defenses without leaving international airspace, their careful flight plans follow courses as rigid and regular as a railroad route. There was no doubt that the Soviets knew exactly where the Olmstead-McKone RB-47 intended to fly as it circled north. If Soviet radars had not been able to trail other planes along the same route, those planes would not have been able to measure Soviet radar.