Cold-War Candor

"It is certainly no secret," said the State Department last week, "that, given the state of the world today, intelligence collection activities are practiced by all countries . . . The necessity for such activities as measures for legitimate national defense is enhanced by the excessive secrecy practiced by the Soviet Union in contrast to the free world."

With historic frankness, the statement went on to admit that "endeavoring to obtain information now concealed behind the Iron Curtain," an unarmed U.S. plane had flown over Soviet territory. Thus the U.S. told the world that a Lockheed U-2 brought down over Russia on May 1 was flying an intelligence mission, just as Premier Nikita Khrushchev said.

That admission stirred up a flurry of concern at home and abroad over the U.S.'s "embarrassment." The admission was embarrassing to the U.S. for one reason: it reversed the Administration's earlier claim that the U.S. was engaged in high-altitude meteorological research over Turkey and the plane drifted into Russia by mistake.

Open Skies. All the bored calm with which the world awaited an unproductive summit vanished in a new preoccupation: Would Khrushchev make use of his capture of the U.S. high-flying plane either to scuttle the summit or make unreasonable demands? Would allies be dismayed and neutrals angered?

The apprehensions, as they so often are, were exaggerated. The incident, coupled with Khrushchev's recent intransigence, has certainly heated up the cold war. But people everywhere have accepted the reality of the cold war, which has its own kinds of maneuvers, battles, tactics and weapons.

Faced with the unexpected, the State Department, after its manly candor, set out to make its own points about the U2.

"One of the things creating tension in the world today," it said, "is apprehension over surprise attack with weapons of mass destruction. To reduce mutual suspicion and to get a measure of protection against surprise attack, the U.S. in 1955 offered its 'open skies' proposal--a proposal which was rejected out of hand by the Soviet Union. It is in relation to the danger of surprise attack that planes of the type of the unarmed civilian U-2 aircraft have made flights along the frontiers of the free world for the past four years."

Cleared Air. If the U.S. felt embarrassed, perhaps rocket-rattling Nikita ("We will bury you") Khrushchev must have found it embarrassing, too, to have the world learn that unarmed, big-target U.S. planes had been flying missions over Soviet territory for four years before his armed forces finally managed to bring one down.

For reasons of his own, Nikita Khrushchev chose to make a spectacular out of the U-2 incident (see FOREIGN NEWS). In Washington, there were some calls for a congressional investigation, and in both the U.S. and Britain some fears were expressed that the U.S., by risking the U-2 flight "at this time," had risked prospects for "agreements" at the summit. But if the shooting down of the U-2 dimmed summit prospects, they could not have been very bright beforehand.

Perhaps they were never very bright. President Eisenhower, Secretary of State Herter and Under Secretary of State Dillon have all made it clear in recent weeks that the U.S. will go to the summit determined to hold fast to its rights in Berlin, and Nikita Khrushchev has shown in tough-toned speeches that the U.S. firmness has undercut his hopes of making any headway at the summit.

The talk of endangered agreements at the summit showed a short memory of what the cold war was all about and how it got that way. Under standard Communist terms no agreements of any substance or durability were likely to be possible at the summit, before or after the U-2 incident, unless the U.S. and its allies would accede to Russian demands. By candidly admitting that the U.S. is flying intelligence missions over Russia, by vividly reminding the world that a cold war is going on, and by demonstrating that it reserves the right to defend itself in every way it can, the U.S. might have cleared the summit air for some hard talk on hard issues that could be a lot more worthwhile than vague, generalized agreements.

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