Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage: The Declassified Stories of Cold War Reconnaissance Flights and the Men Who Flew Them

In the annals of espionage wars, the category of aerial reconnaissance collection is strongly represented. But the literature is dominated by two kinds of works, those that deal with specific aerial incidents, such as the U-2 shootdown of 1960, and those that cover the histories of particular aircraft types. A few overview histories of the aerial Cold War have appeared, largely compiled by researchers working from the outside using whatever sources they could gain access to. For a long time the inside story was lacking. The air reconnaissance program was and remained Top Secret, among the exotic categories of “special compartmented information.” Few documents were kept and even fewer declassified. Pilots and crewmen downed in aerial incidents mostly never lived to tell their stories. This began to change after the end of the Cold War. In 1996 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) declassified an official history of the U-2...