Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — When a Chinese high-altitude balloon suspected of spying was recently sighted over the United States, the US Air Force responded by deploying its own high-flying spyware: the U-2 reconnaissance jet.
It was the Cold War-era spy plane that took the high-resolution photos — not to mention its pilot’s selfie — that reportedly convinced Washington that the Chinese balloon was gathering intelligence and not, as Beijing continues to point out, the weather examined.
The plane played a key role in an event that skyrocketed tensions between the world’s two largest economies and cast an international spotlight on the methods the two governments are using to keep tabs on one another.
Until now, the media focus has been mostly on the balloon – specifically how a ship popularly viewed as a relic of a bygone era of espionage could potentially remain relevant in the playbook of modern espionage. For many military historians, however, it is the involvement of this other symbol of a bygone era, the U-2, that is far more telling.
The U-2 has a long and colorful history when it comes to espionage battles between the US and China. At least five of them were shot down during surveillance missions over China in the 1960s and 1970s.
These losses have not been as widespread as expected – and with good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was responsible for all American U-2s at the time the planes were shot down, has never officially explained what they were doing there.
Adding to the mystery was that the planes were flown neither by US pilots nor under the US flag, but by Taiwanese pilots who, in a striking parallel to today’s balloon saga, claimed to be involved in a weather research initiative.
A U.S. Air Force pilot looks out at the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon from the cockpit of his U-2 spy plane on February 3, 2023.
The dragon lady and Chinese nuclear weapons
That the CIA would remain silent about what these American-built spy planes were doing is hardly surprising.
But the agency’s continued silence more than 50 years later — it didn’t respond to a CNN request for comment on the article — speaks volumes about how sensitive the issue was then and still is today.
The US government has a general rule of 25 years for automatic declassification of sensitive material. However, one of the reasons often cited for flouting this rule are cases where disclosure of the information “would seriously harm relations between the US and a foreign government or ongoing US diplomatic activities.”
Contemporary accounts of what the planes were doing – from downed Taiwanese pilots, retired US Air Force officers and military historians among them – leave little doubt as to why it would have attracted attention.
The aircraft – according to the pilots – made in Taiwan Documentaries and stories published on US government websites — had been transferred to Taiwan as part of a top-secret mission to spy on Communist China’s growing military capabilities, including its nascent Soviet-backed nuclear program.
The newly developed U-2, nicknamed Dragon Lady, seemed to offer the perfect ship. The US had already been using it to spy on the Soviet nuclear program, since it was designed in the 1950s to reach “a breathtaking and unprecedented height of 70,000 feet,” according to its developer Lockheed — get it out of range anti-aircraft missiles.
At least that’s what the US thought. In 1960, the Soviets shot down a CIA-operated U-2 and put its pilot, Gary Powers, on trial. Washington was forced to give up its cover story (that Powers had been on a weather reconnaissance mission and drifted into Soviet airspace after an oxygen blackout), admit to the spy plane program, and trade Powers’ return in a prisoner swap.
“Since America didn’t want its own pilots shot down in a U-2 like Gary Powers did over the Soviet Union in 1960, causing a major diplomatic incident, they turned to Taiwan, and Taiwan was only too willing for its to enable pilots to train and conduct a long series of overflights over mainland China,” said Chris Pocock, author of 50 Years of the U-2. explained in the 2018 documentary Lost Black Cats 35th Squadron.
A mobile pursuit car pursues a U-2 Dragon Lady preparing to land at Beale Air Force Base, California, June 2015.
The Black Cats and Department H
Like the U-2, Taiwan – also known as the Republic of China (ROC) – appeared to be the perfect choice for the mission. The self-governing island in eastern mainland China was – as it still is today – at odds with the communist leadership in Beijing and had a mutual defense treaty with Washington at that time in history.
That treaty has long expired, but Taiwan remains a point of great tension between China and the United States, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledging to bring it under Communist Party control and Washington still obliged to give it the means of self-defense to provide.
Today, as part of that commitment, the US is selling F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan. In the 1960s, Taiwan got the US-made U-2.
The island’s military set up a squadron that would be officially known as the Weather Reconnaissance and Research Section.
But its members — Taiwanese pilots trained in the US to fly U-2s — knew it by a different name: the “Black Cats.”
Author Pocock and Gary Powers Jr., the son of the Soviet downed pilot and co-founder of the Cold War Museum in Washington, DC, explained the thought behind the squadron and its mission in the 2018 documentary.
“The Black Cats program was instituted because the American government needed to find out information about mainland China — what their strengths and weaknesses were, where their military installations were, where their submarine bases were, what kind of aircraft they were developing. said Powers Jr.
Lloyd Leavitt, a retired US Air Force lieutenant general, described the mission as “a joint United States-ROC intelligence operation.”
“American U-2s were painted with ROC insignia, ROC pilots were under the command of an ROC (Air Force) colonel, overflight missions were planned by Washington, and both countries were recipients of intelligence gathered over the mainland,” Leavitt wrote in one Personal history of the Cold War published in 2010 by the Air Force Research Institute in Alabama.
One of the first men to fly the U-2 for Taiwan was Mike Hua, who was present when the first planes arrived at Taoyuan Air Base in Taiwan in early 1961.
“The cover story was that the ROC (Air Force) bought the plane, which wore the (Taiwanese) national insignia. …To avoid confusion with other air force organizations based in Taoyuan, the section became the 35 Squadron with the Black Cat as its insignia,” Hua wrote in a 2002 history of the unit for Air Force Historical Foundation magazine.
At the Taiwan Air Force Base, the Americans worked alongside the Taiwanese pilots, helping to maintain the aircraft and process the information. According to Hua, they were known as Detachment H.
“All US employees were allegedly employees of the Lockheed Aircraft Company,” Hua wrote.
Codename: Razor
The ROC Air Force and US officials signed an agreement on the operation and codenamed it “Razor,” Hua wrote.
He described the information gained from the flights as “enormous” and said it was shared between Taipei and Washington.
“The missions covered the vast interior of mainland China, where almost no aerial photography was taken,” he wrote. “Each mission returned an aerial map about 100 miles wide by 2,000 miles long that revealed not only a target’s exact location but also ground-based activity.”
Other sensors on the spy planes were gathering information about Chinese radar capabilities and more, he said.
Between January 1962 and May 1974, the Black Cats flew 220 reconnaissance missions, covering “more than 10 million square kilometers in 30 provinces in mainland China,” according to a story on the Taiwan Ministry of Defense website.
When asked for further comment on the Black Cats, the Department referred CNN to the released materials.
“The idea was that black cats would go out at night and the U-2 would normally take off in the dark. Her cameras were her eyes, and it was very stealthy, quiet, and hard to get. And so we combined the two stories, they became known as the Black Cats,” writer Pocock said in the documentary.
The squadron even had its own patch, said to have been created by one of its members, Lt. Col. Chen Huai-sheng, drawn and inspired by a local facility frequented by the pilots.
But the Black Cats, like Powers Sr. two years earlier, were finding that their U-2s were not impervious to anti-aircraft fire.
On September 9, 1962, Chen became the first U-2 pilot to be shot down by a People’s Liberation Army anti-aircraft missile. His plane crashed during a mission over Nanchang, China.
Shot down over China
In the years that followed, three more Black Cat U-2 pilots were killed on missions over China as the PLA figured out how to counter the U-2 missions.
“The mainland Chinese learned from their radars where these flights were going, what their destinations were, and they started building locations for the missiles, but moving them back and forth,” Pocock said.
“So they would build a site here, occupy this site for a while, but if they thought the next flight was going to be here, they would move the rockets. It was a cat-and-mouse game, literally a black cat and mouse game, between the routines of flights from Taiwan and the mainland (Chinese) Air Defense Forces to figure out where the next flight would go.
In July 1964, the U-2 was commanded by Lt. Col. Lee Nan-ping shot down by a PLA SA-2 missile over Chenghai, China. According to Taiwan’s defense ministry, he was flying out of a US naval air station in the Philippines, trying to get information about China’s supply routes to North Vietnam.
In September 1967, a PLA missile hit U-2 being flown by Captain Hwang Rung-pei over Jiaxin, China, and in May 1969, Maj. Chang Hsieh suffered a “flight control failure” over the Yellow Sea while crossing the coast explored Hebei Province, China. No trace of his U-2 has ever been found, according to Taiwan’s Defense Ministry.
A U-2 Dragon Lady from Beale Air Force Base lands at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, in 2017.
Captured by the communists
Two other Taiwanese U-2 pilots were shot down but survived, only to spend years in communist captivity.
Maj. Robin Yeh was shot down over Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province in November 1963.
“The plane lost control when the missile’s explosion destroyed part of the left wing. The plane fell down. A lot of shrapnel flew into the plane and hit both my legs,” recalled Yeh, who died in 2016, in The Brave in the Upper Air: An Oral History of The Black Cat Squadron, published by the Taiwan Ministry of Defense.
He said Chinese doctors removed 59 splinters from his legs after his arrest, but could not remove all of them.
“It didn’t really affect my daily life, but in the winter my legs hurt, which affected my mobility. I think that would be my memory for life,” Yeh said.
Maj. Jack Chang’s U-2 was hit by a missile over Inner Mongolia in 1965. He, too, suffered dozens of shrapnel injuries and ejected and landed on a snowy landscape.
“It was dark at the time, which prevented me from seeking help anyway, so I had to wrap myself up tight with the parachute to keep warm… Ten hours later, as dawn broke, I saw a village in the distance with yurts, so I dragged myself and sought help there. I collapsed while reaching a bed,” he recalled in Oral History.
Neither Yeh nor Chang, believed to have been killed in combat, would see Taiwan again for decades. The pilots were finally released in 1982 in Hong Kong, then still a British colony.
However, the world in which they appeared had changed a lot in recent years. The US no longer had a mutual defense agreement with Taiwan and had formally shifted diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
Although the US-Taiwan alliance no longer existed during the Cold War, the CIA brought the two pilots to the US to live until they were finally allowed to return to Taiwan in 1990.
Members of the 5th Reconnaissance Squadron “Black Cats” work on a U-2 “Dragon Lady” at Osan Air Base on October 22, 2020.
No regret
In fact, by the time of their release, CIA control of the U-2 program had long since ceased. According to a US Air Force history, she had turned the aircraft over to the US Air Force in 1974.
Two years later, the Air Force’s 99th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron and its U-2s moved to Osan Air Base in South Korea. Commander Lt. Col. David Young nicknamed the place “Black Cat”.
Today the unit is known as the 5th Reconnaissance Squadron.
But US U-2s continue to engage in what could be described as “cat-and-mouse” activities, and their activities continue to occasionally make waves in China. In 2020, Beijing accused the US of sending a U-2 into a no-fly zone to “enter” live-fire exercises being conducted by China below.
The US Pacific Air Forces confirmed to CNN at the time that the flight took place but said it did not break any rules.
In the meantime, there are few regrets for those involved in the original Black Cats – even for those who were captured.
Yeh told the documentary filmmakers he has fond memories of life at 70,000 feet.
“We were literally in the air. The view we had was different too; we had a bird’s eye view. Everything we saw was huge,” he said.
Chang felt no bitterness either.
“I love flying,” he said. “I didn’t die, so I have no regrets.”