A Review of “Through The Crosshairs of a Scope” By John C. Simpson

Through the Crosshairs of a Scope By Bill Anthony 2009 Strategic Book Publishing “It’s the most pointless book ever written since ‘How to Learn French’ was translated into French.” - Edmund Blackadder III This all started one day when an e-mail came into the office breathlessly announcing a memoir written by a sniper: [W]e have an author that wrote an amazing book. He is a former Sniper for Navy Special Ops. The author is in talks with a major movie company to possibly produce a movie version of his manuscript over the next few years. We are trying to get his book out there on some "related" sites, in some catalogues, you name it. I was looking to see how new products are reviewed for possible listing on your company site? To answer their question simply, if someone claims to be a military sniper it comes to me. The Supreme Court may have struck down the Stolen Valor Act but I’m not going anywhere. In any event I was dismayed when I read the blurb from the book jacket: From 1964 through 1966, a special bond was formed between the soldiers of the special ops team. Although many didn't expect them to survive, the men defied the odds and all returned safely to continue their strong bond of friendship. From Texas to Florida and on to the outer reaches of Iceland, meet a team of men who fought for the United States with no recognition and peer through a scope at their friendship, which has stood the test of time.

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Right off the bat I couldn’t help but notice that people in the Navy are actually called “sailors” and NOT soldiers (that’s Army don’t you know). Let me end any suspense now by saying straight off that this is a terrible book, fiction or not. Once again everybody talks like the cartoon character Peggy Hill and avoids the use of contractions. After recounting an episode on zeroing his rifle out to 1000 yards (more on that later) the author says, “It is good”. Very biblical. I found the lack of editing in this piece borders on the criminal with words being spelled every possible way often within a couple pages of each other. Note to the author, rifles have a breech at the back of the barrel while a breach is the hole a Breacher blows in a door so the rest of the Entry mugs can charge through it. One editing gaffe that still makes me wake up sweating from a sound sleep is found on page 44 where we read the immortal line, “How was are you doing?” Not as bad is how the Army uniforms they wear on page 5 become Marine uniforms on page 30. That’s one way to avoid attention, show up in uniforms from different services! I was thinking of designing a drinking game out of this book; every time he refers to his Mauser rifle as a “Mouser” you take a shot. He makes the rookie mistake of lapsing into jargon that makes it incomprehensible to a typical reader. I mean come on, he rattles off terms like “A” Brancher, “T” Brancher and never having been in the Navy I have no idea what that means. He carelessly uses acronyms like CT that required me to look up online that it means Cryptology Technician. I would be remiss to my Navy friends if I didn’t call him out for his use of “Seals” when he means to write SEALs. It also doesn’t help that he refers to British SEALs (no such thing by the way). His need to share with us his encounters with baloney sandwiches in Air Force inflight box lunches borders on the pathological and just becomes repetitive. And it just goes on like this. Now before anyone thinks I’m being overly harsh toward the folks that put this book together allow me to say that this is just spillover from the real problem that I have with this book. The problem started when I read this on the back cover of his book: Debut book author Bill Anthony resides in Phoenix, Arizona and still keeps in touch with his special ops team, which was the inspiration for this fictionalized account.

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This was on the publisher’s webpage: First-time author Bill Anthony lived the cold war as part of a special ops team. His experiences as a Navy sharpshooter form the basis of this fictionalized novel.  As a matter of course we asked the publisher to ask the author for a copy of his DD-214 so we could verify his story. She came back saying how humble he was. As things turned out he doesn’t have that much to be humble about. Using the author’s real name of William Difilippantonio I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get his military service record. Beginning to read the book I already knew what I was going to find. To summarize his book, young William enlisted in the Navy in 1964. He performed so well on the rifle range 5 weeks into Navy boot camp that he was snatched up and recruited into an undesignated organization to be part of a four-man “spec ops” team operating out of a secret base in Scotland to make the world safe for democracy. His nickname/call sign/codename is “Trigger” because he’s a sniper carrying a 7-shot (?) 8mm Mauser with a 20-power scope! I immediately pegged the author as a phony, a poser and a wannabe when I saw that his story had more holes in it than a Swiss cheese donut! Let’s look at his basic premise; at a time when we had veteran Sergeants and Petty Officers in Army Special Forces and Navy SEALs someone in the military came up with the brilliant idea to recruit 18-year olds before they finished Basic Training, send them into foreign countries like Russia to commit acts of war and war crimes without adult supervision. Anyway, my hunch was confirmed when the service record arrived and I saw that the author was a Cryptology Technician who had been stationed in Scotland as a (wait for it) Cryptology Technician. No special training beyond career development and what used to be called ABC School (Atomic, Biological and Chemical Defense training). All that being said, it was when I read that the team was getting ready to go on a mission and they were instructed if they encountered any civilians they would have to kill them that this review became personal for me. After all, everybody knows that to get military people to murder civilians all you have to do is order them to do it, right? Sure enough, this team of kids is walking through the Soviet Union and the author says that he murdered some civilian they encountered in the woods. As I’ve written elsewhere, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and the burden of that proof is on the guy who says that he was on a “spec ops team”. That being said however, there are a number of factual errors in the book that will prove to a reasonable person that this is truly imaginary war porn written by someone who’s legitimate service wasn’t enough for him.

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Using various documented sources as well as the author’s service record I created a timeline at the end of this article that helps place things into historical perspective. So to paraphrase Bill Cosby in his opening to the Fat Albert show, I’ll be coming at you with ridicule and fun and if you’re not careful you may learn something before it’s done. Blackbird References

At various times in the narrative the lads get to study overhead imagery from a “Blackbird”. On one assignment they are tasked with infiltrating in someplace in order to bury a transmitter beacon to help guide “Blackbirds”. This would be a trick because as we can see in the timeline that when the author was in the Navy that Blackbirds weren’t flying anywhere but over the United States. And yes, I’m including the original single seat version belonging to the CIA and codenamed OXCART that flew on what were codenamed BLACK SHIELD mission. The CIA was thoughtful enough to declassify previously TOP SECRET documents including this handsome briefing chart of the dates and locations of every BLACKSHIELD flight.

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Same thing with the two-seat Air Force SR-71, first mission was over Vietnam well after the author got out of the Navy. Those were codenamed SENIOR CROWN missions. Infiltration by F6 Fighter It turns out that the teams most used method of infiltration was to go in by “F6”. Looking over the military inventory at the time the Navy did have an interceptor designated as the F-6 Skyraider. According to the author he, his parachute, gear for a month and weapons were stuffed in somewhere behind the pilot’s seat. Four Navy fighter planes would then scream towards a foreign border, the pilot would drop to 500 feet, do a barrel roll to invert the plane, open the canopy and dip the nose all of which would somehow cause the spec ops guy to fall out and open his parachute. This is an F6

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This is how the canopy opens. That whole hinged at the back thing would prove problematic in flight. Plus you’ll notice there’s not a lot of space for a parachutist back there. I reached out to my friend Bobby Overbey, an authority on freefall parachuting who has been a consultant to the real special operations community on a number of occasions. I did this because the author talks about an innovation where he sat behind the pilot’s seat with an uncased, folded up parachute clutched to his chest so that when he fell out of the plane from 500 feet he would just throw it out as soon as he was “face down and level”. Asking around the skydiving community Bobby got the same reaction he had when I asked him, “He said what?” Now I gave the publisher and the author a chance to address my concerns and just provide a clarification on how he infiltrated using a single seat jet with a canopy that hinged in the back. Here is the reply that I received: I explained to Derrick, and the author also states in his book, the account of his story is “fictionalized”…as he recalls it from memory from quite a while ago… sorry to have bothered either of you with this.

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No bother at all and speaking as a retired Special Forces soldier I don’t remember every jump that I ever made but there are some that stand out in my memory and falling out of a Douglas Skyraider more than once would have to be among the remembered ones! And you’re fixing to be a lot sorrier…. Infiltrating by Van I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t mention this one. The lads have to get into Denmark with a van. The only logical course of action they come up with is to drive a van with the four-man team, their gear and a driver to the airfield. They then proceed to sling it beneath a 1965 era UH-1 Huey helicopter. Never mind that you would exceed the capacity of a current model UH-1H but the image of a van dangling under a Huey as it flies toward Denmark is way over the top. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the author watched way too many episodes of “The A Team”. The only thing missing from the picture is a tied up Mr. T shouting that he’s not flying with that crazy fool! My old teammate Lauren Sharp had the best take on this, “It’s Denmark. Why didn’t they just drive across the border?” Night Vision Goggles References are made to team members using “see in the dark” or “night vision goggles”. It would have been a nice piece of kit to have indeed except for the fact that not even first generation night vision goggles existed when this guy was in the Navy. 1st Generation Image Intensifiers were relatively large and heavy. No way could someone wear them as goggles. The only goggles that existed were near infrared driving goggles that required an active IR light source along the lines of a headlight or searchlight.

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Too bad the T-6A Infrared Driving Binoculars pictured above weren’t tested in Vietnam until May 1967 (after the author was transferred to Cuba). Assignment Berlin One mission that stands out was the lads are sent to West Berlin to cover the crossing of some refugees through secret tunnels from East to West Berlin. As shown by the timeline this completely ignores the existence of a covert Special Forces unit stationed in Berlin. The author’s mission is to shoot into East Berlin and murder a bunch of Border Guards under the notion that the East Germans are claiming there are no armed guards on the border so they can’t say anything. This one kind of turns my stomach because the East Germans wound up shooting 98 escapees during the Berlin Wall’s existence. And believe me, it was never a secret as seen in this famous photo of East German border guards retrieving the body of Günter Litfin from the River Spree, 1961.

Now the last time I checked, tunnels are usually dug in the basement of buildings, but those crafty East Germans have armed guards on the roofs of the buildings containing the tunnels. Maybe the light’s better up there. The tactics practiced by “Trigger” and his

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buddies are rather unusual in that the day before the refugees are to come across they cleverly start shooting guards on rooftops. That’s sure to make the Border Guards focus their attention elsewhere. The Radar Site This one really stands out because the team is supposed to walk 450 miles into Russia and all four of them are to attack a radar site in 1966 because back in 1960 it was “the” radar site that tracked Gary Powers U-2 before it was shot down. Their Lieutenant says, “[We want] them to know that we know”. So once again armed members of the US military kill people and break things in the Soviet Union. The technical term for that is An Act of War but I digress. So these guys walk to Kirov in the west of Russia. Too bad that what we now know about Gary Power’s mission is that it didn’t go anywhere near Kirov and he was shot down over a place called Sverdlovsk about 400 miles to the East of Kirov. Never mind that we now know that the Russians had Gary Powers on radar as he was over Afghanistan as this briefing slide shows his planned route and shoot down point.

Francis Gary Powers was shot down by an SA-2 missile and their supporting FAN SONG & SPOON REST radars are always co-located with them. The last two items are going to be of particular interest to the snipers out there.

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Murdering the MIG-15 Pilot So one of the first missions that they go on is to sneak into Poland by parachuting out of F6 jets, walking to an airbase and then recording flights in and out of the base. They also “have to look for a new Mig-15 prototype that was being tested there. If spotted it was [the author’s] job to shoot the pilot or the plane so the plane would crash.” Never mind the fact that we weren’t at war with Poland and we were kind of engaging in the same behavior demonstrated by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor in 1941 but let’s look at how “Trigger” says he did this. Before I go any further we can see by the timeline that there wasn’t anything “prototype” about the Mig-15 in 1965. I mean come on; American pilots were dog fighting with them over Korea in the 1950’s. The team set up 800 yards away and they spot the Mig-15 taking off. The author hopes for the best, aims at the nose of the plane and fires hitting the pilot in the head through the canopy. Looking at this from a sniper’s point of view let’s first consider his choice of a twenty-power scope. At that point in time Lyman made a very nice target scope in that power.

Remembering that Simpson’s Law teaches us that IF I CAN’T SHOW YOU THE MATH THEN IT’S JUST MY OPINION let’s look at the math behind his shot. Having obtained a copy of the factory literature we see that the field of view is listed as 5½ feet at 100 yards. This is 66 inches at 100 yards, which works out to 63 minutes of angle or a little over one degree. 63 minutes of angle at 1000 yards is 63 times 10.47 inches or about 55 feet (Rule of thumb, anything over 22 minutes of angle don’t round it

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off to one inch). So at 800 yards a minute is 8.376 inches and multiplied by 63 gives us 527.7 inches or about 44 feet. So now we know that the field of view in his scope at 800 yards was 44 feet wide and twenty-two feet from the center to the edge. Set that aside for a moment. The author says that he used 220-grain 8mm Mauser bullets. Using Sierra Ballistics software we find the Time of Flight to 800 yards is 1.130324 seconds. The only missing piece of the puzzle to calculate our lead was provided by an aviation expert who informed me that the take off speed of a Mig-15 is 134 knots which readily converts to 226.0821 feet per second. Assuming that there was no wind that day, “Trigger’ would have had to hold 226.0821 times 1.130324 or 255.5 feet in front of the pilot’s head. Now comparing that to how he could only see a circle 44 feet wide through his scope makes this even more impressive. Oh, and the last time I looked, the Mig-15 doesn’t have a 255 foot long nose.

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The Saga of the Mauser aka Ignorance in Action Having investigated a number of wannabes one common thread I find is that these “experts” really don’t know as much about firearms as they think that they do. Case in point we’re treated to a narrative of the author zeroing his Mauser rifle. He begins at 500 yards with a single shot. His spotter informs him that he’s one inch high and about a half inch to the right. He then places the crosshairs on the bullet hole and adjusts his sights “just a click”. His second shot is duly spotted at an eighth of an inch high and he follows the same procedure as before. His third shot is of course dead center on the target now. He then fires a single shot each at 600, 700, 800 and 900 yards and he hits dead center. He fires a last shot at 1000 yards and the spotter is able to see that it lands 1/8th of an inch high at which point the author proclaims, “It is good”. What writing! So now he attaches a suppressor and fires at the 500-yard target. Through binoculars he sees that he’s one sixteenth of an inch to the left. He makes an adjustment to something and he’s now dead center all the way out to 1000 yards. Okay…rifles, ammunition and shooters make these things called groups. Which is a pretty good reason that you never zero off of single shots. Bear in mind that a minute of angle at 500 yards is five inches! So this clown is saying that he made adjustments of two tenths of a minute of angle for elevation and a tenth of a minute for windage. His last adjustment at 500 yards works out to 0.0025 minutes of angle! Most scopes available for snipers in the United States have ¼ minute of angle clicks. That converts to an adjustment of one quarter of an inch at 100 yards, half an inch at 200 yards and so on up to 1.25 inches at 500 yards! If we go with high-end target scopes that are unsuited for sniping we might find 1/8th minute of angle clicks. Too bad one of those moves the shot group 0.625 inches at 500 yards. And an eighth of an inch off at 1000 yards? On September 18th, 2010 Matt Kline fired a world record 10-shot group at 1000 yards that had an Extreme Spread of 2.815 inches! By his own account the author far surpassed that on a regular basis. It also begs the question of being able to see a bullet hole an eighth of an inch from the aiming point at 1000 yards! As for that suppressor that only throws the shot off 1/16th an inch at 500 yards? I know some suppressor manufacturers today that would like to know how that worked. Like I said, the kind of guy who writes fiction like this doesn’t know as much about firearms as he thinks he does. Another case in point details how his team is going to a cold weather environment and they have their Russian AK-47s taken away from them supposedly because they were designed for a jungle environment.

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Really? The Red Army knew so little about fighting in the cold that their primary small arm was only suitable for the jungle?

Not to mention it was adopted in 1947 and I wonder what jungles the Soviets were fighting in then? One More Some of the miscellaneous ignorance the author demonstrates includes stuff like being asked to try out a brand new “smokeless” Sterno. Of course I’ve never heard of “smoky” Sterno because it’s always been made of jellied alcohol since 1900. Yeah, I know…fictionalized account from memory. One that I had to read more than once details how when his team attacked the radar site they walked through Russia about 450 miles there and then walk back. At the end of this they are back at the base and turn in their flight suits and parachutes. Now that’s a commitment to property accountability that borders on the supernatural!

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In Conclusion Like I said, anyone is free to write a bad novel but you don’t get to say that it was based on your real world experiences when they didn’t happen. And if you weren’t in a spec ops unit and you’re saying you did things like shoot foreign nationals during peacetime or murdered civilians with your bare hands then you need to get called on it. Throughout the book the author endlessly goes on and on about dealing with the people he’s killed and getting right with god. I’ve known enough people who had to face that for real to really resent him pretending to be this badass operator trying to live with what he did. As I’ve said this isn’t the first wannabe I’ve investigated and I’m anticipating his response that this is all in a “secret file” somewhere. Maybe so, but there’s one mistake he can’t explain away and that’s his lack of a parachutist qualification in his service record. In his book he says how they made practice jumps in between missions. No way, no how is someone in the military making training jumps from government aircraft without attending jump school and here’s why not, the administrators wouldn’t allow it. If anyone got hurt or killed on a training jump, an investigation would be made by regulation. Imagine the trouble when the investigators turn up that Special Operator X-9 wasn’t qualified to wear jump wings. Then Finance will wonder why soldiers and sailors on jump status weren’t being paid jump pay. Now before anybody says, “Hey it was spec ops I had a secret file” remember that there are hardly more secretive units today than Delta and SEAL Team 6 and they wear jump wings and get paid jump pay. For folks whose knowledge of special operations is based on movies and novels that think units of this kind are above the law need to ask Dick Marcinko and Robert Rheault if they could tell the Judge Advocate or Inspector General that they were “spec ops” and weren’t to be messed with. Believe me, I’ve only scratched the surface about the author’s lack of knowledge about this subject. Don’t buy this book. Even out of curiosity. I can’t put it any better than Bobby Overbey after we had discussed this novel’s shortcomings, “He went to great lengths to make this stupid”.

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“Trigger” Timeline

Entries in bold are from “Through the Crosshairs of a Scope” Entries in italics are from Difilippantonio service record 1948 July: MIG-15 first appears at an air show1. 1952 June 19: 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) activated at Fort Bragg, NC2 1953 10 November: The 10th Special Forces Group is split in half. One half deployed to Bad Tölz and Lenggries, Germany as the 10th Special Forces Group. The remaining troops formed the new 77th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. 3 1956 August: Six Special Forces Operational "A" Detachments of the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) stationed at Flint Kaserne in Bad Toelz, West Germany, were relocated to West Berlin under the 7761 Army Unit (also known subsequently as 39th SFOD) and embedded within Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 6th Infantry Regiment, Regimental Headquarters. Their mission was “stay behind” Unconventional Warfare. 4 In April 1958, the 7761 Army Unit found its final home in Building 904, Section 2, at Andrews Barracks, West Berlin, and was assigned to HHQ Company, US Army Garrison Berlin with a new name - Detachment “A" (Det A). 5 1961 August 24: Günter Litfin, is shot dead in the water a short distance from the Berlin Wall by East German Transportation Police. He is the first escapee killed by gunshots. 1961 December: Navy SEALs are officially approved for operations via the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke.6 1962 January 1, 1300 hrs: SEAL Team ONE was commissioned in the Pacific Fleet and SEAL Team TWO in the Atlantic Fleet. These teams were developed to conduct unconventional warfare, counter-guerrilla warfare and clandestine operations. 7 1962 April: Detachment "A" was separated from the Garrison and became Detachment "A", Berlin Brigade, US ARMY Europe (USAREUR), which it remained until its

1 Soviet Operational Interceptor Aircraft: Air Technical Intelligence Study 102-AC-52/14-34; 3 September 1952; United States Air Force. Originally classified SECRET, declassified on June 2010 2 The History of the 10th Special Forces Group archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20090327070632/http://www.soc.mil/SF/history.pdf 3 The History of the 10th Special Forces Group 4 The History of the 10th Special Forces Group 5 The History of the 10th Special Forces Group 6 http://www.navysealmuseum.com/historicaltimeline.php 7 http://www.navysealmuseum.com/historicaltimeline.php

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deactivation on 30 December 1984. 8 1962 April 26: Unofficial maiden flight in the United States of the CIA A-12 version of the Blackbird9. 1962 August 17: Young building worker Peter Fechter is shot in the pelvis by East German Border Guards as he attempts to climb the wall near Zimmerstraße. Whilst hundreds of horrified onlookers on the Western side called in vain for someone to help him, neither GDR or FRG guards attempted to give him medical assistance, both sides apparently fearing to leave their posts or to enter the forbidden zone. After an hour, Fechter eventually died a slow death through internal and external bleeding and his body was finally retrieved by East German guards10. 1963 July 20: First Mach 3 flight of a CIA A-12. 1964 February: Difilippantonio enlists in the Navy. 1964 July: Difilippantonio enters active duty. 1964 July 30: Difilippantonio enters active duty. 1964 August: Difilippantonio allegedly begins six months of “special operations” and “sniper” training at Fort Sam Houston, TX. 1964 October 05: Difilippantonio reports to Great Lakes Naval Training Center 1964 October 29: SR-71 prototype to Palmdale, CA11. 1964 October 30: Difilippantonio begins Cryptology Technician (CT) School 1964 December 21: SR-71 Taxi Tests. 1964 December 22: 1st Flight of SR-71 at Palmdale, CA. 1965 January: Waiting on clearance after finishing “Special Operations” training.. 1965 March: 1st mission to shoot “prototype” MIG-15. 1965 March 25: MIG-15bis crashes in Czechoslovakia due to pilot error. Pilot is killed12.

8 The History of the 10th Special Forces Group 9 The Oxcart Story from Studies in Intelligence magazine: Volume 26, Number 2, Summer 1982; published by the Central Intelligence Agency 10 http://www.gpsmycity.com/tours/the-berlin-wall-1004.html; Accessed 7 July 2012 11 Lockheed SR-71 The Secret Missions Exposed; Paul F. Crickmore; 1993: Osprey Aerospace. 12 http://svici.sweb.cz/havarie.htm

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1965 April 16: Difilippantonio finishes CT school and reports to Pensacola, FL 1965 May 16: Difilippantonio reports to Naval Security Group Activity RAF Edzell in Scotland 1965 May: 2nd mission to Denmark. 1965 July: 3rd mission to Bulgaria. 1st reference to night vision goggles. 1965 August: 4th mission to Aleppo. 1965 September: 5th mission to Minsk. 1st reference to “Blackbird photos”. 1965 December: 6th mission to repair sensors at Syrian border. 1966 January 6: First SR-71 delivered to US Air Force. 1966 mid-January: First Starlight scope Night Vision Devices (NVD) arrives for evaluation in Vietnam13. 1966 March: 8th assignment to Iceland. 1966 April 1st: 9th mission to Berlin. 1966 May 3: 10th mission to Russia (gone for 6 weeks). 1966 July 7: 11th mission to Russian radar station. 1966 mid-September: 12th mission to Poland. 1966 October 6: Exfiltration from Poland. 1966 December: Arrive at Guantanamo. 1967 April 16: Difilippantonio reports to Guantanamo, Cuba 1967 May 31: First A-12 operational sortie for the Central Intelligence Agency. 1967 September 29: Difilippantonio is discharged from active service 1967 December 11: AN/PAS-5 Infra-Red Goggles enter the system14

13 Use of Night Vision Devices by US Army Units in Vietnam; Army Concept Team in Vietnam; Final report dated 24 December 1966. Originally classified Confidential, declassified 30 May 1975. 14 Data obtained from the Defense Logistics Agency Logistics Information Service for National Stock Number 5855-00-054-4408

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1968 March 21: First SR-71 operational sortie for the US Air Force. 1968 September: 10th Special Forces Group minus 1st Battalion relocates to Fort Devens, MA15. 1968 October 15: SU-49 Infra-Red Goggles enter the system16 1971 October 8: AN/PVS-5 Image Intensifier Night Vision Goggles enter the system17 1973 October: First SR-71 operational sortie anywhere near Europe, it’s a flight to Egypt during the Yom Kippur War18. 1977 May 20: First operational sortie by an SR-71 based in Europe19.

15 The History of the 10th Special Forces Group 16 Data obtained from the Defense Logistics Agency Logistics Information Service for National Stock Number 5855-00-118-8761 17 Data obtained from the Defense Logistics Agency Logistics Information Service for National Stock Number 5855-00-150-1820 18 Lockheed SR-71 Operations in Europe and the Middle East; Paul Crickmore; 2009; Osprey Publishing 19 Lockheed SR-71 Operations in Europe and the Middle East; Paul Crickmore; 2009; Osprey Publishing

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INFORMATION RELEASABLE UNDER THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTNAME:

William Joseph DifilippantonioBRANCH OF SERVICE AND SERIAL/SERVICE NUMBER(S):

United States Navy / 777 87 66DATES OF SERVICE:

United States Navy: July 30, 1964 to JUly 29, 1970United States Navy: July 30, 1964 to September 29, 1967

DUTY STATUS:Discharged

RANK/GRADE:CT3 / E-4

SALARY:N/A

SOURCE OF COMMISSION:N/A

PROMOTION SEQUENCE NUMBER:N/A

ASSIGNMENTS AND GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATIONS:See attached

MILITARY EDUCATION:See attached

DECORATIONS AND AWARDS:National Defense Service Medal

TRANSCRIPT OF COURT-MARTIAL TRIAL:Not on file

PHOTOGRAPH:N/A

PLACE OF ENTRY:Bangor, PA

PLACE OF SEPARATION:Bainbridge, MD

FOR DECEASED VETERAN ONLY

PLACE OF BIRTH

DATE OF DEATH

LOCATION OF DEATH

PLACE OF BURIAL

NOTE: N/A denotes information is not available in the veteran's records

NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION NA FORM 13164 (Rev. 02-02)

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*See Art. B-230S, BuRers M<!in

1. DATE 5. SHIP OR ACTIVITY6.

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195

.....Chapter 5

u-2 Operations AfterMay 1960

The loss of Francis Gary Powers' U-2 over the Soviet Union on IMay 1960 marked the end of the aircraft's use over the Soviet Bloc.Soon after the May Day incident, President Eisenhower ordered anend to overflights. Similarly. his successor, John F. Kennedy, told a 25January 1961 press conference. "I have ordered that the flights not beresumed, which is a continuation of the order given by PresidentEisenhower in May of last year." This was not a binding pledge, asJohn A. McCone (who became DCI in November 1961) pointed outto President Kennedy's successor. Lyndon B. Johnson, on 15 January1964 in response to the new President's request for information onU-2 overflight policies:

Contrary to popular assumption. President Kennedy did notmake any pledge or give all assurance, at least publicly. thatthere would be no further overflights. He limited his response toa statement that he had ordered that the flights not be resumed.An order. obviously, is valid only until countermanded. I

Technically, McCone was correct, but no President was likely toorder a resumption of overflights of the Soviet Union without verygood reason, and such a situation never developed. in part becausesatellite photography gradually began to fill the gap left by the end ofU-2 coverage.

Although there were several proposals to resume overflights ofthe Soviet Union in the years that followed, none reached the missionplanning stage. The Kennedy administration came closest to resuming

• Memorandum for President Johnson from DCI McCon~, "Response to QueryConcerning U-2 Overflight Policy:' 15 January 19~. DCI records••••••••••••I'TS Codeword).

~t

Extracted From http://www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000192682/DOC_0000192682.pdf

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