Project Home Run: A Declassified Oral History of the Top Secret Spy Flights Over the Soviet Union 1950-1960

Before there was the U-2, there was the RB-29 and the RB-47. As the Cold War began, plans were being made to prepare for the possibility of an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. But to plan its nuclear strikes, the Pentagon needed to know where the Soviet targets and defenses were. And so, in 1949, the Air Force began a highly-classified program of intelligence-gathering flights. In all around 160 missions were flown over Soviet territory under Project Home Run, and dozens more were carried out by the Navy and by other Air Force programs such as Heart Throb and Sharp Cut. At the height of the Cold War between 1947 and 1967, at least 24 American reconnaissance planes, both Air Force and Navy, were attacked in or near Russian airspace by Soviet fighters, with 10 of these being shot down. Around 100 crewmen were killed. Until recently, the existence of Project Home Run and the other overflight programs was highly classified. Even the families of the airmen who were shot down and killed over Soviet territory were not told how or where their loved ones had died (they were told the deaths were due to “training accidents”). It wasn’t until 1992 that some of the information finally began to be declassified and released. This volume contains a number of firsthand accounts of Home Run flights by the people who made them, gathered as part of the official classified history of the project. Illustrated.