Bison!

This is coolbert:

"For a ten year period beginning in 1945, it would have been better if the United States did NOT HAVE an intelligence agency" - - R. Helms, Director CIA.

American intelligence, during that early period of the Cold War, having very inaccurate or even non-existent intelligence regarding the Soviet Union, that entity most perceived to be a existential threat to the United States.

A threat both military and political, the former being most accentuated by the threat of nuclear annihilation during a global thermonuclear war. Nuclear bombs dropped on American cities by long-range intercontinental Soviet Air Force warplanes, flying mission over the Arctic and North Pole southward toward North American and American cities.

The Soviets thought to have already at their disposal [mid-1950's] a profusion of manned bomber aircraft, high-flying and long-range, capable of intercontinental missions - - a bomber force existing in numbers perhaps even far beyond was available at the time to the American Strategic Air Command!

America was at peril and DID NOT HAVE AN ADEQUATE RESPONSE!! So was the thinking.

This was referred to as the "Bomber gap". The Soviet already deploying significant numbers of long-range bomber aircraft in excess of what was available to American military planners.

"The 'bomber gap' was the unfounded belief in the Cold War-era United States that the Soviet Union had gained an advantage in deploying jet-powered strategic bombers."

IN PARTICULAR and MOST worrisome to those in the Pentagon was the Soviet M-4 BISON. Long-range four jet engine bomber of the most sophisticated design, comparable to the U.S. B-52 AND ALREADY EXISTING IN QUANTITY!

"On February 15, 1954, Aviation Week published an article describing new Soviet jet bombers capable of carrying a nuclear bomb to the United States from their bases in Russia. The aircraft they referred to was the Myasishchev M-4 Bison."

The threat from the BISON - - however - - being mostly a mirage! The plane WAS in the Soviet inventory and WAS capable, BUT ONLY about twenty [20] of these aircraft existed TOTAL and their performance left much to be desired! THE INTERCONTINENTAL BOMBER THREAT AND THE "GAP" WAS  UNFOUNDED!! American intelligence regarding the "gap" was not only poor, it was downright misleading and destructive!

Misleading and destructive that in response to an erroneous perception, the U.S. Air Force arming itself to the teeth with manned bomber aircraft with intercontinental range [B-52] in prodigious numbers, those planes rolling off the assembly line almost if they were aspirin tablets. An expense almost without parallel?

"The result was a production series consisting of thousands of aircraft. Over 2,000 B-47s and almost 750 B-52s were built to match the imagined fleet of Soviet aircraft."

And here with an extract from a George Washington University interview with Martin Knutson, a U-2 pilot who actually was able to photograph during a "spy mission" the entire BISON air fleet and confirm that THERE WAS NO BOMBER GAP!

MK: The U-2 provided information that was probably the most important intelligence coups that had ever been done by aerial reconnaissance, in my estimation. It proved the fact that there was no bomber gap in the early flights; and in the later years, late Fifties, it proved that there was no missile gap as well, and this information was totally unobtainable by other means.

INT: Excellent answer. Can you talk me through 1957 specifically? I mean, one of the photographs that you were involved in taking was the one over the Engels airfield base. Can you just talk me through that particular mission - what you saw and what you thought it meant, and your general feelings as you were doing it?

MK: In the earliest part of the programme, '57, again all the targets were trying to determine the existence of a bomber gap. The belief in the United States military was that the Russians had scads and scads of bombers, and in fact we were building up our air defence forces in the United States to be able to counteract that threat. One of the flights I was on, I came across the so-called Engels airfield, and much to my surprise and joy it was loaded with Bison bombers. I can't remember the exact count, but many, many; the entire field was full of Bison bombers. I knew right then that I had found that there was a bomber gap, that this had to be the most important picture ever taken by a reconnaissance pilot. I kind of expected Congressional medals of honour when I landed. However, it turned out that what I'd taken a picture of was not just a portion of the entire Russian bomber fleet, but in fact I'd taken a picture of the entire Russian fleet, and there really was no bomber gap; they were all on that airfield at the same time.

There was no bomber gap, American intelligence was very faulty and downright misleading, the cost of such an error immense. Helms was right, no intelligence to be preferred over bad intelligence!

coolbert.