By Any Means Necessary: America's Heroes Flying Secret Missions in a Hostile World

Rating:
Summary: Worthwhile With Some Cautions
Review: * William E. Burrow's BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY is a history of the
American airborne surveillance effort against the Eastern Bloc
during the Cold War. This effort, which remained mostly secret
for decades, involved electronic intelligence ("ELINT") aircraft
probing the edges of Communist airspace and occasionally making
daring overflights. Quite a few of these ELINT aircraft were
shot down and many crew captured and killed, with the US
government generally publicly disavowing any knowlege of the
matter.

I have read other books by William Burrows and this one follows
his style, which has its bad points and good points. The bad
points are that he tends towards the verbose, overblown,
heavy-handed, and sensationalistic. He also tends to be a bit
digressive, often ranging out from the main line of the story
to semi-relevant background topics, which may be handy for the
relatively naive reader but which gets tedious for someone
with some knowledge of the Cold War.

On the good points, Mr. Burrows really wore out a lot of shoe
leather researching this book. He went around and spoke to
a lot of people, and if not everything Mr. Burrows says can
be taken at face value the interview material is solid gold.
More to the fact, this is a story that really needs to be told,
and if it needs to be taken with a grain of salt here and
there that doesn't really diminish the story. He deserves a
lot of credit for that, credit which really overshadows any
limitations of the way the story was told.

So this a good book, just one to be taken with a grain of
salt here and there -- for example, when Mr. Burrows insists
that the Israeli attack on the US Navy SIGINT ship LIBERTY
during the 1967 Six-Day War couldn't have been a "friendly
fire" incident and had to be deliberate (a scenario in which
it is much easier to count the bricks present than the bricks
missing) ... and his assertion that SIGINT satellites were
superior to SIGINT aircraft because the satellites only had
to pick up one-way signals (which I read through multiple
times and found more baffling each time).

Rating:
Summary: The Cold War Sometimes Turned Hot
Review: I recommend this book as a "must read" for anyone interested in Cold War military history and intelligence gathering as well as all former "spooks". Mr. Burrows has written a detailed account of United States Air Force, Navy and CIA airborne electronic and photographic reconnaissance efforts from the end of WWII through the US Navy's P3 incident on Hainan in 2001. The development of specialized aircraft (U-2, SR-71), electronics and camera equipment as well as modification of ordinary aircraft (B-29, B-47, C-130, etc) for reconnaissance missions is covered in sufficient detail to satisfy everyone expect hardcore technical buffs.

Besides detailed descriptions of 16 Cold War shootdowns that involved US deaths - many of which did not become widely known until recently - Mr. Burrows presents evidence to support the premise that many crewmen initially survived shootdowns only to be murdered or die in Soviet prisons. There are also many tales of crews that returned with damaged aircraft, and sometimes wounded men, to their home base or after a period of Soviet incarceration. The efforts of families of lost crewmen to find out what happened to their relatives, despite stonewalling by both the US and foreign governments, add a deeply human touch to what would otherwise be a recitation of interesting facts and scary war stories.

There are lots of footnotes supporting the events described and a number of photographs of lost aircrews and some of the aircraft they flew.

Rating:
Summary: Very good book
Review: Written very well. It brings out into the open for the first time the people, the missions, and the politics behind a dark chapter in our country's history. The crews were sent into very dangerous situations with limited or no support, and if they survived, they received very little recognition. The crews that did not come back were left to die, and their families were lied to in order to cover up the true circumstances that lead to their lose.