The U-2 was developed by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation for the CIA to perform aerial reconnaissance overflights of the Soviet Union.
Project director Richard M. Bissell assured President Dwight Eisenhower that the aircraft's high altitude (70,000 ft or 21,000 m) would render it invisible to Soviet radars.
On 5 July, an A-100 "Kama" radar detected Carmine Vito as he flew over Smolensk, en route to Moscow.
The operators even calculated his altitude as twenty kilometers (66,000 feet), which was later rejected by experts who did not believe that an aircraft could fly that high.
S-25 Berkut missiles (NATO designation SA-1 Guild) were not kept at the air defense sites around Moscow, and no intercept was attempted.
Among the group were Edwin H. Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation and head of Project Three the Technological Capabilities Panel;[2] Edward Purcell, a Nobel laureate physicist from Harvard; and Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, head of Lockheed Advanced Development Projects (ADP)—the Skunk Works.
Working in isolation from the rest of the lab, his group began trying to find ways to reduce the U-2's radar cross section.
A small group headed by L. D. MacDonald included chemist Mel George, physicist Edward Lovick, and other scientists and engineers.
It consisted of a conductive pattern printed on a flexible sheet called a grid that was then glued to a honeycomb that was then applied to the aircraft.
Without the power to maintain cockpit pressurization, the faceplate on Sieker's helmet popped open and he lost consciousness.
[11] By the fall of 1957, only months after the first deployment of a dirty bird, it had become obvious to Bissell and the scientific team that the treatments would only have a marginal effect on tracking, and that a new aircraft would be needed.
On 4 December 1957, Bissell conducted a meeting at which the various techniques were summed up:[12] A large number of people had become aware of Project RAINBOW.