The full story of the Cold War's secret but very real air battles in which hundreds of combatants lost their lives is revealed in this startling study. It recounts how long before Gary Powers's U-2 spy plane was shot down over the USSR in 1960, an undeclared war was being fought in the stratosphere -- the aerial espionage war between the West and the Soviet Union that included the shoot-down of some 40 Western aircraft and an alarming USAF plan in the 1950s to use the spy flights to provoke World War Ill.