by M. Dobbs
During the weeks leading up to the Cuban crisis, Kennedy had been preoccupied by the question of how to deter a Soviet attack on West Berlin. There was no way the West could win a conventional war over Berlin, but at least he could raise the costs of a Soviet attack. He asked his aides how long it would take to get a battalion-sized force up the Autobahn into Berlin in an emergency. The answer was thirty-five hours. At the president's request, the military considered ways to cut the reaction time to seventeen hours by repositioning the force. The CIA reported on October 23 that the city had sufficient stocks of food, fuel, and medicine to survive a six-month blockade.
Contrary to American expectations, the Soviets did not increase the pressure on Berlin in response to the U.S. blockade of Cuba. There were the usual incidents on the border and arguments about movements of allied convoys. Soviet troops in East Germany were ordered to a higher state of alert. Soviet and American officers exchanged accusations about "provocative actions" by the other side. But it was all more or less routine.
East Germans were still fleeing to the West, although in much reduced numbers. In the early hours of Saturday morning, five young men and a woman clawed their way through layers of barbed wire to reach the French sector. East German border guards sent up flares to illuminate the night and sprayed the ground with automatic weapons fire. The twenty-three-year-old woman caught her coat in a barbed-wire barricade. Her male companions helped her untangle herself and dodge the bullets in the pouring rain. Another group of three young men crept through a graveyard on the border and scrambled over a barbed-wire-topped brick wall into West Berlin.
In the afternoon, a U.S. transport plane flying out of the city along the central air corridor was buzzed by Soviet fighter-interceptors. The Soviet jets made three passes at the slower-moving American T-29 prop aircraft, but did not otherwise interfere. American intelligence officers wondered if the incident was an early sign of a new campaign of air corridor harassment.
Khrushchev may well have seen a link between the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba and the endgame over Berlin. In his mind, everything was connected. Had the Cuban gamble succeeded, his overall geopolitical bargaining power would be much greater. He had been dropping heavy hints about a major new initiative on West Berlin, including the signing of a peace treaty with East Germany, after the U.S. congressional elections on November 6. "We will give [Kennedy] a choice. Go to war or sign a peace treaty," the chairman told Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall in September. "Do you need Berlin? Like hell you need it."
Whatever his initial motives for deploying Soviet missiles to Cuba, Khrushchev now had no stomach for a wider confrontation with the United States. He resisted the temptation to raise the stakes in West Berlin at a time when the world was close to nuclear war in Cuba. When a deputy Soviet foreign minister, Vasily Kuznetsov, proposed "increasing pressure" on West Berlin as a way of countering American pressure on Cuba, Khrushchev reacted sharply. "We are just beginning to extricate ourselves from one adventure, and you are suggesting that we jump into another."
Khrushchev had decided to give the West's "testicles" a rest.
9:09 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27
At McCoy Air Force Base outside Orlando, Florida, Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr., was completing final preparations for his sixth U-2 mission over Cuba. He had received a last briefing from the navigators, gone through his breathing exercises, and wriggled into his partial-pressure flight suit. He would make a one-hour fifteen-minute reconnaissance flight over the eastern half of the island.
Lean and athletic, with dark hair and striking dark brown eyes, the thirty-five-year-old Anderson was a classic Type A personality. Flying was his life and his passion. As a child, he built model airplanes and dreamed of becoming a pilot. His evaluations were uniformly excellent, signposting the way to a brilliant military career. Exuberant in private ― he once jumped out of his second-story college dorm window to chase a bird that had escaped from its cage ― he was intensely serious when it came to work. His friend Bob Powell considered him the type of pilot "who took every mission you could get. You would volunteer for backup if the primary aborted. You had to go. He was irrepressible."
Anderson was engaged in a friendly competition with another U-2 pilot, Richard Heyser, to rack up the most combat missions over Cuba. Heyser was senior to Anderson in rank, but Anderson was chief of standardization for the squadron, a prestigious position overseeing other pilots. Heyser had flown the U-2 mission over San Cristobal in western Cuba on October 14 that discovered the Soviet missiles. Anderson flew a mission the next day, discovering more missile sites in central Cuba, near Sagua la Grande. By Saturday, October 27, each man had flown five sorties over the island.
Initially, Anderson's name was not on the flight roster for Saturday morning. The original plan consisted of three sorties, to be flown by less experienced pilots. The first mission was a quick twenty-minute hop over the missile sites of central Cuba. The second was a one-hour flight over all the missile sites. The third was a four-hour flight around the periphery of the island, remaining in international airspace. On Friday evening, SAC planners added a fourth mission to the schedule: checking out Soviet and Cuban military deployments in the vicinity of Guantanamo Naval Base and probing the Soviet air defense system. Eager to rack up more combat hours, Anderson lobbied for the assignment.
One by one, the first three missions were canceled in the early hours of Saturday morning. The Navy was conducting low-altitude reconnaissance of the missile sites, so there was not much sense sending U-2s over the same area at a time when the Soviets had activated their air defense system. One pilot, Captain Charles Kern, was already sitting in the cockpit of his plane when the order arrived from Washington to scrub the flight. That left mission 3128 ― Anderson's mission.
The flight plan called for Anderson to fly within range of eight SAM sites at an altitude of seventy-two thousand feet. He was well aware of the threat posed by Soviet V-75 missiles. His U-2 was equipped with a device for detecting the radar systems associated with the missile system. If a Soviet radar painted his plane, a yellow light would appear in his cockpit. If the SAM site locked on to the plane, the light would turn red. He would then attempt evasive action, feinting inwards and outwards like a matador deflecting a bull. It was hoped that the missiles would zip past him and explode harmlessly in the sky above.
A van drove Anderson to the flight line, where the plane that he had used to make his five previous overflights was waiting. It was a CIA bird, No. 56-6676, repainted with Air Force insignia. Kennedy preferred to have Air Force blue-suiters flying over Cuba rather than CIA pilots: fewer questions would be asked if they were shot down. But the agency U-2s were slightly superior to the Air Force version: they had a more powerful engine and could fly five thousand feet higher. This made them a slightly more difficult target for the Soviet SAMs. The CIA had agreed reluctantly to lend several of its planes to the Air Force on condition that it retained control over the photo interpretation process.
The agency was unhappy about being upstaged by the Air Force. CIA personnel were still responsible for servicing the spy planes at McCoy and taking charge of the intelligence materials. The Air Force pilots regarded them as interlopers, "looking for fault in everything we did." CIA officials complained that the Air Force did not pay enough attention to the threat posed by the SAM sites. There was no system for using electronic warfare techniques to jam the radars used by the Soviet air defense system or to track the U-2s as they flew over Cuba. Intelligence officers estimated the chances of a U-2 pilot being shot down over Cuba as around one in six.
Anderson climbed up the steps to the U-2 followed by his mobile control officer and strapped himself into the cockpit. He carried photographs of his wife and two young children in his wallet. He was still feeling some pain in his right shoulder caused by a fall on the ice while on temporary duty in Alaska, but he was not going to let that stop him from flying. When his commander pulled him off the flight schedule o
ne day to give him some rest, he had complained vociferously. "Aren't I doing a good enough job?" he wanted to know.
The mobile officer, Captain Roger Herman, ran through the final checklist. Herman made sure that Anderson's oxygen supply was connected properly and that the maps and "top secret" target folder were all neatly stacked by the side of the ejector seat. The two pilots tested the emergency systems to make sure they were functioning normally. A surge of oxygen briefly inflated the capstans on Anderson's partial-pressure suit, filling the cockpit. When he was certain that everything was in order, Herman slapped Anderson on the shoulder.
"Okay, Rudy, here we go, have a good trip. See you when you get back."
Anderson gave a thumbs-up sign as Herman closed the canopy. Moments later, his U-2 took off for Cuba. It was 9:09 a.m.
At the time that Anderson took off, an American electronics reconnaissance plane had already been in the air for four hours. The RB-47, a modified version of the B-47 bomber, was ferreting out Soviet radar signals. Captain Stan Willson had taken off at five o'clock that morning from Forbes Air Force Base in Kansas, topped up his fuel tank over the Gulf of Mexico, and was now circling Cuba, taking care to remain over international waters. Although he was interested in any type of radar signal, his primary goal was to find out whether Soviet air defenses had been activated.
In addition to two pilots and a navigator, the crew of the RB-47 included three electronic warfare officers. In official Air Force lingo, they were known as "ravens," but they preferred a more humorous, self-deprecating term, "crows." Shortly after the plane got in the air, but before it reached altitude, the ravens had crawled back to the converted bomb bay, now stuffed with electronic eavesdropping equipment. Protruding like a pregnant womb from the underbelly of the plane, the "crows' nest" was sealed off from the pilot's compartment and pressurized separately. The ravens would spend the next ten hours listening to a series of beeps and twitters over the airwaves.
For the most part, it was boring work, punctuated by moments of intense activity. Many of the men on Willson's plane had flown peripheral missions around the Soviet Union, probing for weaknesses in the air defense system in advance of a possible bomber attack. They would aim directly for the Soviet frontier, as if they were on a bombing raid, and then veer away at the last moment. The idea was to provoke the Russians to switch on their radars. The intercept data could be used later to map the Soviet air defense system. There was always a risk that they would stray over Soviet territory and be shot down. Several members of Willson's outfit ― the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing ― had ended up in Soviet prisons, while others had been killed by the very weapons systems they had been sent to detect.
The flights around Cuba were known as "Common Cause." Some thrill-seeking ravens had begun to refer to the missions as "Lost Cause." Entire days could go by without anything happening. For one RB-47 pilot, the defining sound of the Cuban missile crisis was the "noise of silence." Both sides remained off the airwaves for as long as they could in order to give away as little information as possible to the enemy. Normally there was "a lot of chatter," but now everybody seemed to be "holding their breath."
On Saturday morning, the airwaves came alive again, as the Soviets turned on their air defense tracking system. When the ravens picked up a radar signal, they immediately turned on their tape recorders and scanners. Analyzing radar signals was a cross between monitoring a cardiogram and studying birdsong. Just as experienced birders can make out hundreds of different varieties of birds, ravens learned to distinguish between different types of radar system, and even imitate them. Early warning radars produced a low-pitched sound, with considerable distance between the pulses. Fire-control radars emitted a shriller, almost continuous squeal, like the chirping of a bird. When a raven heard one of those, he knew that his own plane was in danger of being targeted. The pilot was authorized to "fire to destroy" if he thought he was coming under attack.
As Willson's RB-47 flew around the coast of Cuba, the ravens began picking up radar signals associated with different Soviet missiles. They identified the telltale brrr-brrr of a Spoon Rest, the target acquisition radar for the Soviet SAM system. The spy ship Oxford had picked up similar signals overnight from the middle of the Florida Straits, an early indication that the Soviets had finally decided to activate their air defense system.
Hunched over their monitors, the ravens suddenly heard the high-pitched zip-zip-zip of a fire-control radar. Using their direction-finding equipment, a spinning antenna in the underbelly of the plane, they were able to trace the source of the signal. It was coming from a previously identified SAM site a few miles outside the town of Banes in eastern Cuba. The implications were ominous: American planes overflying Cuba were not just being tracked by Soviet air defenses. They were being targeted.
The senior raven flicked the switch on the intercom connecting the crows' nest to the cockpit above. "Hey boss, we have a Big Cigar."
"Big Cigar" was the official code word for a Fruit Set fire-control radar. The copilot relayed the information to the Strategic Air Command, but there was no way he could get in touch with Anderson directly to warn him of the danger. The U-2 pilot was observing strict radio silence.
After eleven years in the Air Force, Chuck Maultsby had a reputation as an outstanding pilot. He had served two years with the Thunderbirds, the Air Force acrobatic team, maneuvering his F-100 Super Sabre through a series of spectacular loops, rolls, and corkscrews. He flew Right Wing in the four-plane formation. Prior to that, he had survived six hundred days as a Chinese prisoner of war after being shot down in combat over North Korea. With his trim mustache, darkly handsome face, and amused eyes, he looked like a shorter version of the British actor David Niven. He exuded confidence and competence. Like most Air Force top guns, Maultsby firmly believed that he could "whip anybody else in an air fight."
Right now, however, he was feeling anything but confident. According to his flight plan, he should have been on his way back to Alaska. But stars kept popping up in unexpected places. He wondered if something had gone "terribly wrong."
Maultsby was relying on the age-old techniques of celestial navigation ― methods used by Magellan and Christopher Columbus ― to keep himself oriented. Navigators had prepared a stack of celestial charts for various points along his route. The pilot kept the charts stacked by his seat. When he was halfway to the pole from Barter Island, he pulled out the stiff green card that showed his assumed position and the precise alignment of the stars for this particular time of night. If he was on track, the soft orange light of Arcturus, the brightest star in the northern hemisphere, should have been visible to the right of the plane's nose. Another bright star, Vega, would be located slightly higher up in the sky, toward the northwest. The northern star, Polaris, would be almost directly overhead, indicating that he was getting close to the North Pole. The constellation Orion, the Hunter, would be behind him, toward the south.
He had tried to shoot several of the brighter stars with his sextant, but "streaks of light dancing through the sky" made it difficult to distinguish one from the other. The further north he got, "the more intense" the lights became. He had run into the phenomenon known as the aurora borealis, the northern lights.
In different circumstances, he might have enjoyed the spectacle, which was unlike anything he had ever seen before. The dark night sky outside his cockpit was alive with brilliant, throbbing lights. Flashes of orange and violet and crimson streaked across the heavens, twirling and twisting like streamers in the wind. At times, the sky resembled a celestial battlefield, ablaze with gleaming sabers and darting javelins. At others, it was a stage for a ballet, with luminous shapes dancing delicate patterns against the darkened sky.
Dazzled by the whirling lights, Maultsby found it difficult to distinguish one star from another. His compass was no help. In the vicinity of the North Pole, the needle was jerked automatically downward, toward the earth's magnetic field, and North and South became impossibly confu
sed. Unable to obtain a proper fix on the stars, he had only a vague idea where he was or the direction he was headed. The last few fixes before reaching what he thought was the North Pole seemed "highly suspect," but he stubbornly held his course, hoping that "the star I thought I saw was the right one."
Flying a temperamental plane like the U-2 was difficult enough at the best of times. There were so many variables to consider and calculations to make. Maultsby was flying at an altitude known to U-2 pilots as "coffin corner," where the air was so thin that it could barely support the weight of the plane, and the difference between maximum and minimum permissible speeds was a scant 6 knots. Designed to soar to extraordinary heights, the U-2 was one of the flimsiest planes ever built. If he flew too fast, the fragile gray bird would fall apart, beginning with the tail. If he flew too slow, the engine would stall, and he would nose-dive. Maultsby could not allow his eyes to stray too long from the circular airspeed indicator in front of him.
Piloting a U-2, Maultsby had discovered, was a little like returning to the early days of aviation, when flying was reduced to essentials. With no hydraulics to assist him, he had to use his arm strength to move the wing flaps, pulling or pushing the E-shaped yoke in front of him in the cockpit. Above the yoke was a round viewfinder that could be used either in the down position, to observe the earth, or in the up position as a sextant.
As he flew north, Maultsby activated a giant filter paper mechanism to scoop up radioactive dust. The filter paper was located in the belly of the U-2, in the compartment normally reserved for cameras. He also collected air samples in bottles that would be sent away to a laboratory after his return to Alaska. By carefully analyzing air and dust samples, American scientists could learn a lot about the nuclear tests being conducted by the Soviets one thousand miles away on Novaya Zemlya. They particularly valued samples collected at high altitude, since they were likely to be less polluted than dust that had fallen further through the atmosphere.
