MiG Pilot

by John Barron

  So on his third day in America, Air Force officers brought to the mansion huge photographs of the MiG-25 cockpit blown up to its actual size, with resolution so fine that you could see every instrument and inch of the cockpit just as clearly as if you were sitting in it The leader of the group was a tall, powerfully built colonel with searching dark eyes and the weathered face of a lumberjack. The colonel, introduced as Gregg, shocked Belenko when he spoke. Peter spoke Russian well, Anna spoke it flawlessly, but this colonel spoke Russian as if he had been born and lived all his life in Russia. He is a Russian in disguise! No, that cannot be; that is ridiculous. But what if it is true? Call Nick. Don’t make a fool of yourself. You have put your life in their hands anyway. It’s their responsibility.

  Gregg welcomed Belenko, cordially but not extravagantly, rather as if he were greeting a highly recommended young officer reporting to his squadron. There was important work to do, and he wanted to get on with it. They set up the panels of photographs in the library, creating an eerily accurate three-dimensional illusion of the cockpit, and placed against the wall photographs displaying various sections, actual size.

  Belenko explained what he understood to be the purpose of each button marked “Danger.” He could not explain why the safety pins had been removed; they were supposed to be there. A drunken mistake? Malice by someone in the regiment? Orders? He honestly did not know. But together, he and Gregg figured out where to insert replacement pins, which Japanese and American technicians would have to fabricate.

  “Okay, now show me how to start the engines.”

  “Why not wait until we have it over here? I can show you everything then and teach your pilots how to fly it.”

  “I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to fly it. It looks as if we’ll have to give it back in a month or so.”

  “What! Are you stupid?” Belenko was incredulous, enraged, betrayed. “Give it backl Do you think that if an F-14 or F-15 landed in Czechoslovakia or Poland, you would ever get it back? It’s your airplane now! I brought it to you! I risked my life, I gave up everything to give it to you! Make the Japanese let you have it! If you give it back, the Russians will laugh at you! They will think you are fools!”

  “Calm down!” Gregg commanded. “I’m as pissed off as you are. I agree with you. But I don’t make policy. We figure with your help we can learn most of what we need to know without flying it. So let’s get started.”

  It’s unbelievable. What can I do? I guess nothing except help them as much as I can.

  As they worked together, two professionals addressing a common task, Belenko increasingly realized he was talking with an authentic flier and a man who spoke his language in every way. The more he learned of the colonel, the surer he was of his initial impression. For Gregg was everything that Belenko had aspired to be — fighter pilot, combat pilot, test pilot, adventurer. In Vietnam he had flown 100 Wild Weasel missions over Hanoi, Haiphong, and the nests of SAMs protecting strategic bridges, and from his lessons in American tactics, Belenko knew what these missions were. Wild Weasel pilots, usually flying F-105s, were the first to venture into a target area and the last to leave. They flew about trying to provoke the SAM crews into turning on the radar that guided the missiles and firing at them. Quite simply, they dangled their lives before the North Vietnamese and their Soviet advisers. If the SAM crews rose to the bait, other American aircraft could lock onto the ground radar and fire; Shrike missiles would follow the radar beam down to its source, obliterating the SAM site, crews and all. If the Wild Weasel pilots were lucky, they would see or their instruments would detect the arrays of SAMs rocketing toward them at three times the speed of sound. Then they could flout death by diving at sharp angles a SAM could not emulate. If they did not see the SAM, which looked like a flying telephone pole, if they did not dive quickly enough, if they were caught in the inferno of ground fire that erupted as they pulled out of the dive to go back up as live decoys, they would not know what happened. A sympathetic telegram from the Defense Department, however, would inform their wives and children back in the States.

  Professors at Armavir explained that the Wild Weasel pilots were willing to offer up their lives because (1) they were highly paid mercenaries or (2) they were under the influence of marijuana or stronger narcotics. Belenko believed neither explanation and had asked himself, Would I be so brave? Could I do that?

  Gregg’s parents, like Nick’s, were Russian emigres, and determined to impart some of their native culture to their children, they insisted on speaking Russian in the home, and he studied the language throughout his university years. Because of his command of the language, as well as the technical background acquired as a test pilot, Gregg frequently had been diverted, against his will, from flying to intelligence assignments. He had gamed the respect and confidence of the CIA, not given lightly to outsiders, and hence, it was decided that he should be primarily responsible for the technical debriefing of Belenko. As it developed, there could have been no better choice.

  The personal rapport that evolved between Belenko and his three principal American stewards failed, however, to demolish the barricade of skepticism which guarded him against the wiles of the Dark Forces. He did not blame Peter, Anna, and Gregg or the Dark Forces for presenting him with the most roseate picture of their country. That was their duty; he understood. He merely remained disposed to disbelieve much of what they said and to regard what he saw as atypical.

  Certainly, nothing could convince him that the garden apartment in Falls Church, Virginia, where he and Nick settled was approximately typical of those being constructed in the Washington suburbs and within the means of young couples with a moderate income. Whoever heard of a worker’s apartment with two bathrooms and carpets all over the floors and machines that wash the dishes and do away with the garbage? And a special room for reading [a small den]. Of course not.

  True to their word, the Dark Forces arranged for him to fly from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington to visit a fighter base. He and Gregg were waiting in the departure lounge when the wing commander at Andrews, a general, strode in, recognized Gregg, and came over to shake hands. Belenko was incredulous because the general was black. He’s not a real nigger. No nigger could be a general. They must have painted somebody and dressed him in a generafs uniform. Sure, they painted him just for me.

  The fighter base, he judged, artfully combined the authentically representative with the seductively phony embroidered to impress selected visitors like him. He was invited to inspect the fighters, F-4s, F-106s, and then one of the two he had been taught most to dread, the F-15. “Go ahead, sit in the cockpit,” Gregg said. “But if you fly away with one of these, they’ll have my ass.” No question: the fighters were real enough, just as they had been described in the Soviet Union. Some attributes did surprise him. The electronic, fire control, armament, navigational, and certain other systems were much more sophisticated than he had been told, and the exterior surfaces of all the U.S. planes were smoother than those of the MiG-25. Essentially, though, they were what he expected: marvelous machines, but known machines.

  The clubs for enlisted personnel, noncommissioned officers, and officers, with their various rooms for dining, dancing, drinking, reading, pool, Ping-Pong, cards, and chess; the athletic fields, gymnasiums, swimming pools, tennis courts; the theater — they might be real.

  “How can you afford to spend so much on people rather than weapons?”

  “How can we afford not to?” responded the fighter-base commander, a colonel, who was escorting them. “The best weapons in the world are no good unless you have people willing and able to man them.”

  That’s right, absolutely right. That’s what I was trying to tell the Party.

  The base commander told Belenko that the Air Force wished to give him an American flight suit as a memento of the visit. Never had he admired any apparel so much. Although made of synthetics, it was silken and flexible in feel, light, yet warm. “You make a fine-looking American
pilot,” Gregg said, as Belenko looked at himself in the dark green suit before a mirror.

  “Let me show you something,” said an officer, who flicked a cigarette lighter and touched the flame to the flight suit.

  “Don’t do that!” shouted Belenko, shoving the officer away.

  “No, just trust me. It’s fireproof. If it burns, we’ll give you a new one.” The officer held the flame to a sleeve, and Belenko saw that the suit was, indeed, impervious to fire.

  Belenko then asked to meet a typical sergeant, whom he questioned about his work and standard of living. Believing none of the straightforward answers, Belenko announced he would like to visit the sergeant’s quarters. Easy enough, said the commander. He lives only a few blocks away. Come on, we’ll go in my car. Obviously, this was a put-on. Can you imagine a colonel actually driving people around, including one of his own sergeants, like a common chauffeur?

  The sergeant lived on base in a two-story stucco house with a screened front porch, small yard, and attached garage. Belenko asked how a sergeant could have such a large house, and the commander told him the size of the house allotted depended on the size of the family to occupy it. Oh, that’s absurd. And look at that car [a 1976 Impala]! They want me to think a sergeant owns a car like that. Why, it’s better than the colonefs car.

  Upon looking at a major’s house, which was nicer but not that much nicer, Belenko gave up. I’ve seen the show. Why put them to more trouble?

  That evening some officers took Belenko and Gregg to a good dinner at a civilian restaurant near the base. Belenko felt that the conversation, pilots talking to pilots, was genuine and stimulating. But when the host attempted to pay the check, the whole scheme was exposed to him. The proprietor, a Greek immigrant, refused to take money, and the meal cost well over $100. Gregg translated. “He says he owes this country more than he can ever repay, but as a token repayment he is giving us dinner. I think he’s guessed or someone has told him who you are.”

  Sometimes, though, Belenko saw significance in the mundane, and some of his observations began to engender doubts about his doubts. On successive Sundays, Peter took him to the zoo in Washington’s Rock Creek Park and the King’s Dominion Amusement Park north of Richmond. The zoo, situated in lovely woods, maintains a large collection of exotic animals. The amusement park is a wholesome place offering many ingenious rides and delights for children and teenagers. Yet at both the zoo and park he was most impressed by the people.

  Most, in his opinion, were from the “working class.” Try as he would, he could not honestly discern in their appearance or behavior any manifestations of the fear, anxiety, or privation which he from childhood on had been assured prevailed among the majority of Americans. Families and couples strolled about as if, for the moment anyway, they were carefree and having a good time. Among them were many black people. They were dressed just as well as the white people, were equally attentive to their children, and, so far as he could tell, seemed to have no qualms about mingling with the white people.

  He momentarily froze, then pointed at a rather pretty young blond girl holding hands with a young black man at the amusement park. “Is that allowed in this country?”

  “It’s their business,” Peter said. “Not ours, not the government’s.”

  There was something else. According to the Party, zoos, museums, and other public recreational facilities in the United States cost so much that ordinary people could not afford them. But as he verified for himself, admission to the zoo was free, and while the rides at the park cost money, the workers, including the blacks, obviously could afford them.

  He doubted that the zoo and park were Potemkin creations of the Dark Forces, as he had thought the shopping center, mansion, apartment, and air base were. His Sunday observations did not convince him that the United States was a land of universal contentment, justice, and racial equality. But if what he saw was fairly representative, then social and economic conditions were vastly different from what the Party said. If this is true, they’re bigger liars than I ever dreamed. If this is true, then something is right here.

  It took Peter and Nick a while to locate “a real workers’ bar, a cheap place, “where the lowly laborers might repair in the evening, but they found an approximation on a side street in Falls Church. There was a long bar with stools on one side and a row of wooden booths on the other. Men in working clothes were drinking beer, talking, and laughing or watching a savage game (Monday night football) on color television. The menu of the establishment was chalked on a blackboard, and although Belenko already had dined, he insisted on sampling the food, which he ordered at random. A black man served an extravagant portion of barbecued beef sandwiched in a large bun, together with french fried potatoes, coleslaw, and a beer. The little green check totaled $2.08.

  That was real meat, delicious, and so cheap. And I think that black man made it himself and was proud of it. The men’s room was clean. Nobody was drunk or vomiting or fighting. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen drunks or fighting on the streets here. But there are bars everywhere here. You can buy vodka and beer and wine here a lot easier than in the Soviet Union. And it’s so cheap, people could stay drunk all the time if they wanted. It’s as if 1980 has already cornel

  When Belenko expressed some of these thoughts, Peter remarked, “I’m sorry to say that alcoholism is a serious problem in the United States. By our definition, between nine and ten million Americans are alcoholics.”

  “What is your definition of an alcoholic?”

  “Someone who is dependent on alcohol or whose consumption of alcohol harmfully interferes with his or her life.”

  “Well, by that definition, three-fourths of all the men in the Soviet Union are alcoholics.”

  Peter agreed that alcoholism was a more acute problem in the Soviet Union than in the United States but went on to explain the American problem with drug addiction.

  Referring to purveyors of illicit drugs, Belenko exclaimed, “Why don’t you arrest them? Shoot them! Or at least put them in jail!”

  “We try to arrest them. But, Viktor, as you will learn, it is not so easy to put someone in jail in the United States.”

  Both Peter and Anna emphasized to Belenko the necessity of learning to drive, a task he relished. Upon being told that prior to his lessons he would have to obtain a Virginia learner’s permit, he was incensed.

  “Why cant you just give me a license?”

  “We don’t have the power to do that.”

  “That is ridiculous. In the Soviet Union you can buy a license on the black market for a hundred rubles. If you can’t issue me a license, buy me one.”

  “Take my word, Viktor, you’re going to have to pass a test like everybody else. We can give you false identity papers, but not a license.”

  Belenko learned to drive in less than an hour but tended to maneuver a car as if it were a fighter plane and habitually exceeded the speed limit. He was driving with Peter along a four-lane divided highway, when a siren sounded behind them.

  “God dammit, Viktor, you’re speeding. Now do as I tell you. Slow down, pull off the highway, and stop and roll down the window. The state trooper will come up and ask for your driver’s license. Just give it to him, and say nothing. He will write a ticket. When he hands it to you, just nod and say, Thank you, Officer.’”

  Belenko was unconcerned; indeed, he welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate to Peter his ability to cope with the unexpected. He knew what to do. Every 100 kilometers or so along Soviet roads, police maintain checkpoints and routinely stop all vehicles. The driver routinely gives the policeman two or three rubles; otherwise, he is accused and convicted on the spot of a traffic violation, and his license is punched and, with the third punch, revoked.

  A tall state trooper wearing a broad-brimmed gray hat bent down by the window. “Son, do you realize you were going eighty-five miles an hour?”

  Belenko grinned and tried to hand the trooper two twenty-dollar bills.

  “
No! No!” Peter yelled in Russian. “Take that money back, Viktor!” Then in English: “Officer, I am a representative of the Central Intelligence Agency. May I speak with you privately?” Peter got out of the car and talked with the trooper.

  After a couple of minutes the trooper returned and said to Belenko, “I would like to shake your hand.”

  With a seriousness that Belenko did not mistake, Peter warned that bribery of a policeman or public official was a major crime. “Some will take bribes, that’s true. But ninetynine point nine percent won’t, and if you try it, you will be arrested, and I may not always be around to rescue you. I’m telling you for your own good.”

  Father Peter, he means what he says. But if officials don’t take bribes, maybe the law is the same for everybody. Well, that’s right, they put Nixon’s men in jail.

  The Party depicted America as awash in pornography, a social pox communism spares the Soviet Union. Having seen none in the Virginia suburbs, Belenko asked where all the pornography was, so Peter took him to an X-rated movie. “What did you think?” he asked as they left the theater a few blocks from the White House.

  “At first I was amazed. Then I felt as if I were watching people go to the toilet. Nobody loved anybody in that movie. What I don’t understand is why, if pornography is so popular, the theater was so empty.”

  “Obviously, there’s a market for the stuff, or the theater couldn’t stay in business. But which would you rather do? Watch some whores go through the motions of making love or go out and find a girl and make love yourself?”