* * *
Thirty years later—in 1992—I hitched a ride in a Russian army truck across the roof of the world. That was what the driver called it, but Western cartographers know it as the Pamir plateau. It is a moonscape of thin brown grass and permanent snow, none of it lower than fifteen thousand feet. Across it winds a four-hundred-mile road built by Soviet frontier guards for no other reason than to defend their frontier. To the east of the plateau lies Tibet, to the south, a thin strip of Afghanistan, and beyond that the unspeakably jagged peaks of northern Pakistan.
Three hours along the road the truck stopped. The soldiers with me in the cab pointed toward the Afghan border and a tiny cluster of white domes just inside what had, only a few months before, been Soviet territory. The domes were a radar station. “That’s where we detected Powers,” the soldiers said. They used the word “we” even though the oldest of them would have been a baby at the time. Their inherited pride was as memorable as the freezing desolation of the place.
On the same trip I took a taxi halfway across Kazakhstan to Baikonur, the Soviet Cosmodrome, to watch a night launch by a Proton rocket with a German satellite in its nose. Later I trundled north over the steppe, along a lonely spur of the Trans-Siberian railway line, and pestered a sleepy crew of bureaucrats to let me into the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site. Eventually they relented. A charity had stuck a four-sided post in the dirt at the entrance with MAY PEACE PREVAIL ON EARTH in a different language on each side. Inside the site, an irritated Russian army colonel accused me of “radiophobia” for taking out a Geiger counter.
Times had changed. In 1960 the only way for a foreigner to see Baikonur or Semipalatinsk was via the inverted periscope through which U-2 pilots peered down on their targets from seventy thousand feet. Only Powers and a handful of others had that privilege. The same was true of Chelyabinsk, a grotesquely polluted arms metropolis in the Urals that was one of the last places Powers photographed before being shot down—and one of the first places I visited as a Moscow-based reporter in 1999. We were taken there by Green Cross International (chairman: Mikhail Gorbachev). Before that, covering show business and equally serious topics from Los Angeles, I interviewed women who had, they said, been abducted by aliens a few miles from where Powers trained in the Nevada desert, and I played cricket where he died in the San Fernando Valley. Wherever I went, his ghost seemed to have gotten there first.
The legacy of Francis Gary Powers is haunting enough anyway for how it changed the world. It gave us thirty years of cold war that might very well have been avoided. But it also gave us what the young policeman witnessed on Glienicke Bridge—a faint echo of the three-hour truce on Christmas Day in 1916, when troops from the opposing armies in the Flanders mud emerged from their trenches for a surreal game of football. Before and after those moments, human folly reigned supreme. Pryor, Powers, and Fisher bore more than their share of it. This is their story.
Shock and awe was not invented for Saddam Hussein. It was invented for Joseph Stalin, and it worked pretty well.
On July 24, 1946, as most of Russia slept, a team of U.S. Navy frogmen guided a heavy steel container to its final resting place in the clear waters of Bikini Lagoon, 2,500 miles west of Honolulu. They stabilized it with cables ninety feet below an anchored amphibious assault ship that gloried in the name LSM-60. The container was made from the conning tower of the USS Salmon, a scrapped navy submarine, and inside it was a working replica of the plutonium bomb that had killed eighty thousand people at Nagasaki the previous year. That evening, on a support vessel outside the lagoon, the frogmen ate T-bone steaks with all the trimmings.
Around the LSM-60, like giant moon shadows on the water’s calm surface, a target fleet of eighty-five more ships spent that night emptied of crew and supplies, with no role left except to sink. One of the closest to the bomb was the USS Arkansas, a 27,000-ton battleship that had carried President Taft to Panama before the First World War and bombarded Cherbourg and Iwo Jima in the Second. For most of her life the only way for a battleship to go down had been with guns blazing, but the nuclear age had changed that. It turned out that with the help of an atom bomb a battleship could go down like a toy in a bath. It could be flicked onto its bow and rammed into the seabed so that its superstructure fell off as if never even bolted on.
Shortly after breakfast time on the morning of the twenty-fifth, the Arkansas was photographed from every angle as the bomb in the steel container was detonated 170 yards from her hull. Cameras in a B-29 bomber twenty-five thousand feet above the lagoon and a little to the south captured the sight of a huge disc of ocean turning white in an instant. That was the water beneath the Arkansas being vaporized.
The shockwave from the initial blast rolled the ship onto her side and ripped off her propellers. A six-thousand-foot column of spray and water, created in about two and a half seconds, then heaved her into a vertical position in which two thirds of her length were clearly visible ten miles away, dwarfed by the largest man-made waterspout in history. She has lain upside down on the floor of the lagoon ever since.
The Arkansas was one of ten ships sunk outright by what came to be known as the Baker shot. It was the second of two nuclear tests conducted at Bikini with undisguised panache as the world adjusted to an awesome new technology (and to the daring swimsuit it inspired; the first-ever bikini, presented in Paris that month, was called l’atome, and the second was a buttock-baring thong described by one fashion writer as what the survivor of a nuclear blast could expect to be wearing as the fireball subsided).
Participation in the tests by U.S. military personnel was voluntary but popular. In shirtsleeves and sunglasses, 37,000 men extended their wartime service for a year to help set up the tests and to see for themselves the power of the weapon that had brought Japan to its knees.
Pat Bradley was there, up a tree with a movie camera on Bikini atoll to film the blast and the tsunami it produced—a single ninety-foot wave that subsided before it hit the island, then three smaller waves. “It took a couple of minutes before the first wave came in to the atoll,” he remembered. “The second came in higher, then the third completely covered the island four to six feet deep.”
A lean and thoughtful young air force captain named Stan Beerli was there too. He had survived the world war in B-17 bombers over Italy and would survive the cold war in the regulation dark suit of the CIA. His tasks would include trying to keep Gary Powers and the U-2 in the shadows where they belonged, but for the time being the cold war was pure spectacle.
The foreign and domestic press were welcome at Bikini. The Baker shot was witnessed by 131 reporters, including a full Soviet contingent. With Warner Bros.’ help, the Pentagon released a propaganda film of the blast for anyone who had missed the initial coverage, and Admiral William “Spike” Blandy, who oversaw the operation, posed with his wife cutting an angel food cake in the shape of a mushroom cloud.
Responding to public anxiety before the blast, Blandy promised that he was “not an atomic playboy” and that the bomb would not “blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole.” This was true, but it could still do a lot of damage. In the summer of 1947 Life magazine published a long article based on official studies of the intense radioactive fallout from the Baker bomb. It concluded that if a similar weapon were to explode off the tip of Manhattan in a stiff southerly wind, two million people would die.
America had finished the war with a pair of atom bombs and started the peace in the same way. President Truman’s message to Stalin could not have been clearer if written in blood. It was a warning not to contemplate starting a new war in Europe trusting in the Red Army’s old-fashioned strength in numbers. And it signaled more concisely than any speech that Truman had accepted the central argument of George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow six months before the tests: the Soviet Union had to be contained. As Truman himself put it: “If we could just have Stalin and his boys see one of these thing
s, there wouldn’t be any question about another war.”
Stalin refused to be intimidated. He had not sacrificed twenty million people to defeat Fascism only to be told where to set the limits on Stalinism. And yet he had a problem.
At the time of the Bikini tests, the Soviet Union was still three years and a month from exploding its first nuclear weapon. Its efforts to build one were under way on a bend in the Shagan River in eastern Kazakhstan, under the direction of a bearded young hero of Soviet science (and tightly closeted homosexual) named Igor Kurchatov. Stalin had deemed the bomb “Problem Number One.” He had created a special state committee to ensure that no expense was spared in solving it. Whole mountains in Bulgaria had been commandeered to give Kurchatov the uranium he needed. But Kurchatov was not an innovator. He was a nuclear plagiarist, almost completely dependent on intelligence from left-leaning scientists in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. As he admitted in a 1943 memo to the Council of People’s Commissars, this flow of intelligence had “immense, indeed incalculable importance for our State and science”—but in 1946 the flow had slowed suddenly to a trickle.
Just a year earlier, not one but two descriptions of the first bomb tested at Los Alamos were in the Kremlin nearly two weeks before it even exploded. After that test, more detailed diagrams of the device reached Moscow than were provided in the first official nuclear report to Congress. One was smuggled out of Albuquerque in a box of Kleenex. Atomic espionage was never more bountiful than this. But on November 7, 1945, Elizabeth Terrill Bentley, a thirty-seven-year-old graduate of Vassar and a paid-up Soviet agent, went to the FBI with a 107-page description of Soviet intelligence activities in North America. The following day J. Edgar Hoover sent a secret memo to the White House based on Bentley’s material. It produced few arrests because she offered scant supporting evidence, but her defection forced Moscow to shut down most of the channels feeding nuclear secrets to Kurchatov.
There were other reasons why Soviet espionage in the United States was grinding to a halt. Victory in the war had removed the most compelling reason for scientists at Los Alamos to share designs with their former Soviet allies—the defeat of Nazism. And the U.S. Army had at last begun decoding encrypted Soviet cable traffic, code-named Venona, that corroborated many of Bentley’s allegations.
Without vital intelligence from the true pioneers of nuclear fission in New Mexico, Kurchatov would not be able to complete the bomb. Without the bomb, the most that the Soviet empire could hope to do was defend its interminable frontiers. As the Bikini lagoon erupted, the outlook for international Communism looked bleak indeed. Yet from the bowels of the Lyubianka—headquarters of the KGB and the true engine room of the revolution—there came a glimmer of hope.
“There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person.”
Graham Greene (via Mr. Wormald in a cable to MI6
headquarters in Our Man in Havana)
Shortly before midday on November 14, 1948, an aging Cunard liner laden with immigrants picked up a pilot for the last few miles of its transatlantic crossing. It nosed up the Saint Lawrence Seaway beneath the lowering darkness of the Plains of Abraham and docked in Quebec at five past one. A cold wind raked the quayside. The SS Scythia had been nine days at sea since leaving Cuxhaven on the north German coast. Most of its passengers were in family groups being met by those who had made the journey before them. Most were refugees from the joyless austerity of a country destroyed by war and occupied by its victors. They stepped cautiously down the Scythia’s gangplanks, wrapped in thick coats, clutching what they would need for the first few hours of their new lives.
For a few moments Andrew Kayotis may have stood out among them. As a single man, middle-aged, taller than average despite his stoop, it was probably unavoidable. But he did not stand out for long. No one met him. He carried only a suitcase so had no need of a porter. His papers were in order. He showed his passport, walked briskly to the railway station on the Rue Saint-Pierre, and bought a ticket for the first train to Montreal.
“Kayotis” had spent the crossing reading quietly in his cabin, taking walks on the Scythia’s promenade deck, and talking very little. The voyage had been a hiatus between two worlds, and two identities. His real name was William Fisher. His future name was Emil Goldfus. His Kayotis papers were a convenience of transition, to be torn up and flushed away as soon as Goldfus was ready to spring to life. His code name was “Arach,” and for nine years from the moment he stepped ashore in Quebec he was the most senior Soviet spy in North America.
* * *
At his trial, Fisher would be called a threat to the free world and to civilization itself. It is more accurate to think of him as the Forrest Gump of Soviet foreign intelligence. Most Americans who had dealings with him decided he was “brilliant,” and it was true that he could speak five languages and amuse himself for hours with logarithmic tables and back issues of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But his brilliance never got him far. His luck got him much further. He was a mild, stoic, generous man, far too good natured for his profession, who rode his luck through the terrifying middle decades of the twentieth century straight into the safe haven of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
By the time Life magazine published its article on the Bikini blasts, Fisher had been in training for the toughest assignment of his career for nearly a year. It would take him into the heart and soul of the Main Adversary—the United States, that vast and baffling country that somehow produced guns and butter (and Rita Hayworth) with no guiding hand at the controls of its economy.
Fisher’s main task was to rebuild the Soviet spy network in America. If he succeeded, the flow of information from Los Alamos and the top secret fuel enrichment laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, would start again. Stalin’s scientists would conquer nuclear fission, then leapfrog the West to make a reality of fusion, and the H-bomb as well. Berlin, Washington, and London would quake without a shot being fired. That was the fantasy, and as long as Fisher was safely ensconced at a KGB training facility in the woods outside Moscow, there was no harm in fantasizing.
Fisher’s superiors had chosen him for his background and his personality. As far as they could tell he was a man of unswerving loyalty and discipline. He was educated but not overeducated. In the war he had shown respect for tradecraft and courage under fire. He was a genius with radios and able to deflect attention from himself as completely as a mirror.
He was quite unlike the KGB’s best-known British recruits, the so-called Cambridge Five, whom he detested. Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, and Anthony Blunt were cosseted products of the English class system. Fisher was a stranger to privilege. He saw himself as a Soviet patriot and the others as traitors to their motherland. They were louche and libidinous. He was ascetic. They were dilettantes. He was a Bolshevik born and bred—yet he was also irresistibly human. “There was something—can I say that?—lovable about him.” That was the verdict of the man whom Fisher fooled most comprehensively about his true identity, the New York artist Burton Silverman.
Fisher was rail thin, with the countenance of a weasel and a mental toughness that still amazes those who knew him. He switched identities throughout his working life but never forgot his own. He could hold forth for hours on music theory or mathematics, both of which he taught himself. He was a soulful player of the classical guitar and a passable painter whose work Robert Kennedy would later try to hang in the White House.
He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England in 1903 to German parents. He moved with them to Russia at age eighteen. Those bare facts of his biography gave him fluency in the three languages a secret agent of his era needed most. His father gave him his vocation: Heinrich Fisher was already a committed revolutionary when he first met Lenin in the 1890s. Having grown up on an aristocrat’s estate in central Russia, he turned to Marxism with the zeal and arrogance of the autodidact. He and Lenin taught and agitated at the Saint Petersburg
Technological Institution until Fisher senior was arrested for sedition and exiled to Archangel in the Russian Arctic in 1896. After that, as an ethnic German, he faced deportation and compulsory service in the German army. England offered refuge. Heinrich sailed with his young wife to Newcastle upon Tyne, where they had two sons. The first was named Henry after his father. The second was William, but they called him Willie.
After the 1905 Russian revolution failed, Willie’s father turned to gunrunning to help the proletariat he had left behind. (One shipment that was discovered before being dispatched to the Baltic included more than a million rounds of ammunition, including some for the type of Mauser pistol used to assassinate Czar Nicholas.) After the 1917 revolution succeeded, the Fishers returned to Russia to put themselves at its service.
Willie Fisher embraced the great Soviet experiment in utopia building, and it embraced him back. He joined the Communist Youth League, which put him to work as a translator. Then he served two years in the Red Army as a radio operator. He was young enough for his command of languages and experience of a foreign country to be a qualification, not grounds for suspicion. By the age of twenty-four, in the eyes of the ever-expanding Soviet intelligence apparatus, he was ripe for recruitment. He was also married to the illegitimate daughter of a Polish count.
Bridge of Spies Page 2
