Between that fence and the North Pole, in 1956, lay 8.6 million square miles of denied territory—nearly three times the area of the lower forty-eight U.S. states. In this vastness a foreigner could travel only under the strictest supervision of the KGB and its subsidiaries, if at all. North of the fence lay forests that took seven days to cross by train and three-thousand-mile rivers debouching under pack ice into the Arctic Ocean. There were whole mountain ranges never sullied by a human foot. There was the great water-filled gash in the earth’s crust known as Lake Baikal, the endless land ocean of the steppe, and the terrible frozen emptiness of the taiga. And there were launchpads, test sites, and closed nuclear cities devoted entirely to the design and manufacture of the instruments of Armageddon. This much the CIA knew from cautious reconnaissance flights along the edges of Soviet airspace and a small cadre of defectors and informants. But it was not enough.
In August 1953 an earth-shattering explosion about one hundred miles west of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan marked the Soviet Union’s arrival in the age of the superbomb—the H-bomb. The Americans had already detonated one. It vaporized Eniwetok atoll near Bikini and produced a mushroom cloud twenty-five miles high, filmed in glorious orange Technicolor for the president. They called it Ivy Mike. The Russians called theirs a layer cake, or sloika: it was based on Andrei Sakharov’s “first idea,” to pile fission and fusion fuel layer on layer in search of the biggest bang in history. The result was not a true hydrogen bomb by some purists’ definition, but it was entirely homemade and a respectable thirty times more powerful than the one that killed 140,000 people at Hiroshima.
In 1954 the Soviets reverted to type and copied the American H-bomb design. Yield: 1.6 megatons, or one hundred Hiroshimas. The arms race was picking up speed, and the steppe was starting to betray the cost with giant craters and concentric scorch marks. (Deformed fetuses would come later, collected by doctors in Semipalatinsk and stored secretly in jars.)
Not only the steppe suffered. A thousand miles to the north, off the island of Novaya Zemlya, the Soviet navy had loaded a nuclear warhead onto a torpedo and fired it into a fleet of more than thirty ships crewed by five hundred sheep and goats. The animals died swiftly, and the destroyer closest to the blast sank without trace. In due course word of the new northern test site seeped out, and its skyline of frigid mountains floating on white cloud served as the target of General Jack D. Ripper’s 843rd bomb wing, flown into oblivion in Dr. Strangelove.
In the film it is President “Dmitri,” interrupted in the course of a loud musical diversion, who provides the terrifying unpredictability at the eastern end of the hotline. In reality it was Nikita Khrushchev—showman, warrior, and Soviet premier, constantly trying not to be outflanked by his more hawkish colleagues in the politburo.
In November 1956 Khrushchev hosted a reception in Moscow for the visiting Polish prime minister. Weeks earlier, he had ordered Soviet tanks to crush the Hungarian uprising in Budapest. Western condemnation was still running at full flow, and Western diplomats invited to the reception were being careful not to seem too grateful to their hosts. Emboldened by vodka, Khrushchev struck a pose in the middle of the room, called for silence, and offered those capitalists present an impromptu harangue.
“We are Bolsheviks!” he began. “If you don’t like us, don’t accept our invitations, and don’t invite us to come to see you! Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” In Russian: Myi vas pokhoronim! Those three words—four in translation—were pure bluster; a delusional socioeconomic forecast based on the Marxist adage that the proletariat is the undertaker of the bourgeoisie. But the speaker was one of two men in the world who could launch a nuclear cataclysm. His words were widely misinterpreted to suggest burial under mountains of radioactive rubble. More than any other single threat they seemed to confirm that Khrushchev was out to escalate and win the thermonuclear arms race. But could he?
There was only one way to find out. Aerial photography from unmanned balloons had been tried, but they only took pictures of where the wind sent them, and they often came down in Russia. In 1953 the Royal Air Force (RAF) flew a stripped-down B-57 bomber over a new missile test range near the Volga delta, but it landed in Iran pockmarked with bullet holes and returned few useful photographs. The result was a National Intelligence Estimate in 1954 that had no intelligence on the test range or on missile production or numbers and therefore gave no estimate. No one in the American intelligence community thought the answer was more spies. The only serious suggestion was a new spy plane. As General Philip Strong told his boss, Robert Amory, chief intelligence gatherer at the CIA: “We’ve just got to get upstairs.”
Initially the air force insisted on being in charge. It invited designs for a new reconnaissance plane in 1953 and backed a beautiful but flimsy twin-engined idea from one of Kelly Johnson’s rivals. It was called the Bell X-16 and never flew. Then the charismatic inventor and entrepreneur Edwin “Din” Land, millionaire inventor of the Polaroid camera, called on Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, and urged him to take control. In a letter following up their discussion, he pressed home the argument that the time was ripe for a wholesale reinvention of the spying game.
“I am not sure that we have made it clear that we feel there are many reasons why this activity is appropriate for the CIA,” he wrote. “We told you that this seems to us the kind of action and technique that is right for the contemporary version of the CIA; a modern and scientific way for an Agency that is always supposed to be looking, to do its looking.”
Land headed a top secret panel within a semisecret commission appointed by President Eisenhower to solve the most pressing national security problem of the age—how to prevent a nuclear Pearl Harbor. He was the Thomas Edison of his time: a promiscuous inventor and a natural entrepreneur whose stake in the Polaroid Corporation made him a multibillionaire in twenty-first-century terms and whose immaculate dark eyebrows made him look a little like Cary Grant. He appended to his letter to Dulles a summary of the case for aerial reconnaissance that managed to be both concise and splendidly pompous: “During a period in which Russia has free access to the geography of all our bases and major nuclear facilities, as well as to our entirely military and civilian economy, we have no corresponding knowledge about Russia.… Unfortunately it is the US, the more mature, more civilized, and more responsible country that must bear the burden of not knowing what is happening [there].”
Land believed that the mature, civilized, responsible way of bearing this burden was straight out of Popular Mechanics: “a jet-powered glider,” “an extraordinary and unorthodox vehicle” that his good friend Kelly Johnson at the Lockheed Corporation had already designed and offered to build in total secrecy to fly over the Soviet Union at seventy thousand feet and photograph in minute detail on each clear-weather mission a strip of Russia two hundred miles wide and 2,500 miles long.
The “Lockheed super glider,” Land went on, would fly “well out of reach of present Russian interception and high enough to have a good chance of avoiding detection.” But even if it were detected, he averred quite wrongly, it would be “so obviously unarmed and devoid of military usefulness, that it would minimize affront to the Russians.”
For an inventor, Land had an impressive grasp of the military-strategic balance. He was also a terrific salesman. The clock was ticking, he said: Russian fighters and surface-to-air missiles were flying ever higher, meaning that “the opportunity for safe overflight may last only a few years.… We therefore recommend immediate action through special channels in CIA in procuring the Lockheed glider and in establishing the CIA taskforce. No proposal or program that we have seen in intelligence planning can so quickly bring so much vital information at so little risk and at so little cost.”
The letter was sent on November 5, 1954. Two days later a B-29 (combat ceiling 36,000 feet) was shot down over the Sea of Japan while photographing a Soviet base in the Kuril Islands. On November 24, at 8:15 a.m., Eisenhower sat be
hind his desk in the Oval Office as his most senior military and intelligence planners, including Dulles, his number two at the CIA, and a somewhat grudging General Nathan Twining of the air force, filed in and made the case for the U-2. By 8:30 a.m. they were filing out again. At four that afternoon a call was placed from the Pentagon to Kelly Johnson in his windowless Burbank office. He could go ahead and build his glider.
* * *
In the love story of Frank and Barbara Powers, both principals would have looked at home on an eight-by-ten-foot movie poster. He was the fighter pilot with the dreamy eyes who blushed deep red when introduced to Barbara at the air force cafeteria where her mother worked the night shift. She was the eighteen-year-old secretary who called in there most evenings on her way home from work. They fell hard for each other despite her reputation for trouble among his friends and fellow fliers. Or maybe because of it.
They were married in the spring of 1955, and the first night of their new life, at least, was happy. “Lordy, but how that handsome Ridge Runner of mine could make love!” Barbara would write. (She always gave him credit for his performance in bed, even when she gave him credit for nothing else.) Disappointment set in early. Nine months after a blissful honeymoon in the Bahamas, her husband came home to tell her he was leaving the air force—the next day. For the time being he was also leaving her. He would be gone for three years but could not say where or why; only that he would still be flying.
Both would later plead their cases in the divorce court of public opinion. In Barbara’s account the “bombshell” is a fait accompli. After dropping it her husband even has the gall to accuse her of worrying first about how she will pay the bills. In Frank’s version, he is offered “risky but patriotic work” outside the air force but his first reaction is to turn it down for Barbara. He changes his mind only when she points out that they could use the extra money it would bring: “We had recently made payment on a new car; the balance was still due.”
It was the perfect rationale for the imperfect spy. Money was always a concern for Powers, as his sister Jessica was reminded when he called on her in Washington soon after starting his new job.
“I was nineteen, working in DC and living there with my sister Janice,” she recalls. “He dropped in to see us and the only thing he ever said about his work was: ‘I pay more taxes than you make.’ And I thought, hey, you got a good job. He was not giving anything away. But you sort of got the idea that he was proud of what he was doing, or proud that he was making so much.”
Or, most likely, both. Powers was his father’s son, driven by a sense of obligation to provide. But in his own unspoken thoughts he was also an all-American hero, a brother to five adoring sisters, a Kentucky college track star, and now master of the seven thousand pounds of thrust that he could blast from the rear end of a Thunderstreak. From such beginnings serious accomplishment was surely possible. He might have been a soft-spoken spelunker on the outside, but that hid a tightly wound coil of potential.
The meeting at Turner AFB wing headquarters was at 8:00 a.m. A handful of other pilots showed up. A major from wing command made a simple announcement. On account of their exceptional pilot ratings and top secret clearance, those present were invited to apply for unspecified non—air force work. No further information was available, but anyone wanting to know more was told where to go and when. Powers wanted to know more. At 1900 hours that evening he knocked self-consciously on the door of cottage 1 at the Radium Springs Motel, not far from Turner. As instructed, he wore civilian clothes and asked for a Mr. William Collins.
Mr. Collins was not alone. He was one of a small group of youngish men in trim civilian clothes who had checked into the motel as if for a convention of clones. There was nothing remarkable about any of them except their sameness and their calm professionalism.
“The rationale for meeting off base was to have an environment where a pilot can feel free to talk if he expresses an interest in separating from his normal air force activity,” says one of those who played the Collins role from time to time. Perhaps. But there were two other reasons for the peculiar venue: to keep the meetings secret and to generate a certain excitement. Who the heck was Collins? What did he mean by the chance to do “something important for your country”? Why the backdrop of king-size beds and shower curtains?
He was with the CIA, Collins said at a follow-up meeting the next day, as if that explained it.
In a sense, it did. In 1956 the Central Intelligence Agency was still a genuine mystery to everyone except those who ran it, and to some of them as well. Almost no one could point to it on a map, since its headquarters in Virginia was not yet built. No one knew for sure where its responsibilities started and those of the Pentagon and State Department ended, because it was in the process of stealing territory from both. And no one could equate it with disastrous arrogance or extra-judicial adventurism, because the Bay of Pigs was still a little-known beauty spot on the south coast of Cuba. To the likes of Francis Gary Powers there was just the acronym, and whatever it made him feel felt good.
The agency was building a brand-new plane, Collins said. It would fly higher than anything he had ever flown before. It would penetrate deep into Russia. It would photograph whatever they were building there that Mr. Khrushchev wanted to keep secret, and it needed pilots willing to take it there for $2,500 a month.
“I was amazed,” Powers wrote later. “And immensely proud, not only of being chosen to participate in such a venture, but, even more, proud of my country … for having the courage, and guts, to do what it believed essential and right.” Those words were written in 1970 with a skeptical public in mind, but they ring true. Forget Korea—this was the summons he had been waiting for. This was the call-up that suited his quiet ambition, that would catapult him from the great herd of combat-ready but untested first lieutenants into an elite of specialists. This was real. Its secrecy made it so, because secrecy was currency in the existential standoff with Communism that brought duck-and-cover drills to Minnesota high schools and ever-bigger mushroom clouds to the evening news. Powers would be airborne in a silhouette that Jack Goff wouldn’t recognize even if he could see it, squinting up from Big Stone Gap or wherever Jack was working nowadays. And the pay would be five times what Frank was earning at Turner. He was in. He said so there and then at the Radium Springs Motel, even though Bill Collins insisted that he take another night to think it over.
So it was that Francis G. Powers left Turner AFB on orders for temporary duty off base, and Francis G. Palmer checked into the Dupont Plaza Hotel in Washington. He went to his room and waited for a call.
He left behind a wife whose world had been upended. It might have helped their marriage if Powers had been allowed to tell her more about his work, but Bill Collins had forbidden it. He had supplied a PO box number in California for wives who wanted to write letters and a phone number in Virginia for emergencies. Still, for all Barbara knew her husband had been recruited to fly drugs in from the Caribbean. She wasn’t happy.
The same was true of many of those left behind, pilots as well as relatives. Soon after Powers’s disappearance, flight commander Lieutenant Jerry McIlmoyle reported for duty with the 515th Strategic Fighter Bomber Squadron at Malmstrom AFB in Great Falls, Montana. He had been home on leave. In his absence, three friends had gone. Lieutenants Barry Baker and Jim Barnes and Captain Frank Grace had resigned and vanished without saying anything to anyone.
“We just never heard from them again,” McIlmoyle would write. “I thought Frank, Barry and James had been good and close friends. We had all been in Korea together; we partied together, played bridge and poker and camped out together. Christmas rolled around and we received no cards, no phone calls, absolutely nothing from any of them. I really didn’t understand why.” There were chance encounters in the decades that followed, “but there was no camaraderie, just a handshake and smile, no small talk. I was reminded of the old Pentagon euphemism: those three friends ‘evanesced.’ ”
There was nothing like a disappearing pilot to spark rumors about where he’d gone. When one of them died—it turned out to be Frank Grace—those rumors gathered urgency. McIlmoyle and others were ordered to fly four Thunderstreaks to Texas for the funeral. They learned en route that Grace had hit a telegraph pole while taking off at night from an unlighted airstrip, but they were ordered “not to ask any questions about the crash, where, what, how, when and most especially not about what aircraft he had been flying.”
So what had he been flying? Human nature demanded an answer. The CIA conspired heroically to withhold it. With no closed cities, no six-thousand-mile fences, no way of muzzling the press, and no standing threat of a no-questions-asked bullet for suspected traitors, this wasn’t easy, which is why Powers found himself booked into the Dupont Plaza in someone else’s name, sitting on the bed and waiting for the phone to ring. He felt “more than a little foolish.” When the call came through, it was Bill Collins again, directing him to another room in the same hotel for a more detailed briefing on the mission and a primer on rudimentary tradecraft. There were several other recruits in the room. Whenever Collins talked, he kept the radio on. When Powers turned it off to hear better—which he did only once—Collins fell silent.
Bridge of Spies Page 7
