Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  Briefing over, the pilots were invited individually into an adjoining room to take a lie-detector test. Powers went through with this even though he considered it an unpardonable affront to his integrity. He was then dispatched—via Saint Louis, Omaha, and Saint Louis again, to shake off any tails—to New Mexico.

  At the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, Colonel Flickinger of the Air Research and Development Command had devised a medical exam to test the sinews and sanity of the toughest pilots in the business. It was in their best interests, of course—Flickinger had done pioneering work in “upper air medicine” to help pilots flying transports over the Himalayas during the war. It just didn’t feel like it.

  The tests lasted a week. In his memoir Powers called them “incredibly thorough” and left it at that, but he admitted to his friend Jack Goff that after a subsequent checkup he flunked an important exercise and had to fly back to Albuquerque to redo it. It was deceptively simple: he had to sit on a chair in a silent room for two hours, but he had fallen asleep.

  Tony Bevacqua rememberes some of the more uncomfortable tests. “We had to put an arm in a bucket of ice until we didn’t want it to be there anymore, and they had us hyperventilate on purpose to see if we’d have some kind of fit or seizure. We ended up with our arms rigid across our chests, like a corpse, and then they’d try to force them open again.”

  There was more. The pilots were spun in centrifuges, sometimes until they blacked out. They had electrodes attached to their scalps for hours at a time and barium inserted “everywhere you could think of.” They were even asked for semen samples. Why? It turned out that the U-2 boys were being used as guinea pigs for the Mercury astronauts’ physicals, though whether John Glenn’s sperm count or motility was ever a factor in his selection remains unknown.

  Glenn was compensated for his privations at Lovelace with space travel, enduring fame and a career as a U.S. senator. The U-2 pilots were required to suffer in silence. Only one of Powers’s group was eliminated at this stage. The rest were handed sheaves of airline tickets and ordered to report to a manufacturer of ladies’ bras and girdles two time zones to the east.

  The tickets took them, one at a time, to the David Clark Company of Worcester, Massachusetts. Mr. Clark still made bras. He also made pressure suits. As part of their training, the pilots would be shown why. They would sit in a depressurization chamber at the Wright Field aeromedical laboratory wearing a pressure suit and holding a condom full of water. As the pilot breathed piped oxygen and the suit gradually inflated, the air would be sucked out of the chamber to simulate increasing altitude. At about 55,000 feet the water in the condom would begin to boil. At 70,000 sudden depressurization in a cockpit would kill an unprotected pilot in ten seconds, and sudden depressurization happened in U-2s all the time: the power source for pressurizing the cockpit was the engine, and engine flameouts because of the thin air were practically routine.

  Hence Colonel Flickinger’s visit to the Pentagon the previous year. The template was Richard III’s horseshoe at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485; without a shoe his kingdom was lost. Without a decent pressure suit for the CIA, the cold war was liable to heat up. The stakes were no higher than for Kelly Johnson, but they were still extremely high. Given ten months when he had said he needed at least three years, Flickinger’s first call had been to Clark.

  As self-effacing as he was stubborn, David G. Clark left school at fifteen with no qualifications but a deep interest in science. He channeled it into two-way stretch fibers and the knitting business. The results included six patents and a thriving factory churning out the kind of supportive women’s underwear that was much in demand in Eisenhower’s years of plenty. From the war years onward, Clark also built a niche business custom sewing anti-G suits for fighter pilots. But as Flickinger had told the impatient secretary of the air force, the best pressure suit that Clark or anyone had yet produced was of the “get me down” variety; a high flier’s life vest, strictly for emergencies.

  The new specification was for a suit that could be worn uninflated for twelve hours and for four hours providing full life support. It was to inflate whenever pressure in the cockpit fell below the equivalent of 28,000 feet (roughly the height of Annapurna).

  Clark’s early suits had been based on a prototype designed by a Dr. James Henry of the University of Southern California. The prototype had been tested by Dr. Henry himself in long sessions in the low-pressure chamber at Wright Field. There was something distinctly Victorian about his masochism, which Clark described with a dry eye for detail: “Several of us watched through the chamber windows while Dr. Henry demonstrated the suit at various simulated altitudes up to 90,000 feet,” he wrote.

  He remained above 65,000 feet for over half an hour. The suit was obviously intended to fit closely and extended well up his neck. The “helmet” was designed to overlap the suit at the neck, but did not quite make it. As Dr. Henry moved about at the higher altitudes, his flesh would frequently pop out about as much as a hen’s egg and then reduce again.

  The “helmet” was not a helmet in any modern sense. Rather,

  it consisted of curved plexiglass with a black rubber inflatable seal at the edges to cover [Dr. Henry’s] eyes, nose and mouth.… Closely fitted fabric covered his chin and the back of his head. The top of his head and his ears were not covered. As he moved about his scalp would lift, seemingly as much as an inch. Dr. Henry appeared not to notice these phenomena. The other watchers did not mention it either.

  The U-2 pilots had to be allowed to keep their scalps. For them, Clark used a proprietary elasticated fabric to create an airtight seal between suit and helmet. But Dr. Henry’s basic idea of using compressed oxygen to apply direct pressure all over the body via inflatable tubes and bladders survived. When everything else went wrong at seventy thousand feet, the pilots could be reasonably sure of fifteen pounds of pressure per square inch of their bodies, three around their heads, and a steady supply to breathe.

  Survival in the stratosphere came at the price of comfort. The only way to ingest anything was via a straw fed through a self-sealing hole at the bottom of the helmet’s faceplate. Secretion and excretion were still more awkward. If a pilot had to sit in the sun for more than a few minutes before takeoff, his regulation long johns would be drenched in sweat for the whole flight. If he had to urinate, well, he had to urinate. And so on. As Tony Bevacqua says over eggs Benedict at a diner near his home in California, “Shit happens.”

  Form followed function. The suits’ tubes, or capstans, necessarily ran along the outside of the suit. It was the principle used later by the architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers when they garlanded the outside of the Centre Pompidou in Paris with its innards. In both cases the effect was spectacularly modern. Not many people saw the U-2 pilots, but those who did knew they were glimpsing the future.

  Just in case the Russians were watching Clark’s factory in Worcester for signs of a sudden spike in output of girdles or anything else, his staff were enlisted to the cause of security. They were instructed not to fraternize with visiting pilots or even admit they recognized them if they did. This meant that measuring could be unnerving. As Jerry McIlmoyle remembered it long after finally being admitted to the program, the pressure suit room was reached via the factory’s open-plan ground floor, full of women sewing bras and corsets and carefully not making eye contact. A wooden stairway led from there to a basement corridor ending in a green door. Beyond that was the regular flight suit department, and beyond that a black door leading to another room, where he was told to strip to his undershorts and stand on a two-foot-high wooden podium.

  “A stoop-shouldered, wizened old man” then entered the room and measured every inch—“and I mean every inch”—of his body, using a cup to determine the volume of his genitals.

  The session ended with the words “Okay, we’re through. Come back in the morning.” Clark’s people then worked through the night to complete two perfectly fitting pressure suits. A company rep a
dded another sheaf of airline tickets. Rather than head straight back to Malmstrom AFB, McIlmoyle was ordered to spend a weekend in Manhattan at taxpayers’ expense, “just like you’re a tourist.” If the idea was to fool people like Fisher and Hayhanen, it would have worked. From all the available evidence, they could not have been less interested.

  * * *

  If frequent flier miles existed in 1956, Powers would have racked them up.

  Suited and indoctrinated into the ways of the agency, he formally resigned his air force commission and flew to the West Coast to report, as a civilian, to March Air Force Base at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains. Five other ex–fighter pilots made the same trip: fit young men in patterned shirts with short haircuts and heavy shoulder bags courtesy of the David Clark Company. They climbed into a Douglas C-47 with blacked-out windows and flew northeast to what would become the most famous lake bed in the history of conspiracy theories.

  The Watertown strip at Groom Lake had been used before, for emergency landings by trainee pilots in the war. It was rediscovered ten years later by Tony LeVier, Lockheed’s chief test pilot. His orders were to take the company Beechcraft and search the wide-open spaces of Nevada for somewhere to test a secret plane.

  In fact there was nothing open about Groom Lake, and not only because of the mountains that ringed it. The airspace above was closed to commercial traffic because of the nuclear test site immediately to the west. This would complicate U-2 pilot training because the whole operation had to be evacuated to Phoenix whenever there was a test at Jackass Flats. But for the time being the lake bed looked perfect. On his first reconnaissance LeVier made a low pass and dropped a sixteen-pound shot put ball out of his cockpit window. It bounced. Soon afterward he returned with Johnson and a tall passenger with a high forehead and patrician mien. He was dressed in chinos, tennis shoes, and a checkered blazer, and Johnson referred to him as Mr. B.

  “B” was for “Bissell”—Richard Bissell—but it might as well have been for “blue blood.” The son of a Connecticut insurance mogul who had grown up in Mark Twain’s gingerbread house in Hartford, Bissell was a world-class economist who liked to call himself a man-eating shark when confronted with red tape. This was his first trip to Groom Lake but by no means his first out west on U-2 business. He was the favorite troubleshooter of Allen Dulles, director of Central Intelligence, and he shared his boss’s fascination with the idea of covert mischief in a free society. He had been assigned to run the agency’s in-house air force the moment Eisenhower had approved the U-2 plan in 1954.

  At this stage of his career there was more than a hint of the young Donald Rumsfeld about Bissell. He was brilliant, arrogant, iconoclastic, funny, and successful. He was also inclined to push things a bit too far. Bissell later took the fall, deservedly, for the Bay of Pigs disaster. He had no shortage of critics before that, either, among them a senior U-2 pilot who despaired of his blindness toward mounting morale and security problems four thousand miles away in Turkey. “Bissell refused to accept my advice or anyone else’s,” Harry Cordes wrote bitterly. “He thought he knew it all.” But certain things he did know better than anyone else in government, and one of them was how to get things done. His was the only number Johnson needed to know on the East Coast, and without it the U-2 might never have been built.

  No photographs survive of Bissell, Johnson, and LeVier stepping out of their Bonanza in the dry heat of the Nevada spring and chatting quietly about how to build a nonexistent airport. But if such images did exist, they would deserve space in the cold war pantheon.

  Seen from the air, Bissell remembered, Groom Lake “was approximately three to four miles in diameter and smooth as a billiard table.” As LeVier came down, they saw the outline of the old airstrip ending at the southern edge of the lake. Having done his homework, LeVier landed on the lake bed, not the strip. “Once on the ground, we walked over to the airstrip to see if it was viable,” said Bissell. “The closer we got, the deeper we sank into soft, sagebrush-covered soil. Had we attempted to land on it, we most assuredly would have crashed.”

  Still, Bissell agreed that this was the place. They flew back to Los Angeles (over an atom bomb perched on a scaffold and primed to go off nine hours later), and Bissell returned to Washington. He talked to Dulles, who talked to Eisenhower, who in a single Oval Office meeting agreed to add the lake and its environs to the adjacent test site. Johnson had his secret sandbox. Bissell called it Watertown in a nod to Dulles’s birthplace in upstate New York. Johnson called it Paradise Ranch.

  In the next three months a contractor who thought he was working for C & J Engineering paved the airstrip, sunk a well alongside it, and put up three hangars, a mess hall, and basic accommodation for two hundred people, all for $800,000. Workers and building materials were flown in from Burbank on air force shuttles.

  Most of the buildings were positioned on a fresh slab of paving at the north end of the runway near the lake bed, where there was also room to park incoming aircraft. It was here, in May 1956, at the foot of the barren Belted Mountains, that Powers saw his first U-2. He was polite about it in his memoir: “It was a strange-looking aircraft, unlike any other I had ever seen … a jet, but with the body of a glider. Though a hybrid, it was nevertheless very individual, with a beautiful symmetry all its own.”

  Jerry McIlmoyle was more enthusiastic: “What did I feel when I first saw the U2? It was total, unbridled excitement.… What was it like to take off and climb above 70,000 feet? It was total euphoria; I was thrilled to the core with absolute and complete focus on what I was doing.”

  Marty Knutson, whose exploits in the U-2 became the stuff of legend, “almost died of disappointment” when he first saw it. “I looked in the cockpit and saw that the damn thing had a yoke.… The last straw. Either you flew with a stick like a self-respecting fighter jock or you were a crappy bomber driver—a goddam disgrace.”

  The truth is the U-2 did not appeal to a fighter jock’s outer machismo or his inner aesthete. It was not a hot rod. It was not cute or sexy. It would not land on a carrier, at least not in this form, and it would never break the sound barrier. It looked like a child’s drawing of a plane, with oversize wings and a generic tail that could have been stuck on as an afterthought. It was also a work in progress.

  History has looked favorably on the U-2 because it did what was asked of it. But when first delivered to Groom Lake and rolled out of the clamshell doors of a double-decker Globemaster transport in July 1955, it was a hunch wrapped in a boast covered in a tarpaulin.

  Like Burt Rutan, the maverick aircraft designer from Mojave who won the X Prize for private space flight with a rocket plane powered by laughing gas, Kelly Johnson lived on his reputation as well as his wits. He had helped design Lockheed’s Electra airliner and F-104 Starfighter, so when he told General Philip Strong it would be a cinch to put “wings like a tent” on a Starfighter’s body, the hunch carried weight. When he boasted that he could produce a prototype U-2 in eight months flat and a detachment of operational versions in a year and a half, the East Coast people trusted him. But that trust was not based on flow charts and organograms. It was based on Kelly’s experience of driving engineers to their limits under the pressures of a “hot” war, and on his intimidating chutzpah. When the first U-2’s disassembled wings and fuselage arrived at Watertown, there was no guarantee that they would fly, let alone for four thousand miles at seventy thousand feet. That miracle was to come. The first was that the prototype existed at all.

  Johnson famously produced his first detailed plan of the U-2 after winning the contract, not before. It was a twenty-three-page document put together in seven days that served as the blueprint for three dozen designers who would work hundred-hour weeks, in shifts, around the clock, to meet his eight-month deadline. Johnson’s team were all male and all white and they all smoked heavily. Since no janitors had security clearance for the Skunk Works, they had to clean their own toilets and empty their own ashtrays at the same time as saving
the free world. Since no women were present in the flesh, pictures of them without too many clothes on went up on the walls.

  The design problems were all to do with altitude. Johnson’s rule of thumb was that every extra pound of weight would cost a foot of height, bringing the planes that much closer to Soviet surface-to-air missiles. He insisted on using aluminum up to two thirds thinner than usual, and titanium where possible. The tail was attached with three short bolts (an engineering decision that was to have a spectacular impact on the course of human affairs). There was a grand total of two landing wheels, forcing pilots to land the U-2 like a bicycle with an eighty-foot wingspan. To save weight and clear space for cameras, there was no central spar connecting the two wings through the fuselage. The wings were simply bolted on, but they still had to support the weight of six hundred gallons of fuel each. Their length and fragility created a serious danger once in flight. Engineers called it aeroelastic divergence leading to catastrophic failure. Others called it flapping leading to falling off. Hence, in Johnson’s diary for June 20, 1955: “A very busy time in that we have only 650 hours to airplane completion point. Having terrific struggle with the wing.” But three weeks was a long time in the Skunk Works. “Airplane is essentially completed,” Johnson wrote on July 15. “Terrifically long hours. Everybody almost dead.”

  In the end the only real answer to the midair disintegration problem was to beg the pilots to take it easy and stay above any turbulence. But solving one set of altitude problems created another. The higher the U-2 flew, the thinner the air rushing over its wings and into its engine. That meant an ever-narrower gap between stall speed and “Mach buffet” and an ever-greater chance of the engine packing up. These were occupational hazards the pilots would have to learn to live with.

  Powers did just that. He was a natural in the U-2. Unlike Marty Knutson, he never complained about the yoke. He came through his two months at the ranch without a hitch (and with high praise for the food, which, with pilot morale in mind, was “exceptional by any standard”). He wrote later of a “special aloneness” in the cockpit, which seems to have suited his temperament. There were discomforts to be borne in return for membership in the U-2 elite, including long hours in the pressure suit and prebreathing of pure oxygen before each flight to purge the body of nitrogen as a defense against the bends in the event of depressurization. But he took them in stride, marveling instead at the extraordinary views to be had of the American West from thirteen miles up. On one flight, when his drift sight showed the Colorado River slicing through Arizona below him, he could see a six-hundred-mile sweep of the West Coast up ahead, from the Monterey Peninsula to Baja California.