Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  The flight training was thorough. It had to be. The only easy part about flying the U-2 was taking off, which Tony LeVier discovered on his first test took place automatically at seventy knots (he had not intended to leave the ground). The initial climb was spectacular, but if the pilot forgot to ease his angle of attack at 35,000 feet the plane was liable to explode because of the expanding fuel in its wings. At 70,000 feet the giant Pratt & Whitney engine that occupied most of the fuselage had 7 percent of the power it boasted at sea level. That high up, the margin between stalling and speed wobble was no more than five knots, meaning that in a tight turn one wingtip could shudder for one reason and the other for the other. All of which was straightforward compared with landing. The U-2 was supremely reluctant to lose height. It was designed to have a gliding radius of 250 miles in the event of engine failure, and some pilots found they could double that. Close to the ground, especially the hot ground of Groom Lake, it defied Newton. A pilot could be ten feet from landing and yet not land. Even with its engine idling, Mr. Johnson’s albatross would skim clear across the lake bed unless actively forced down. Johnson assumed the way to do this was nose first, but his prototype nearly disintegrated when LeVier tried it. LeVier eventually made landing look easy with a more conventional tail-wheel-first approach, but even then it was a delicate business requiring a countdown from a chase car and a stall timed to perfection. For him, as for those who followed, there was no simulator, no copilot, and no ejector seat.

  In the end, each pilot had to figure out the U-2 for himself. It could be a hairy business. One afternoon Bissell was in his office in Washington when Groom Lake called to say that a U-2 had reported an engine flameout over Tennessee and was gliding toward an air force base near Albuquerque.

  “He believed he could make the base in about half an hour on a long, flat glide,” Bissell recalled. “I got on the telephone to the commander of the Albuquerque base and told him that in about 30 to 40 minutes he should expect a special aircraft, a U-2, to land; he was to move it to a remote part of the base as quickly as possible, have a tarpaulin put over it to disguise its shape, and post a guard. I can only imagine his surprise at receiving a call from the CIA, but 45 minutes later the phone rang and he reported that the flight did indeed land … and the pilot was available to speak with me.”

  When Bissell flew to Groom Lake to inspect the faulty engine, he reached into its tail end and pulled out the remains of a compressor blade that had crystallized and disintegrated in the extreme cold of seventy thousand feet.

  Powers was lucky. He had no near misses in training and no doubt that he would be able to glide down and restart his engine if it flamed out over the United States. What nagged at the back of his mind was what to do should it happen over Russia, but it was not a question anyone actually asked—or answered.

  Each group that passed through the ranch spent a week at a CIA farm back east, part of which had been converted to resemble a Soviet border installation. The pilots learned how to scramble under a fence and walk across a plowed field without leaving footprints, but there was no discussion of what to do if the border was a thousand miles away. Powers concluded that the exercise was more for psychological than practical purposes. He was surely right. And he would just as surely have been disturbed to know that both Bissell and Dulles had assured Eisenhower it was “a given” that no pilot would survive a crash on Soviet territory.

  By the end of his time at Watertown, reports were reaching the CIA of tests on a monstrous Russian rocket engine designed to develop 450 tons of thrust—enough to hurl a thermonuclear warhead five thousand miles through space. A National Security Agency listening post in Iran, in the mountains near Mashhad, had picked up signs of missile tests deep in the Soviet hinterland and farther east than the known test range at Kapustin Yar. It was past time to find out where.

  Powers’s group was given two weeks’ leave, then sent to Turkey. He dropped in on Pound and dodged questions about his work but failed to allay his father’s suspicions. When he telephoned from the airport to say a final good-bye, Powers senior said he’d figured out that Frank was working for the FBI. His sister Jessica was less suspicious but had more evidence to work with. Frank had paid her a visit too. “I had a folding canvas cot and we asked him if he’d like to stay,” she says. “He said yes, and he took off his shirt and it looked to me as though you could play checkers on his back. I didn’t ask—he could have been in a fight. But I guess now it was that suit.”

  * * *

  Powers’s departure for foreign parts had a peculiar effect on his friends and family. A large number of them followed him. Jessica would be among them, in circumstances she could scarcely credit and that even now she struggles to believe were real. But before her there was her brother’s wife.

  Barbara Powers had a good deal in common with her father-in-law, including an instant mutual dislike. Like him, she was hardworking, hotheaded, mainly self-taught, and not easily intimidated. Like him, she made up for what she lacked in formal education with a ferocious impatience with anyone who might be keeping something from her. With Frank’s disappearance, that meant Frank, but also the whole damned outfit he was working for. It was not an outfit that particularly wanted to hear from her.

  In Richard Bissell’s air force, deniability was everything. His aircraft flew without markings. His pilots flew without dog tags. Their underpants had no labels, and the brand names were ground off the zippers on their pressure suits. His Washington headquarters was a decrepit suite of upstairs offices in an old brothel on E Street, and his business, should anyone ask, was meteorology.

  The cover story he approved for the first detachment of U-2s and pilots shipped overseas was that they would be gathering high-altitude weather data for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. An unclassified press release announced that by arrangement with the USAF’s Air Weather Service the planes would be studying the jet stream, convective clouds, and cosmic ray effects at 55,000 feet. It was the same story for Powers’s detachment, Detachment B, which would be based in “Greece.” NACA went along with it, and so did most pilots’ families.

  Not Barbara. Shorn of her husband, she had left Turner Air Force Base and gone home to Milledgeville, Georgia, to live with her mother. The plan had been to sit tight and bank Frank’s implausible earnings for a down payment on a house. It palled quickly. He had been gone all of three months when she dialed the number Frank had left her for emergencies and told a startled agency man that she would be flying to Athens the following day to find her husband.

  The agency man tried to put her off, but it was too late. The tickets were bought: Air France via Paris.

  “All right, then,” he told her. “You are instructed to go to the King George Hotel immediately upon your arrival.”

  Later that day, Turkish time, Powers climbed out of a U-2 after a training flight, his long johns drenched in sweat and his head spinning with tactical pilotage charts of the Soviet border, to be handed a note by an irritated detachment commander, a Colonel Perry. He couldn’t take it in, so Colonel Perry had to spell it out. Barbara was on her way.

  There was time, as things turned out. A few hours out of Washington Barbara woke to see two of the Air France Constellation’s four engines on fire. She was marooned in Newfoundland for five days.

  She was eventually reunited with her husband, as instructed, at the finest hotel in Greece—two bright young things enjoying peerless views of the Acropolis and all the freedoms of the Pax Americana. They enjoyed each other’s company as well, until Frank screwed up his face and broke it to her that he was not based in Greece; nor could he say where he’d flown in from.

  Barbara was dismayed but not defeated. He’d flown in once. He could do it again. She would stay in Athens.

  The agency appears to have sensed quickly that it would be counterproductive to pick a fight with the redoubtable Mrs. Powers. With some discreet nudging she was found work as secretary to an air force judge advocate based in At
hens, a Captain Reuben B. Jackson. It was a humane arrangement, and soon a human one. Captain Jackson, whose wife and three children had tired of the expat life and returned home, asked Barbara to perform the role of hostess at his cocktail parties. She obliged; he fell in love.

  Barbara later claimed she was entirely unaware of Captain Jackson’s feelings for her until he stunned her with a letter saying he was seeking a divorce. Frank wanted to believe her, but friends of his who knew her couldn’t. “How d’you tell your buddy?” Tony Bevacqua muses. “She was a lush.”

  * * *

  Powers the pilot tried to seal off his life from that of Powers the conflicted husband. It wasn’t easy. For his first three months in Turkey there was little to do except train, play poker, and wait for a go code from Washington for the type of mission the U-2 had been built to fly. The food was dreadful, he remembered. There was the small matter of the Suez Crisis to monitor—and it certainly added to Eisenhower’s irritation with Sir Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, that he was not informed in advance of British troop movements near the Suez Canal when his U-2 pilots could see them quite clearly through their drift sights. But Europe’s postimperial delusions were not really the U-2’s business. The black planes with the drooping wings at Adana were there to penetrate a newer and more frightening sort of empire.

  It was only a matter of time before the order came. On July 4 that year, under budget, on deadline, and on Independence Day, Richard Bissell’s hunt for WMD had started with the taut roar of a J-57 engine and a flight plan of epic impertinence. The pilot assigned to fly it was Harvey Stockman of the first NACA Weather Reconnaissance Squadron (Provisional).

  Fewer than ten souls on earth knew exactly where Harvey Stockman was headed or why, and not one of these was in the White House. The only people definitely in the loop were Bissell, a small handful of flight planners on E Street, Stockman’s detachment commander, and Stockman himself.

  The go code was an encrypted one-line cable sent over secure CIA lines to a tightly guarded communications room at Wiesbaden Air Force Base in Germany. It was authorized by Eisenhower, but the precise route and timing were up to Bissell. He launched the mission shortly before midnight on June 3, Washington time. In Germany Stockman’s plane was fueled with 1,200 gallons of kerosene, specially modified so as not to freeze solid in the sub-Arctic temperatures of seventy thousand feet.

  Stockman took off from Wiesbaden at dawn, fortified as usual with steak and eggs and oxygen. As he brought his nose up to its absurd fifty-five-degree climb-out angle and set course for Poznan, he probably didn’t dwell on the sociohistorical significance of the moment. Still, it was considerable. Trussed in Dave Clark’s two-way stretch fibers, half hidden by helmet and oxygen mask, encased in a pressurized titanium capsule, and headed for the penthouse viewing platform of the upper troposphere, he embodied American conviction and American hypocrisy; the conviction that no problem could not be surmounted with ingenuity and hard work, and the hypocrisy of the spy whose president traded on his reputation for openness and honesty in his dealings with an otherwise duplicitous world.

  Stockman flew northwest over Poland and Minsk before turning left for Leningrad. In his payload bay, a Hycon B camera the size and weight of a substantial stove, loaded with six thousand feet of ultrathin Mylar film on two contra-rotating drums, clicked away at three long-range bomber bases near the city. Then it turned its attention to a series of naval shipyards on the Baltic coast that were being rapidly expanded to build nuclear submarines. As Stockman turned for home, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow was treating Khrushchev to a traditional July 4 barbecue at his official residence. Khrushchev was not informed of the incursion while a guest of the Americans, but he knew soon enough.

  Even Dulles did not know that Stockman was headed for Leningrad. When Bissell strolled into the then CIA headquarters building on H Street on the morning of July 5 and told him, Dulles blanched. “The first time is the safest,” Bissell reassured him.

  It was the attitude of a tightrope walker so confident that he performs without a net. The U-2 was an astonishing piece of aeronautical improvisation that had broken its own altitude records time and again on training flights from Watertown and infuriated the very few air force brass who knew about it but had not been able to get their hands on it. But Bissell’s confidence belied reality. He did not know whether Soviet radar would pick it up. What he did know was that if Stockman had a flameout over Leningrad there would be hell to pay.

  Stockman didn’t have a flameout. After eight hours and forty-five minutes in the air, he returned to Wiesbaden and staggered out of his cockpit while technicians transferred the two great rolls of film from his camera to a waiting plane that left at once for Washington.

  While Stockman made up for lost time at the officers’ club, another pilot tried to sleep. Carmine Vito was up next. At dawn on the fifth he was suited up, strapped in, and dispatched to Moscow. He photographed the Kremlin, the city’s air defenses, and a rocket engine test site in a northwestern suburb best known today for its IKEA.

  The U-2s kept coming, each one an enormous calculated risk; each one an expression of Bissell’s relentless curiosity. On July 9, Marty Knutson, who had been so disgusted by the U-2’s yoke, sublimated his objections and flew a historic mission up the Baltic coast and over an air base southeast of Leningrad. He identified it as Engels Airfield. It has since been confused by historians with another Engels air base near Saratov on the Volga. The one Knutson saw remained etched in his mind because of what he saw, peering down through the drift sight that protruded from his instrument panel to give a view of the ground directly beneath him. Glinting in bright sunlight thirteen miles below were thirty long-range Bison bombers drawn up next to the runway.

  “Pay dirt” was what Knutson called the pictures he took that day, but it was an alarming sort of pay dirt. The Bison was a malevolent-looking bomber with a range of five thousand miles and room in its belly for twenty-four tons of nuclear ordnance. At a rehearsal for the May Day fly-past over Red Square in 1955, Western journalists and military attachés had looked up in awe as dozens of them had thundered overhead. In practice a mere handful had circled several times over the city, but the ruse was enough to sow fears among security hawks in Washington of a “bomber gap” being neglected by a president who was overly confident of his security credentials.

  Senator Stuart Symington, a stainless steel tycoon and Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, formally accused the administration of “misleading the American people … as to the relative military strength of the United States vis a vis the Communists.” As a former secretary of the air force, he was especially vexed by Eisenhower’s decision to slow down production of the Big Ugly Fat Fella, as the mighty B-52 American long-range bomber was known to its admirers.

  Knutson’s pictures seemed to confirm that the Soviets did have Bisons in numbers. But they were the only ones spotted in nine U-2 overflights of European Russia that July. What was more, they were in plain view and were unlikely to have been exposed at one base and hidden at others. The conclusion was inescapable: if this was all the Soviets had, it was less than a third as many as Symington and his friends in the air force claimed. In five days flat the U-2 had demolished the bomber gap.

  The film from the returning planes was rushed to Washington and analyzed above a car repair shop near Mount Vernon Square. Then the best prints were taken to the White House, pinned to boards five feet across, and presented to the president.

  He was entranced. Dulles later said he and Eisenhower pored over the images on the Oval Office floor “like two kids running a model train.” Here was the enemy, as promised, stripped of Khrushchev’s posturing, in black and white.

  It was not just the military sites that fascinated. As Herb Miller, a senior CIA official, wrote in an excited memo after the first overflight, “We are no longer dependent on an ‘estimate’ or ‘judgment’ or ‘assessment’ of what the situation is. We now have a cr
oss section of a part of the whole of Soviet life for that date—their military systems, their farms, their irrigation systems, their factories, their power systems to feed the factories, their housing for the people who run the factories, their recreation, their railroads and the amount of traffic they carry.”

  The pictures also revealed that even though Soviet radar was all over the U-2, “fighter aircraft at the five most important bases covered were drawn up in orderly rows as if for formal inspection on parade.” Bombers were not dispersed for their own protection. Antiaircraft guns were not pointing skyward for anyone else’s. They were at ease, horizontal. “These are but a few examples of the many things which tend to spell out the real intentions, objectives and qualities of the Soviet Union that we must fully understand and appreciate if we are to be successful in negotiating a lasting peace for the world,” Miller concluded.

  In hard cash terms the images were worth billions, literally: Congress had demanded at least four billion dollars to modernize the air force against the apocalyptic threat talked up by the bomber-gap lobby. Having seen the U-2 pictures, the president allowed less than one billion dollars. Furthermore, they had been brought back without the loss of a plane or pilot. Willie Fisher and his handlers in Moscow had never dreamed of intelligence gathering on such a scale or with such swift and tangible results.