Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  It was a release in more ways than one. After nine months of inactivity and sagging morale, Detachment B had proved its worth in one spectacular flight. Spooked by the Russian protest note of July 1956, and by Soviet radar’s ability to track U-2s over the Caucasus, Eisenhower had suspended overflights in November that year. He allowed them to restart the following summer with three flights in one day, because the Skunk Works had radically shrunk the U-2’s radar profile with a heavy coat of iron ferrite paint; because Pakistan had allowed the use of the Lahore base in return for a substantial increase in U.S. aid; because Soviet radar defenses seemed to be at their weakest in central Asia; and because central Asia seemed to be hiding the development of a truly terrifying superweapon.

  The day before Cherbonneaux relieved himself at Lahore, Sergey Korolyov’s outsize R7 missile at last made a successful five-thousand-mile test flight from Tyuratam to the volcano-strewn Kamchatka Peninsula in the Pacific. This much the CIA knew because its partners in the National Security Agency could eavesdrop on Soviet military communications, which still used old-fashioned radio relays to reach across the country’s eight time zones. But what sort of warhead could the R7 carry? Where were the warheads being tested and with what success? Was the successful R7 test a fluke or a taste of things to come? Was another test imminent? These were questions only the U-2 could answer.

  At ground level, Cherbonneaux’s route would have been a backpacker’s dream. It took him straight over K2, the second-highest mountain on earth, then northwest over the cotton fields and tobacco plantations of Uzbekistan’s lush Fergana Valley and deep into northern Kazakhstan. Above Karaganda (at that time still an important node of the Gulag archipelago) his flight plan required a sharp right turn and a straight run east with his cameras on. He did not know why; it was a route compiled by intelligence analysts in Washington. He found out what they were interested in three hours into the mission, high over the eastern steppe, near where it begins to merge with the grasslands of Mongolia. Where Genghis Khan’s horde had fanned out seven centuries earlier in search of settlements to seize and raze, Cherbonneaux saw in his drift sight a familiar pattern of craters and faded blotches. Each blotch was linked to the others by a web of dirt roads, but whatever had made the craters had wiped the desert clean around them. The pattern was familiar from the Nevada nuclear test site. Cherbonneaux selected maximum magnification on the drift sight and stared down it, heart pounding, at a large object on top of a makeshift tower. He had found the Semipalatinsk test site, or polygon, and a weapon apparently primed to blow. But when? Who knew? This was not the kind of scenario they put you through at the Lovelace Clinic. If it had been, he might have failed on account of the propensity of his pulse to surge at moments of acute anxiety. He came as close as a U-2 pilot ever did to panicking, yelling into his faceplate for the Russians to hold their fire.

  The bomb on the tower went off the following month, but a separate half-megaton airburst detonated over the site five hours after Cherbonneaux passed through, more or less as he was peeing on the tarmac at Lahore.

  A week later another Detachment B pilot found Tyuratam, holy of holies of the Soviet space-industrial complex, one hundred miles east of the Aral Sea. In one sense the razor-sharp pictures taken that day by E. K. Jones confirmed the CIA’s worst fears. They revealed a huge launch complex, far bigger than anything at Cape Canaveral, as if the Russians had decided to win the space race before it had begun by planting a cosmonaut on Mars.*

  The launchpad was not in fact a pad. It was a steel grid fifty meters square, held in place by sixteen concrete bridge trusses over the fat end of a huge pit shaped like a chemistry flask. Fuel and equipment trains had direct access to the grid along a spur from the main line to Moscow. This gateway to the cosmos was big and deadly serious, but what the U-2 confirmed was that there was only one. The Russians might be going to Mars from Tyuratam, but they were not about to use it to launch a preemptive salvo of ICBMs. That knowledge would underpin Eisenhower’s resistance to the missile lobby for the next three years.

  * * *

  There were no more protest notes from the Soviet embassy in Washington. Had the ferrite paint succeeded in hiding the U-2 from Soviet radar? Hardly. The paint was so heavy that it had forced Cherbonneaux to sneak into Soviet airspace over the Pamirs far below the plane’s normal ceiling, at 58,000 feet. He had simply caught the Soviet radar net napping, but at least one of the other flights from Lahore that day was spotted, and a MiG was scrambled from an Andijon air defense squadron in the Fergana Valley to confirm it was an intruder. When the squadron’s commander told Moscow that Soviet central Asia was being overflown by unidentified flying objects, the head of all Soviet air defense fighter regiments, a Colonel-General Yevgeni Savitsky, flew out to interview the MiG’s pilot. Savitsky decided the pilot was seeing things and had him reassigned.

  The Soviet air defense forces were divided into radar and fighter regiments and rocketeers, and the rocketeers were probably the most attuned to the U-2 menace, because Khrushchev had personally insisted that they shoot it down. To this end a promising guided missile designed by Pavel Grushin for the defense of Leningrad, the S-75, was rushed into mass production for the defense of the whole motherland.

  Like Sergey Korolyov (who served eight years in the Gulag), Grushin was a student of the hard school of rocketry. It was a field assigned the highest priority by Stalin and Beria, who gave the KGB direct control of hundreds of scientists and engineers working alongside their captured German counterparts in forced-labor conditions throughout the postwar period.

  Grushin’s S-75 was the grandfather of all modern Soviet surface-to-air missiles. Variants would distinguish themselves from Cuba and Vietnam to Syria and Iraq over the next four decades, but the S-75 took its first bow in November 1957. General Yuri Votintsev, the great-grandson of a Don Cossack warrior chieftain, was deputed to guide it onto the stage at the head of a ground-shaking display of sixty-two missiles in all.

  “On 7 November at 0800 hours the column took up its assigned place on Manezhnaya Square [north of Red Square],” he recalled. “All the windows in the Metropol Hotel building were open, and long-barrelled lenses of movie and still cameras were sticking out of the windows. The column of missiles brought up the rear of the parade. When we reached Red Square, everything around us froze for an instant. Then ovations began in the grandstands. After passing over the square, the column stretched out along the embankment, and the soldiers began to cover the missiles quickly.… The first rows of spectators from the square had already appeared. People formed a solid ring around the column, crawled on the vehicles and hugged the soldiers and officers.”

  * * *

  The men of Detachment B flew back to Turkey and were joined there by their wives. The idea was to make life in Adana more tolerable for the pilots. The result was an outpost of the American empire that was unique in the cold war.

  The speedboat had at last arrived. Waterskiing happened on a reservoir near the base. For those who preferred bathing or sunbathing on hot, quiet days—and there were plenty—the beaches near Mersin were secluded and spectacular. One faced the ruins of a crusader castle two hundred yards out to sea, stranded there by a sea level that seemed to have risen a few feet since the twelfth century. The pilots called it the castle by the sea and formed an attachment to it, as they might have to the sands of Cocoa Beach or Mission Bay if their flying careers had turned out only slightly differently. They would drive there in big imported Buicks with whitewall tires, and they would horse around in bright Bermuda-length swimming shorts under the supervision of the ranking agency man of the moment, who tended to be paler and skinnier than they.

  Mersin was a short drive from Adana. It was not hard to be back for the daily 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. cocktail hour. With the wives in town, dinner would usually follow at one or another of their homes, prepared by the hostess in turn or occasionally thrown together as a pot luck.

  Accommodation was now mainly off base and rent
ed rather than in the two-person Belgian bachelor trailers that had greeted the pilots in 1956. It was basic compared with married quarters on most U.S. bases around the world and downright primitive compared with diplomatic lodgings, which may have seemed unfair considering that no embassy on earth had as much power to affect the course of world affairs as this little community of weather-recon pilots. But there were compensations that would have been worth writing home about if letters did not have to get past the Agency’s censors. Compensations like more free time than you could fill and a dedicated C-47 Gooney Bird on standby to help fill it. Lunch and shopping in West Germany? Home via Rome and Naples? These things the agency could arrange.

  Barbara Powers was the trailblazer.

  After she had been a stenographer for Judge Advocate Captain Reuben Jackson for six months, the Communists staged a coup in Athens. Women were being raped on the streets—so Barbara was told—and Americans were no longer welcome in the cradle of democracy. She was transferred to Wheelus Air Force Base outside Tripoli. Twenty-nine years later a phalanx of swing-wing bombers from Lakenheath in England would rend the night above Tripoli with high explosives to teach Colonel Gadhafi a lesson about sponsoring terrorism, but in the age of Eisenhower—still only fifteen years after the Allied victory in North Africa—the American military was still an honored guest in Libya.

  By day Barbara took dictation from another judge advocate. She spent her nights on the base in a bunk bed, tormented by flies that the locals refused to exterminate because they fertilized the date palms.

  Gary would fly in when he could in a T-33 Thunderbird, about once a month. He didn’t always phone ahead. One day he found Barbara locked in her room saying she’d be ready in a moment, sounding frightened. By her account he forced his way in and, seeing her holding a purse, rifled through it to find a letter in which Captain Jackson declared his love for her and told her he was getting a divorce. He was begging her to do the same.

  Gary never wrote about the episode, though he did admit his marriage was in trouble. Barbara remembered the military police dragging him away and his turning the tables by filing a formal complaint against Jackson (who died soon afterward in an air crash).

  On another visit, enraged by another fellow officer who wanted to steal his wife, Powers hurled the man over the bar in the Wheelus Officers’ Club. This time Barbara was quietly impressed.

  The heart-stopping news that she would be able to live with her husband at his mysterious place of work came through in the late fall of 1957, as Sputnik was circling the Earth and Burt and Helen Silverman were finishing their European tour after being rudely interrupted by the trial of Rudolf Abel. Barbara was not stupid. She could read a map and had begun to suspect that Gary’s base was in Turkey. The idea of living there enthralled her—yet the reality, she wrote, began with Gary removing a pile of excrement from the front room of their new home.

  Everyone associated with Richard Bissell’s air force was expected to show a high degree of self-reliance as well as discretion, and Barbara and Gary Powers could certainly look after themselves. Gary bought himself a shotgun for hunting (duck, goose, quail, boar). He also bought a gray Mercedes 220SE convertible with red leather seats and a retired German police dog called Eck von Heinerberg. Barbara bought rugs for their home. They started taking drives into the Anatolian hinterland with the wind in their hair and a gun and a dog in their red backseat. It was a life that a reporter could have made to seem extremely glamorous if a reporter had been allowed within a hundred miles of Adana. But it was a life lived in an agency bubble, freedom being a complex thing. Its defenders could not always practice what they preached.

  Soon after their arrival the wives were at last given a look at the aircraft in which their husbands were paid so much to study the weather. “She’s a real doll,” Gary told Barbara in advance. “She gets four miles to the gallon and travels ten times the speed of a truck. Now that ain’t bad!” Barbara was less than awestruck. She told him she thought it looked “like a giant black crow.” But the plane did not loom as large in their life together as it did in history. He almost never talked about it with her and did not seem to fly it often, either.

  In September 1958 all the detachment’s pilots disappeared from Turkey for two months. The wives were not told where and would have been unlikely to guess northern Norway. The point of the decampment was to photograph a swath of Russia not far below the Arctic Circle where the Soviets were rumored to be building ICBM silos close enough to the United States to hit it with a straight shot over the North Pole. The pilots ate sumptuously and took pictures of one another in sharp suits with sharp, dark mountains in the background. But they took none of the alleged new missile site; the cloud cover was unrelenting.

  Back at Adana the communications hut stayed quiet. For months on end no go codes came from Washington; none for the kind of missions that the pilots might want to tell their grandchildren about, at any rate. A new type of trailer came instead. Barbara called it the superhouse trailer (also known as a double-wide). It was fifty-five feet long and had three bedrooms, and there was one for each married officer. Drawn up in two neat rows, the superhouse trailers brought everyone back inside the base. No one had to drive anywhere at night and Detachment B’s partying took on a new intensity.

  “Enjoying liquor, I did my share,” Powers admitted.

  “There was a lot of drinking,” says Joe Murphy, by this time on his second Turkish tour, “but I never thought it was out of control.”

  Major (later General) Harry Cordes, an air force U-2 pilot who didn’t think much of Bissell’s people management, said later: “I saw the potential for international incidents with automobiles and wives [and] tried to caution [Bissell] about the danger of project compromise.”

  The new trailers were a response to such warnings, and they did cut the risk of a U-2 pilot spending time in a Turkish jail for drunk driving. But they did not stop one officer—“a handsome man built like a football player”—from throwing too much of his strength into a dance with the beautiful Barbara one rowdy night in the spring of 1960. She fell and broke her leg and was told to say it had been a waterskiing accident if anybody asked.

  Barbara complained that Gary wasn’t bothered about her leg. But like Cordes, he was bothered about project compromise. “How much did the Russians actually know about our outfit?” he mused later. “Talking it over with the intelligence officer we concluded that they probably knew a great deal. It was an unusual unit, set off by itself, flying an easily identified aircraft. Spying was an ancient profession in Turkey. If Russian intelligence was as good as our intelligence repeatedly told us it was, it seemed likely they not only knew how many planes we had but how many pilots, plus our names.”

  They would know his name soon enough.

  * * *

  What were the wives doing there? Why double the number of people who had seen the “giant black crow” close up? Why treble (at least) the amount of gossip about the Adana party set that wasn’t even part of the air force? The answer went back to Cape Canaveral and a chilly December morning in 1957.

  This time Willie Fisher could not be present. He was detained at the West Street federal prison in New York pending his appeal. But the next stage in America’s journey to the stars would not go unwitnessed. Several hundred reporters and photographers were crammed onto a dune on Cocoa Beach. The networks had cleared time for live broadcasts. The object of their attention was a tall, thin Vanguard rocket on launchpad 18A that contained the free world’s first satellite. It was meant to have blasted off two days earlier. The weather had been dreadful. A liquid oxygen valve had frozen shut and the countdown had been scrubbed. But the sixth was calm. The hour had come. Sputnik would be avenged.

  The Associated Press put out an advance story for use by subscribers in the event of a successful launch. It began:

  THE RADIO-SIGNALING BABY MOON CIRCLING THE EARTH IS THE U.S.’s REPLY TO RUSSIA THAT IT TOO CAN STAKE A CLAIM TO THE SPACE FRONTIER.
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  The Vanguard was a Citroën among rockets : clever but fragile. It was also a navy machine, and few in the army would have hesitated to call it effete. As a concept it was hugely ambitious, with all-new guidance and propulsion systems, solar cells to provide some of its electrical power, and printed circuits to shrink its innards. Its engines generated barely one fortieth of the thrust of Korolyov’s R7–27,000 pounds to 1.1 million, which may strike the Hummer generation as downright un-American. But if the package worked it could, with a little spin, more than compensate for the humiliation of Sputnik by dint of its sheer sophistication.

  Would it work? Now there was a question. The previous Vanguard launch had been aborted five times because of technical hitches. This one was untested on the most fundamental level: its second- and third-stage boosters had never been fired in a real flight before. Wernher von Braun, who had nothing to do with its development but knew a thing or two about rockets, said it didn’t stand a chance. An engineer at the launchpad told a Time reporter: “We’ll be pleased if it does go into orbit. We will not be despondent if it does not.” The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph was more optimistic. “MOON—MINUTES TO GO,” its morning headline screamed, referring to the minimoon, the size of a grapefruit, that the president’s press secretary had promised would be placed in orbit.