Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  At 11:44 the last hose connecting the rocket to its support crane fell away and the first flames spurted from its engines. By 11:45 it was all over. As the official countdown tape put it: “… two … one … zero … fire … first ignition … EXPLOSION!”

  The fireball was as fat and ugly as the rocket was slender and beautiful, but it still failed to spare the Vanguard’s blushes. Before smoke and flame enveloped the whole launch complex, television viewers saw the rocket simply stop in midair a few feet off the ground and fall back as if deciding orbit wasn’t worth the effort. As it did so, the nose cone fell off like an ill-fitting witch’s hat.

  With a little tolerance for excuses, it was all completely understandable. Project Vanguard had been meticulously denied military funding and von Braun’s expertise in order to keep space exploration civilian and honor the spirit of the International Geophysical Year. It was overseen by an astronomer, not a general. There was no strategic imperative to succeed, no relentless pressure from government, no threat of exile to a labor camp in the event of failure, and no privacy in which to make the inevitable early mistakes that dogged any new rocket program. According to acting Defense Secretary Donald Quarles, the explosion was merely “an incident in the perfection of the Vanguard satellite system.”

  But America was in no mood for excuses. For two months Democrats and the media had withheld final judgment on the technological Pearl Harbor that was Sputnik on the basis that the Pentagon (or whoever was running the U.S. missile program—it wasn’t at all clear) had a right of reply. In those two months the Soviets had put up a second satellite, this time with a dog in it. Khrushchev had boasted that he could put up twenty more “tomorrow” and was churning out missiles “like sausages.” Eisenhower’s poll ratings had plunged twenty-two points. Now this. Flopnik. The president’s numbers sank another eight points. There were calls for him to go, and he seriously considered doing so. In the post-Sputnik stress he had suffered a minor stroke. In the post-Vanguard recriminations there was a salutary national backlash against consumerist excess, which seemed to have been achieved at the expense of national security. But there was also a wholesale reevaluation of the Soviet threat—technologically supreme and now being wielded from the moral high ground, since the Sputniks were IGY experiments, not warheads. For the first time in his career Eisenhower doubted whether he was equal to the fight.

  One thing he did not doubt was that Khrushchev, yet again, was bluffing. The U-2 flights of August 1957 had yielded an intelligence bonanza, most of it reassuring. Detailed analysis of the Tyuratam launch facility suggested that while the R7 was a mighty space rocket it was a highly impractical missile that took days to fuel and was impossible to hide. Overflights of the closed nuclear cities along the Trans-Siberian railway revealed intensive fuel enrichment activity but not the mass production of thermonuclear warheads, which was a much more challenging proposition.

  For the time being the world could live with Mr. Khrushchev’s sausages. If you were privy to the dazzling fruits of the U-2’s twenty-twenty overhead vision, this much was clear. But if you weren’t, it wasn’t, and almost no one was. Senators Symington and Johnson were not, which is why they felt so free to flagellate themselves and the administration with the looming so-called missile gap. Joe Alsop was not, which is why he started using the lethal “F” word—flaccid—with such confidence in his influential columns in 1958. Even the authors of the Gaither Report, a supposedly authoritative survey of U.S. defense capabilities commissioned by Eisenhower and published in late 1957, knew nothing about the U-2 when their findings were leaked to the Washington Post. The report called for a crash missile-building program, a nationwide network of nuclear bomb shelters, and a thirteen-billion-dollar boost to the annual defense budget. It concluded that the country was in “the gravest danger in its history.”

  These were the six words of the report that the Post chose to quote most prominently when it obtained a copy. It was a great scoop, and it elevated the missile gap to the status of received wisdom when in fact it was little more than a paranoid delusion. Such was the political context of the Vanguard mess—though you did not have to be delusional to infer from the wreckage at Cape Canaveral that the U.S. missile program was at least in trouble.

  Sooner or later, Eisenhower had to make a decision about the U-2. Would he reveal to the world what it had revealed to him and his inner circle, or would he hang tough, absorb the accusations of complacency, and keep the plane secret so that it could go on doing its extraordinary work? He did neither. In the end he kept the U-2 secret and, for much of 1958 and 1959, he grounded it.

  When Richard Bissell asked permission for more overflights soon after Sputnik, Eisenhower said no. When Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a formidable pair of petitioners if ever there was one—asked again in January 1958, the answer was the same. Ike didn’t like violating Soviet airspace for anything. He cherished his reputation as a straight shooter and knew that would be the least of the casualties if a U-2 was lost over Russia. More particularly, he believed that soaring Soviet confidence made an overreaction to U-2 incursions more likely, not less. That could mean nuclear war, and his priority as president was to keep a nuclear peace.

  For decades afterward, Bissell allowed it to be understood that U-2s had continued flying over Russia throughout 1958 and 1959. In fact there was a total of three overflights in those two years. Of these just one involved an American pilot over central Russia. (Of the other two, one was flown by a British pilot and the other photographed parts of the Soviet Far East, starting and finishing in Japan.)

  Ailing, wary of Khrushchev, and almost as wary of his own defense chiefs, Eisenhower had come to regard the U-2 as more trouble than it was worth. Time and again his experts trooped into the Oval Office with mission profiles, target lists, and urgent intelligence priorities. Time and again he told them the time wasn’t right. It seemed to many a policy of timidity. In reality it was a policy of epic restraint.

  Eisenhower even suggested handing the whole program over to the air force, which would effectively have ended overflights of Soviet territory, since they would no longer be civilian or deniable. Bissell had already relinquished the selection and training of new U-2 pilots to the air force. The new recruits were being checked out at a remote Texas air force base, not the ranch, and were used mainly for border flights and atmospheric sampling. Now Bissell dug in his heels. He implored the president’s close aide, General Andrew Goodpaster, to be allowed to keep the overflight operation active, small, autonomous, and secret. His got his way, but to keep the program as he wanted it he would need to keep his original contract pilots—the old-timers from Watertown and the Dupont Plaza and easily forgotten places like the Radium Springs Motel. And he would need to keep them happy, which was not easy with so little flying to be done. They were civilians, after all, and they could quit. As his first contract came to an end, Gary Powers had a mind to do just that, and he was not the only one. He wrote later: “Several other married pilots had decided that an eighteen-month separation from their families was more than enough. Having little choice, the agency capitulated.” It sent the wives.

  * * *

  At project HQ, Bissell and his U-2 diehards thought hard about how to get the plane back over Russia where it belonged. They tried everything.

  A top secret CIA memo from early 1959, declassified in 2003, tells part of the story. Headed “U2 Vulnerability Tests,” the memo states:

  Vulnerability of the U2 was tested against the F-102 and F-104 fighters at Eglin AFB in December 1958. The tests were conducted under optimum controlled ground and air environment for the attacking pilot (ie. outstanding pilots, isolated air space, ideal weather, pre-selected intercept point etc.). The F-104 cannot cruise at altitudes over 60,000 feet, but it possesses a capability to convert speed to altitude and attain co-altitude of the U2 for a period of less than 30 seconds.

  It was a confessi
on. With the rock-solid pretext of defending the nation and wraparound secrecy provided by the CIA, the fighter jocks had finally had a crack at the dragon lady up in the stratosphere where they thought they belonged. And how had they done this, given their sixty-thousand-foot ceiling? By “converting speed to altitude,” kinetic energy to potential energy. By lighting their afterburners and keeping them lit until they flamed out while performing that idiot maneuver most guaranteed to mock their control surfaces and put them into a flat spin—the zoom climb.

  The zoom climb is the fighter pilot’s answer to the ski jump, with the difference that the placid-looking Finn in the chinless helmet and the spongy jumpsuit will never rise higher than his narrow bench at the top of the 120-meter tower, because once he eases his bottom off the bench he has only gravity to power him. Gravity will take him to eighty miles an hour in a few seconds and make him look as if he is flying if he times his muscular explosion just right at the lip of the jump, but in fact he is falling all the time.

  The fighter pilot performing the zoom climb uses gravity but also kerosene. He starts his run at, say, an Everest and a half, in a shallow dive, punching through the sound barrier and continuing to accelerate to the maximum speed he can sustain without risking the disintegration of his airplane when he pulls his nose up. Then he pulls his nose up.

  With the “outstanding pilots” and “ideal weather” available at Eglin AFB in the Florida panhandle, the machines chosen to go up against the U-2 at the end of 1958 could stand on their tails even at ground level immediately after takeoff. The point of the zoom climb was to do this when already flying as fast and almost as high as they were designed to fly, to push their proverbial envelopes and then tear them open with enough “isolated air space” below to fix whatever problems might ensue. Somewhere around sixty thousand feet the engines on an F-102 or an F-104 Starfighter would tend to give out for want of fuel or air or both, but this did not mean the aircraft suddenly fell out of the sky. At this point it went ballistic, like a bullet or a missile, and if the pilot had chosen exactly the right angle of attack he had a few seconds of weightless calm, coming over the top of his climb, in which to locate any hostile ultrahigh-altitude reconnaissance planes with his airborne radar, engage them with his air-to-air missiles, and shoot them down. (If all went well, he would restart his engine while gliding back to earth.)

  For pilots who were not satisfied with the punch in the lower back delivered by a Pratt & Whitney J-57 or a General Electric J79 at full power, there was an even more visceral thrill to be had from flying rocket planes. Two years before the Eglin tests, Iven Kincheloe, a Korean War ace with a chin like an anvil and an unbeaten record of four MiGs downed in six days, had zoomed to an astonishing 126,000 feet over Edwards Air Force Base in California in a Bell X-2 that owed nothing to the atmosphere and everything to the liquid oxygen in its tanks. Chuck Yeager, the king of all test pilots, later strapped a rocket bottle onto a Starfighter and zoomed it up to 104,000 feet, where even he lost control, and nearly his life. (He fell 97,000 feet in the spinning plane before bailing out at 7,000 feet and landing with half his head covered in burning rocket fuel from his own ejector seat.)

  The Eglin boys did not have rocket bottles and did not give the U-2 much to worry about.

  “The F-104 radar malfunctioned at high altitudes,” the vulnerability test memo said. “The pilot of this fighter could not visually acquire the target in sufficient time to solve the fire control problem.” The F-102 did better but would only have been able to shoot the U-2 down with better air-to-air missiles than it had or, the agency believed, than the Soviets had. Conclusion: “Successful intercept of the U2 by the Soviet defensive fighters for the next few months is unlikely.”

  A quarter of a century later, Flight Lieutenant Mike Hale of the RAF claimed to have drawn level with a U-2 at cruising altitude after a zoom climb in an English Electric Lightning—but that was a quarter of a century later.

  * * *

  In late 1958 a new detachment commander arrived in Adana. His name was Colonel Stan Beerli, and until America was dragged into World War II he had fancied a career as a professional skier. It would have been a natural fit. His parents were Swiss and he grew up in Oregon City, at the foot of Mount Hood and its tremendous snows.

  As the storms started rolling in off the Pacific to mark the start of winter in December 1941, Beerli was twenty-one years old and had a job lined up. He was going to Sun Valley, the resort that Averell Harriman had built from scratch and sprinkled with celebrities in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. Beerli was going to teach the stars to ski and do a bit of racing on the side, but then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He joined the U.S. Army Air Forces, trained as a bombardier and navigator, and flew thirty-eight sorties over Italy in B-17s of the second bomb group of the fifth wing of the 15th Air Force. After the war he witnessed the early nuclear tests in Bikini, also from a B-17, and trained as a fighter pilot. He joined the CIA in 1956.

  Beerli was too thoughtful and too skinny to be a jock. He had lost most of his hair in his thirties and felt quite comfortable in the dark hat that went so well with the dark suit that Agency people tended to wear, rain or shine, on duty or off. But he did not forget his air force training and did not hold with the view that the U-2, which he flew a fair amount himself, was tough to land. “That is bullshit,” he says back within sight of Mount Hood in his eighty-ninth year. “That is such a bunch of horse.”

  On Beerli’s watch at Adana there were no chase cars. If you were a U-2 pilot you landed the damn thing yourself, like any other plane.

  Beerli’s number two, in charge of security for Detachment B, was a younger, heavier man, well liked by the pilots’ wives for organizing their shopping trips to Germany. His name was John Perengosky.

  In the early summer of 1959, Beerli and Perengosky left the detachment to run itself for a few days and flew to Tehran. They checked into one of the city’s better hotels and made contact with the Agency station chief, who provided them with a twin-engine C-47 with inconspicuous markings and plenty of fuel. The following day they went looking for an airfield.

  “The Shah of course was still in power, and there were no questions asked about what we were doing,” Beerli says. “It was a simple thing, to look and see what they had available that could possibly be used. But we were looking specifically for a base that was remote.”

  They found one seven hundred miles southeast of Tehran, in bone-dry Baluchistan, where there was no evidence of anything having landed since the war and no trace of human habitation for a long day’s camel ride in every direction. The Afghan border was close by. There were no hangars, no tower, no wells, no trees—just an airstrip and a radio hiding in a horseshoe of brown mountains. Beerli and Perengosky landed their C-47 to make sure the strip would still take the weight of an airplane, then took off again. The nearest town of any size was called Zahedan, and the name stuck.

  A month later the quiet of the desert was broken again by the sound of an approaching aircraft. This time it was a C-130 Hercules that would have been a familiar sight on any NATO base and could have been engaged in any humdrum NATO chore. It landed at around midday. Twelve men got out, most of them civilians. They rolled a dozen or so oil drums down the plane’s loading ramp, then waited. Around 3:00 p.m. the black line that they recognized as an approaching U-2 appeared over the mountains northeast of the airstrip, already in the final seconds of its long descent from seventy thousand feet. It landed in a hurry—no questions from the cockpit, no go-arounds to get the lay of the land. Out of it climbed an exhausted but exhilarated Marty Knutson.

  For the first time in nearly two years a U-2 had photographed Tyuratam. Ike had been persuaded to grant permission for the flight because of a sudden increase in ICBM activity at the Cosmodrome, and because Dulles and Bissell had told him about Stan Beerli’s clever new system for getting in and out of Russia unobserved.

  The Agency called it Quickmove. Pakistan was still the only country with no qualm
s about U-2 overflights originating from its bases, but as Beerli says, “You knew darn well that if the Russians knew which bases we were using they’d have people there.” The point of Quickmove was “to give them as little time as possible to intercept us or to know that we were doing something.” That meant packing all the support people and equipment a U-2 needed into boring C-130s that would not attract attention. It meant flying at night whenever possible, and it meant no more round-trip overflights from and to Pakistan.

  The Quickmove procedure would require one Hercules to fly from Adana to Peshawar in northern Pakistan with fuel, oxygen, and a pilot for the main mission. It would also carry specialists from Lockheed and the David Clark Company to take care of the U-2 and the pressure suit. Another Hercules would fly the next day to Zahedan with more fuel and another U-2 pilot for the final leg back to Adana.

  “It was the complete package,” Beerli says, “but with the minimum number of people to do the job of getting an airplane ready in a hurry.”

  A few people would see the C-130s; almost no one would see the U-2.

  “It was set up so that we’d arrive in Peshawar late in the afternoon when most people would be off the base. We went to a hangar and stayed in the hangar. Didn’t come out. That first time Knutson flew the mission, but Powers flew the plane in from Adana. He brought it in at midnight. He landed, we got it refueled, got Marty into it and launched it before the people came to work in Peshawar.”

  As Knutson headed into Kazakhstan, Powers caught a ride home in the first Hercules, and NSA eavesdroppers in northern Iran strained to pick up any Soviet air-defense chatter about a high-altitude intruder. As Beerli remembers it, they picked up almost nothing.