“Somebody would report that they saw a speck or a blip on their screen, but there was no coherent response, no warning, no complaints from the Russians. It was almost as if it never happened.”
Knutson took off that day with 1,300 gallons of fuel in his wings. He landed at Zahedan with 20—enough for ten more minutes after nine hours in the air. Someone handed him a cold beer and asked if he’d mind sending a Morse code message to Adana to let them know he’d landed; no one in the Quickmove team knew Morse. Knutson obliged.
“I’m sitting there in the blazing sun, still in my pressure suit, sipping a beer in one hand and with the other tapping out the dots and dashes,” he recalled later. (He also claimed to have been told to abort his landing and bail out if he saw smoke rising from the runway, because that would be a signal that the airstrip’s security had been compromised by bandits. The claim irked Beerli. “If there had been any indication that there was opposition we never would have landed there,” he said.)
A third pilot from Detachment B, who’d been prebreathing oxygen in the second Hercules, spirited the refueled U-2 back to Turkey. Knutson was helped out of his suit. The empty oil drums were rolled back up the loading ramp, and as the sun went down on Zahedan the second Hercules took off, leaving the strip to the wind and the camels.
The last plane was back in Turkey fifty-four hours after the first had left, and still nothing from the Russians.
* * *
The intelligence take from Knutson’s flight was summarized in a top secret double-spaced typed document with the word “talent” printed vertically in huge capitals on its cover page. Next to that in conventional twelve-point type readers were warned that the contents affected the national defense of the United States and were covered by the country’s espionage laws. So America had talent, even then. It happened to be the code word for U-2 photography.
It was “completely unexpected” that there was still only one launch facility at Tyuratam, the summary said. Given the number of launches recently detected, and Khrushchev’s claim to be in serial production of ICBMs, that meant two things. First, the Russians were clearly speeding up their turnaround times between rocket launches at Tyuratam, but second, Tyuratam was obviously still only a proving ground. The Soviets’ main operational deployment of ICBMs—which must exist, or there would be no missile gap—had to be elsewhere. Not for the first time, the Agency had analysts poring over their maps of central Russia, looking for railways going nowhere. Not for the first time, they settled on the northern Urals, where a spur off the main line from Moscow to the labor camps of Vorkuta cut eastward into the mountains fifty miles north of the Arctic Circle. That had to be it.
“Conduct additional high priority overflights as soon and as often as possible,” the summary concluded. Specifically, “we recommend the early coverage of rail lines in the POLYARNYY URAL area as the most likely prototype operational deployment facility for Soviet ICBMs”.
The U-2 had proved itself again. It was answering some of the biggest questions that the United States faced in its existential shadowboxing match with Communism, and asking more. Surely Ike understood that now. Surely the hunt for WMD could kick into high gear at last.
But Eisenhower had other things on his mind: he had to get ready for a visit by Comrade Khrushchev. The leader of world Communism and most powerful dictator on the planet was coming to America. He was coming, moreover, with a plan to stop the cold war in its tracks.*
Like so much about the superpower relations in the prehotline era, the invitation was an accident. For nine months international diplomacy had been in turmoil over an ultimatum from Khrushchev for Western troops to leave Berlin, but any curb on West Berlin’s freedom was something Eisenhower could not begin to contemplate.
Since the start of the crisis, Khrushchev had been dropping hints that he wanted to visit America and that if he were invited and listened to with sufficient respect the unfortunate Berlin affair would go away. At last, on July 8, Ike took the hint, or seemed to. He told his secretary of state that an invitation might be “a device to break the stalemate.” State Department staffers started writing drafts, supposedly on the understanding that any invitation was to be conditional on Soviet cooperation over Berlin. Specifically, the two sides needed to make enough progress to warrant a full-blown Great Power summit the following spring.
An invitation was issued without preconditions by Robert Murphy, under secretary of state for political affairs, to Frol Kozlov, a senior politburo member, who happened to be in New York to open a Soviet exhibition.
Khrushchev received it at his dacha in a spirit of triumphant vindication, and accepted. He would come to Camp David, wherever that was—no one in the Kremlin knew. Since the president had been kind enough to offer to make the arrangements, he would also tour the country.
Eisenhower heard the news on July 22 and was furious. His plan had worked perfectly—for Khrushchev. Ike summoned Murphy, who said he knew nothing about the conditions he was supposed to have attached to the invitation and resigned later that year.
The prospect of hosting Khrushchev depressed Eisenhower immensely. As far as he could tell, his Soviet counterpart was a half-educated maverick with a wild temper, a medicine-ball stomach, a growing nuclear arsenal, and what one aide called a “super-colossal inferiority complex.” Nor was there any evidence that he played golf. But if Eisenhower had known what daring plans were forming in Khrushchev’s restless mind, he might have been more optimistic.
Even before the Soviet premier set foot on U.S. soil, he knew he was losing the cold war. He bragged compulsively about his nuclear firepower, but the truth was he did not have a single operational ICBM. When Richard Nixon visited Russia that summer and asked to see some of Khrushchev’s fabled missiles, he was turned down because, as Sergei Khrushchev wrote, “nothing of the kind was as yet in existence.” When Tyuratam fell silent for months at a time in 1958 and 1959, American eavesdroppers assumed it was because the R7 had passed all its tests. In fact its designers were still struggling to build a nose cone that could protect a warhead from the searing heat of atmospheric reentry. Meanwhile, Khrushchev knew that the main adversary’s Strategic Air Command had enough free-fall bombs and long-range bombers to wipe out every important Soviet target at a few hours’ notice. He also knew America was outproducing the Soviet Union in fridges, ovens, cars, tractors, and even corn and outbuilding it in roads and houses.
Khrushchev knew he had to change the rules. After listening to a presentation in the spring of 1959 on how Siberia could be overlaid with a network of R7 launch sites at a cost of half a billion rubles per site, he told his son: “If we’re forced into doing this, we’ll all lose our pants.”
Capitulation was not an option. No admission of weakness was possible, either; his rivals in the politburo had tried to oust him in 1957 and would pounce again. His solution, which he could not share with them, was the wholesale demilitarization of the cold war.
Khrushchev would travel to America with an unserious speech on total disarmament in his pocket but serious ideas on how to start disarmament in the back of his mind. He would raise them with the president if and when the time seemed right. And then—who knew?—he might even lift his ultimatum on Berlin. One thing Khrushchev did know was that to have any chance of making progress he would have to negotiate from strength.
He picked up the phone and called his favorite rocketeer.
* * *
Saturday, September 12, was a glorious late-summer day in northern England. Village cricket was still very much in season, and Bernard Lovell had a game to play. He was serious about cricket. He would later serve as chairman of the Lancashire County side and never missed playing for Lower Withington if he could help it. He was also serious about astronomy, and that Saturday morning he walked as usual across the fields from his home to his office beneath the giant Jodrell Bank radio telescope that would later bear his name. After a pleasant hour or two immersed in the data that poured constantly from
the telescope as it listened to the faint whispers of deep space, he gathered up his papers and prepared to leave.
The phone rang. It was not a good connection, nor a voice he recognized, but the accent was distinctly Russian. The voice at the other end belonged to a scientist attached to the Lunik 2 Soviet moon-rocket program, or so its owner claimed. Would Mr. Lovell be so kind as to verify trajectory and impact?
Lovell was cordial but vague. He had grown used to crank calls since his success in tracking the Sputnik carrier rocket had thrust him and his telescope into the limelight two years earlier. He hung up and headed for his cricket match, which lasted all afternoon. As the light faded and stumps were drawn, he remembered the peculiar call and returned to his office to find the telex machine pumping out “streams of coordinates from Moscow.” He understood at once what they were supposed to indicate and trained his telescope on the moon.
By this time the Russians had their own radar arrays capable of tracking probes in orbit and beyond, but they knew Washington might choose not to believe a Soviet announcement that one of their rockets had won the latest installment in the space race. It was a problem of mutual mistrust that both sides had considered overcoming by sending a nuclear weapon to explode on the moon so that no one could doubt their “success.” Sergey Korolyov had decided to enlist Lovell instead.
Embedded in the nose of an adapted R7 stage-three booster, Lunik II hurtled precisely on course across 240,000 miles of nothing and slammed into the Mare Serenitatis at 7:30 in the morning London time, on Monday, September 14. Lovell tracked it all the way. When asked, he confirmed that the rocket had performed as Moscow claimed. It so happened that two more R7s, complete with warheads, were at that moment being prepared at last for installation near the village of Plesetsk in northern Russia.
The next day, Khrushchev landed at Andrews Air Force Base in the world’s largest airplane—the very Tupolev that had carried Frol Kozlov back from New York two months earlier. On his first visit to the Oval Office, he presented Eisenhower with a replica of the Lunik probe. “It seemed a strange gift,” the president reflected later. It was, but not half as strange as the journey of mutual discovery on which the two of them were about to embark.
Khrushchev’s parade through America was a two-week fever dream of colliding prejudice and rough, remarkable enlightenment. He got stuck in a lift in the Waldorf-Astoria (a “capitalistic malfunction”) and royally insulted by a bumptious mayor of Los Angeles. He met Shirley MacLaine and Marilyn Monroe and lost his temper when turned down for a visit to Disneyland out of fear for his security. He dropped in on an old friend in Iowa, the corn guru Roswell Garst, and roared with laughter when Garst started throwing silage at the press horde covering his every step. There were no visits to General Curtis LeMay’s nuclear bomber bases, but there were several carefully contrived drives through American suburbia and its relentless proof of prosperity. Khrushchev didn’t like these parts of his itinerary, but he could not deny the evidence of his own eyes. Toward the end he breakfasted on steak and eggs in Camp David’s Aspen Lodge and backed down on Berlin. There had been no mention of U-2s and no progress on disarmament, but that could wait. Eisenhower had given him the respect he craved and had spoken sincerely of his desire for peace. He had promised to arrange a four-power summit and to visit Russia in the spring.
Khrushchev returned to Moscow a changed man. In speeches at the airport and immediately afterward at the Central Lenin Stadium, he said he believed that Eisenhower “sincerely wishes to see the end of the Cold War” and that together they could “do a great deal for peace.” He ended each address with a hurrah for Soviet-American friendship that would have been unimaginable a year earlier. Towns and villages the length of the country began primping and planting in case the Eisenhowers—who had been told that nowhere was off limits—decided to drop by. “You could sense an elated mood in Moscow,” Sergei Khrushchev wrote. “It was like the atmosphere in a home which awaits the arrival of a dear and hoped-for guest.”
The hopefulness grew. Some Russians dared to call the spring of 1960 the American spring. Khrushchev’s biographer, William Taubman, has written that it was in danger of turning into “a massive, spontaneous, public ideological defection.”
It never came to that, but it was real, and it was underpinned by one of the boldest decisions of Khrushchev’s career. In January 1960 he slashed the size of the Soviet armed forces by 1.2 million men. Eisenhower concluded that his new friend in the Kremlin was serious about disarmament.
* * *
Not everyone agreed, however. One of the doubters was another former fighter pilot, Colonel Thomas Lanphier Jr. (retired), without whose tireless work Gary Powers might never have made his last flight over Russia.
Unlike Powers, Lanphier had his chance to prove himself in World War II, and took it. In April 1943 he was stationed at Henderson Field, a forward U.S. air base on Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. He was already a prolific fighter ace with four confirmed Japanese kills, including three in a single day earlier that month. At midnight on the seventeenth he was summoned to a cabin being used by Admiral Marc Mitscher, commander of all airborne U.S. forces in the Solomon Islands, to be told he would be ambushing a Japanese air convoy expected to come within range the following morning. Mitscher had received his intelligence on the convoy directly from the navy secretary in a top secret document that ended: “MUST AT ALL COSTS REACH AND DESTROY. PRESIDENT ATTACHES EXTREME IMPORTANCE TO MISSION.”
Lanphier was smart, fearless, loquacious, and an exceptionally gifted pilot. Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1915, he was the son of another military pilot, Thomas Lanphier Sr., whose close friends included the aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh. A degree from Stanford adorned the younger Lanphier’s résumé, but flying was in his blood.
Fortified with Spam, dried eggs, and coffee, he took off from Henderson Field at 7:00 a.m. on April 18 in an attack formation of four twin-engine P-38 Lightnings backed up by twelve more Lightnings to provide cover. All sixteen planes flew for two hours toward their expected rendezvous with the enemy, skimming the waves to avoid detection by radar. A formation of Japanese bombers and fighter escorts appeared above them exactly as predicted, flying southwest toward the island of Bougainville. Lanphier climbed, chased one of the bombers inland, and brought it down with a long burst of cannon fire that tore off one of its wings. “The plane went flaming to earth,” an army intelligence report said afterward. Among the casualties was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Years later other pilots on the Yamamoto raid began disputing Lanphier’s version of events, but he stuck by his like the fighter he was. After the war he worked briefly in newspapers in Idaho, but he retained a fierce loyalty to the air force and the national defense. When invited to Washington to serve as special assistant to the secretary of the air force, he accepted. His new boss was Stuart Symington, the future senator. They worked formally together for only two years but kept in touch. By the late 1950s Lanphier, now living in Southern California, was one of Symington’s most valued sources on the missile gap. He had maintained excellent contacts in air force intelligence and had gone one better: from 1951 to 1960 he was a vice president of Convair, maker of the mighty Atlas missile that Willie Fisher may have seen trundling over its last few miles to Cape Canaveral from San Diego under an enormous shroud.
The phrase “conflict of interest” barely begins to describe Tom Lanphier’s rabidly partisan approach to advising one of the most powerful congressional allies of the American military-industrial complex. Yet he was in good company. Air force intelligence was crammed with highly competitive analysts who believed they were in a zero-sum game not only with the Russians but also with the army and the navy. If they could make the missile-gap theory stick, America would have to respond with a crash ICBM program of its own. The dominance of the Strategic Air Command in the U.S. military hierarchy would be complete—and Convair would profit mightily. It is hardly surprising t
hat the information Lanphier fed to Symington and Symington to every politician and columnist who would listen was authoritative, alarming, and completely, disastrously wrong.
Symington’s “on the record” projection of Soviet nuclear strength, given to Senate hearings on the missile gap in late 1959, was that by 1962 they would have three thousand ICBMs. The actual number was four. Symington’s was a wild guess, an extrapolation based on extrapolations by air force generals who believed it was only responsible to take Khrushchev at his word when, for example, he told journalists in Moscow that a single Soviet factory was producing 250 rockets a year, complete with warheads.
Symington knew what he was doing. He wanted to be president and believed rightly that missile-gap scaremongering had helped the Democrats pick up nearly fifty seats in Congress in the 1958 midterm elections. But everyone was at it. The 1958 National Intelligence Estimate had forecast one hundred Soviet ICBMs by 1960 and five hundred by 1962. In January 1960 Allen Dulles, who should have known better because he did know better, told Eisenhower that even though the U-2 had shown no evidence of mass missile production, the Russians could still somehow conjure up two hundred of them in eighteen months. On the political left a former congressional aide called Frank Gibney wrote a baseless five-thousand-word cover story for Harper’s magazine accusing the administration of giving the Soviets a six-to-one lead in ICBMs. (Gibney also recommended putting “a system of really massive retaliation” on the moon.) On the right, Vice President Nixon quietly let friends and pundits know that he felt his own boss didn’t quite get the threat. And in the middle, Joe Alsop wrote a devastating series of columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers in which he calculated that the Soviets would have 150 ICBMs in ten months flat and suggested that by not matching them warhead for warhead the president was playing Russian roulette with the national future.
Bridge of Spies Page 18
