Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  Alsop, who lived well but expensively in a substantial house in Georgetown, was the Larry King of his day—dapper, superbly well connected, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a good story. His series ran in the last week of January 1960. Khrushchev read it in translation and resolved to steal the thunder of the missile-gap lobby, which was threatening to land him with an arms race that would bankrupt Communism. Before the four-power summit, which was now scheduled for Paris in mid-May, he would offer to dismantle his entire ICBM stockpile. No one needed to know how big or small it was; they just needed to know that he was serious about disarmament. He revealed his plan to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at a secret meeting in the Kremlin on February 1. It was bold, crafty, and conciliatory all at the same time. It was vintage Khrushchev, and it marked the high point of his power.

  Eisenhower read the Alsop columns and fulminated. He called the missile-gap men “sanctimonious, hypocritical bastards.” But he also bowed to mounting pressure from his own senior staff to beef up the evidence that the missile gap did not exist. This was why he allowed two more U-2 flights before the summit. It was an understandable decision, and a disastrous one.

  It was understandable because the CIA had at last confirmed from other sources that the small stock of ICBMs Russia did have was being installed at Plesetsk, 150 miles due south of Archangel—and not in the northern Urals. Time to photograph them before they were hidden in their silos was fast running out, the Americans believed, and the more Ike knew about Khrushchev’s true nuclear disposition, the less shadowboxing he would have to do in Paris.

  It was disastrous for two reasons: Eisenhower was right that the loss of a U-2 over Russia would destroy his priceless reputation for honesty. But he was wrong if he thought that Khrushchev’s silence on the subject of spy planes at Camp David meant he was resigned to them. On the contrary, privacy was now more central than ever to the Soviet leader’s strategy. His extravagant bluffing about the size of his nuclear arsenal had to work, because without the impression of a meaningful stockpile, there could be no meaningful disarmament. What Khrushchev wrote later about arms inspections applied equally to overflights: the Americans “would simply have been given the opportunity to count our weapons and see that we were weak!”

  He did not believe, after Camp David, that Eisenhower would allow his confounded U-2s to violate Soviet airspace again. But if reactionary forces within the administration sent them in anyway, they would have to be brought down.

  * * *

  The loggers and graders had arrived outside Kosulino the previous summer. They had come to other villages too, and on a map those villages made a tight ring round Sverdlovsk. Trees were felled and tracks cut into the woods that were suitable for heavy trucks but not much else. No one in the villages was told what was going on, but star-shaped patterns in the forest could be seen from civilian flights on final approach to Sverdlovsk Airport. Richard Nixon was on such a flight in late July. So was Ray Garthoff, a junior State Department staffer assigned to travel with the vice president. Nixon had asked to be allowed to use his own plane for the domestic side trips tacked onto his Moscow itinerary that year, in order to take pictures. The request had been turned down for the same reason, but Garthoff snapped some of star-shaped patterns in the forest anyway. Were these the long-sought ICBM sites that Stuart Symington knew all about?

  Not quite. Until September they were nothing but clearings. Then soldiers arrived to dig in for the winter. Kosulino’s battalion was led by Major Mikhail Voronov, a proud veteran of the Great Patriotic War and a confident leader of men. He had no rockets yet, but he had subordinates to train and by Lenin he would train them.

  Voronov was born in 1918 in a village in western Russia too small to have a school. When Hitler’s tanks rolled into Minsk he was a sergeant at war college in the Caucasus, and after two months of accelerated officer training he was dispatched to the front. At the battle of Tula he broke his leg. He was patched up in Tashkent, returned to the front, and apprenticed in the terrifying art of shooting at dive-bombers as the Fascists advanced on Stalingrad. At the battle of Kursk he commanded his own antiaircraft battery as wave upon wave of German fighter-bombers tried and failed to dislodge the Red Army. At Kursk he also met his wife, Valentina, who fought with him all the way to Lublin and still lived with him on the Black Sea coast sixty-three years later. The war prepared him for everything that followed, he said, including the events of May 1, 1960. That day felt “like a small war, just for me.”

  * * *

  In terms of miles covered, it was a big war.

  As the star shapes were being carved out of the forest round Sverdlovsk, a thousand miles to the south the new commander of the Turkistan Air Defense Corps set out on an urgent journey to the roof of the world.

  It was a journey that probably began by air, over the giant white rampart of the northern Pamirs. Behind the rampart, in the late 1950s, snow leopards reigned supreme and the world’s biggest nonpolar ice cap sent glaciers carving and tumbling toward China, Afghanistan, and the deep, fast-flowing River Pyandzh.

  The commander’s plane would have skirted to the west of the main Pamir massif and dived into the gorge dug by the Pyandzh to land on a thin concrete strip wedged between the river and Khorog. Then he needed a truck.

  He was driven into the mountains along the legendary frontier road to Osh, leaving trees, warmth, and all trace of civilian life behind. Beyond the first high pass, where border guards kept vigil over one another and eventually managed to grow a few tomatoes in a greenhouse warmed by hot springs, the road descended a short distance onto a vast brown plateau. For an hour the truck followed the plateau’s northern edge. To the left the lumpen shoulders of Pik Kommunizma, the highest mountain in the Soviet Union, stood back under their mantle of ice and snow. To the right, yaks grazed on oxygen-starved grass. Eventually the truck bumped off the road and headed south toward a cluster of white domes, barely visible at first but proof of a human presence in this moonscape.

  The man in the truck was General Yuri Votintsev. Two years earlier he had led the showstopping procession of Dvina missiles through Red Square. Now he had come to shake things up at the closest Soviet early-warning station to Pakistan.

  The U-2’s flight planners in Washington believed that if they could smuggle the planes into Soviet airspace with no initial radar contact their chances of being tracked and shot down later in their missions would be drastically reduced. Votintsev and his superiors in Moscow knew from experience that this was true. They knew the monstrously impertinent routes flown by Cherbonneaux and Jones in 1957, even if they didn’t know the pilots’ names. They had an inkling about Knutson’s route in 1959, even if Stan Beerli thought it had gone undetected. In December that year and again in February 1960, before Eisenhower’s authorization for a final pair of flights before the Paris summit, more U-2s from Peshawar had photographed the pockmarked proving grounds of Kazakhstan from Kapustin Yar in the west to Sary-Shagan in the east. Votintsev was informed, but too late for a coordinated response.

  “It took me two months to become familiar with the [radar] units, including the personnel of individual companies stationed along the Osh-Khorog road,” Votintsev wrote. “I concluded that the effective strength of the corps deployed on the country’s southern borders was not capable of accomplishing the assigned missions.”

  His men had been staring at their screens and seeing occasional highflying specks, and yawning. Only the Andijon fighter squadron had shown any alacrity, but its pilots had not come within ten thousand feet of the intruders even in a zoom climb. Votintsev spent a year replacing dud officers with the best men at his disposal and installing powerful new radars along the Osh-Khorog road. It made a difference. U.S. aircraft flying along the Soviet border detected the new radars and their findings were fed into a National Intelligence Estimate of March 1960. The estimate said the only gaps left in the southern radar defenses of the entire Sino-Soviet bloc
were in southwestern China.

  Even so, project HQ thought the U-2s would still get through.

  * * *

  On April 8, 1960, Frank Powers and Bob Ericson, another Agency pilot still based at Adana, climbed into a C-130 and took off with the Quickmove team for Pakistan. Ericson was the mission pilot. Powers was his backup. Beerli was back in Washington as Bissell’s head of operations. His place in charge of Detachment B had been taken by William Shelton, an air force colonel who was never quite obsessive enough about secrecy for Beerli’s taste. As Beerli put it, cryptically and yet quite clearly: “Quickmove did not have such an impact on Shelton.… He was more or less Air Force rather than CIA.”

  The previous two missions had not provoked protest notes, but Powers knew the window of the U-2’s invulnerability to Soviet rockets must be closing. “We could not shake the feeling that time was catching up with us,” he wrote. He would find out soon enough that rockets had been fired at an air force U-2 on a ferret run along the coast of Chukotka in the Soviet Far East. They missed, but a Dvina missile had already brought down a Taiwanese spy plane at 63,000 feet near Beijing; and in Washington another National Intelligence Estimate, this one barely a week old, had concluded that the Dvina had “some capability” up to 80,000 feet.

  In Kosulino and the other villages around Sverdlovsk, the rockets had at last arrived.

  In central Siberia, a luxury log cabin was being built for President Eisenhower and his family on a headland overlooking Lake Baikal.

  In a secluded piece of parkland outside Moscow, for the same honored guest, engineers and landscape artists were constructing the Soviet Union’s first golf course.

  * * *

  Ericson took off at dawn on April 9 and was 150 miles into Soviet airspace before being spotted. For six hours he zigzagged over every top secret site in Kazakhstan, leaving chaos in his wake. It was a greatest hits tour, as if the pilot and his paymasters somehow knew that time was running out for Soviet overflights and he wouldn’t be back: Sary-Shagan, Semipalatinsk, Sary-Shagan (again), Tyuratam (yet again). For six hours fighters were scrambled to intercept him, some armed, some unarmed, none with much hope of success. For six hours Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, head of all Soviet air defense forces, maintained a miserable, silent vigil in front of a giant map of the Soviet Union at his Moscow headquarters.

  The most excruciating snafu was caused by the very nuclear security that Ericson was violating. The challenge was to get new Sukhoi Su-9 fighters into the air near the U-2, since they could zoom much higher than more readily available MiG-19s. Ericson seemed to dawdle forever over the Semipalatinsk site, but the nearest Sukhois were a thousand miles away in Perm and would need refueling before heading for the stratosphere.

  Years later, Sergei Khrushchev pieced it all together:

  The Semipalatinsk test site had its own airfield, but ordinary air force pilots were not permitted to land there. A special “atomic” pass was required. The local military headquarters sent a request to Moscow. Since it was the middle of the night, naturally only the air defense duty officer was there.…

  The duty officer followed regulations. He woke up [Marshal] Biryuzov. Biryuzov informed the defense minister, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky.… Malinovsky telephoned Yefim Slavsky, the minister of medium machine building [the official euphemism for nuclear defense]. He was the only one who could take responsibility for allowing “uncertified” pilots to land at his airfield. While all this telephoning was going on, time passed and it was 7 am before the unit finally received permission to land at Semipalatinsk. By then the U2 had finished photographing the nuclear test site and was heading toward Lake Balkhash.…

  As Ericson finally headed south from Tyuratam, a seething Biryuzov broke his silence to order two MiG-17s to chase him into Iran if necessary. The planes were scrambled from Merv in southern Turkmenistan, the site of an especially horrific massacre by Genghis Khan in 1221. No one died there on April 9. One of the Soviet pilots spotted the U-2 as it sailed over the border and gave chase. But he ran low on fuel and turned back before Ericson started his descent.

  Both Khrushchevs were in the Crimea for a spring break. Why not send a protest note this time? Sergei asked his father. “Why give our enemies the satisfaction?” was the reply. The Soviet premier then retired from public view for eleven days to nurse his rage.

  * * *

  Three weeks later the Americans did it again. Authorization for the mission came from the very top and was given with extreme reluctance on account of the looming Great Power summit in Paris and Eisenhower’s hopes for it:

  TOP SECRET

  April 25, 1960

  MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD:

  After checking with the President, I informed Mr. Bissell that one additional operation may be undertaken, provided it is carried out prior to May 1. No operation is to be carried out after May 1.

  A.J. Goodpaster

  The first person outside the White House to know about Mission 4154, apart from U-2 program director Richard Bissell, was Stan Beerli, the former Detachment B commander since reassigned to Washington. On April 26 he was told to pack for Norway. On the twenty-seventh he put on his usual dark suit and caught a flight from Dulles to Oslo. “I went commercial,” he remembers, “via Copenhagen.” He arrived on the twenty-eighth, checked into a hotel, and waited.

  Barbara Powers knew something was up almost as soon as Beerli. On the twenty-seventh, a Wednesday, Gary asked her for a good-sized pack lunch, and that was something she could provide with or without a broken leg. She filled one thermos with hot potato soup and another with coffee. She made him six sandwiches filled variously with tuna, Spam, and pimiento cheese. She packed them all into a red plaid carrying case and filled the gaps with olives, cookies, and sweet pickles, because high-altitude weather recon could be a hungry-making business.

  Her husband took off in a Hercules that morning, confident he’d be back by Sunday evening. The communications chief was going home, and “an appropriate sendoff had been planned.”

  Barbara was left with the one companion she knew loved her unconditionally—Eck, the German shepherd.

  * * *

  In Moscow, Marshal Biryuzov was still smarting. Comrade Khrushchev had chewed him out over the phone from the Crimea as only Comrade Khrushchev knew how. What did it say for the country’s defenses against nuclear bombers if they could not bring down an unarmed spy plane? Where had all the billions for surface-to-air missiles gone? Was half the Soviet military asleep? Biryuzov passed the kicking down the chain of command.

  “It was a terribly nervous time,” said Colonel Alexander Orlov, namesake of the great illegal, who had spent the early hours of April 9 with Biryuzov in the air defense headquarters on Frunze Embankment. Orlov found out that a Soviet listening post in the Caucasus had picked up encrypted American radio chatter about the Ericson flight “several days before it happened” but had failed to pass it on.

  Heads rolled at the listening post. Votintsev was reprimanded by the defense minister. In Kosulino, Voronov received orders to start sending his soldiers on live-fire exercises with the Dvina.

  In Washington, the president had given permission for a second overflight and was not consulted again. It was up to Richard Bissell to choose between two spectacularly high-risk flight plans. One started in western Greenland and flew halfway around the Arctic Ocean before loitering for three hours over northern Russia and landing in Norway. The mission planners called it Operation Time Step. The other started from Peshawar and crossed the entire Soviet landmass, also ending in Norway. This was Operation Grand Slam. Both had one main target: Plesetsk, which still had not been photographed and still nourished air force fantasies of a massive Soviet ICBM strike force to be countered with an even more massive American one.

  Bissell chose the Grand Slam route and left town for the weekend.

  * * *

  “We were trying something new,” Powers wrote later.

  It was a small thing; a variation on Quic
kmove devised by Colonel Shelton and General Bill Burke, another air force man who was serving as Bissell’s deputy in Washington. If the weather was bad over Russia and the mission delayed, the U-2 would be flown back to Adana rather than hidden in a hangar in Peshawar.

  This was not how Beerli would have done it. Beerli was a hide-everything-and-everyone-in-the-hangar man—but he was no longer in charge. He was in Oslo, waiting.

  Soon after midnight on Thursday, April 28, the U-2 for Operation Grand Slam dropped out of the blackness and coasted to a halt on the concrete at Peshawar. It was the plane known as Article 358, the most reliable in the detachment’s inventory. Powers had arrived the previous afternoon in the C-130. He’d eaten some of Barbara’s soup and turned in early—not that there was much chance of real sleep on a camp bed in a corner of the hangar. “It was hot and noisy,” he wrote. “As usual, I tossed and turned, sleeping only sporadically.”

  He was woken at 2:00 a.m. to eat, suit up, and start prebreathing for a 6:00 a.m. takeoff. There was no steak in Peshawar, but there were eggs, bacon, and toast. If it took an effort of will to hold down such Anglo-Saxon staples while wrestling with preflight nerves, no U-2 pilot admitted it. Powers just called it “a good, substantial breakfast,” as if bacon and eggs at two in the morning at the foot of the Khyber Pass were the most natural thing in the world.

  About 3:00 a.m.—the middle of the evening rush hour on the East Coast—the CIA’s weather analysts in Washington postponed the mission by a day. The message was encrypted, sent to Germany, bounced from there to Turkey, and bounced again over the Hindu Kush to Pakistan. Powers came off the hose and Shelton had the U-2 ferried back to Turkey.

  The same thing happened on Friday and Saturday. It was too cloudy over Russia to use the precious presidential permission slip for a mission that might yield nothing. Each day the U-2 commuted to Adana and back—except that by Friday night, Article 358 had flown two hundred hours since its last major inspection and was due for another. On Saturday, Article 360 was flown in instead. No one in the detachment liked Article 360. Powers called it “a dog.”