Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  * * *

  By 6:00 a.m. on May 1 it was already “scorching hot” on the Peshawar flight line, and there were plenty of good reasons to cancel Mission 4154.

  The mission’s cover was almost certainly blown. There had been seven U-2 ferry runs in three days between Turkey and Pakistan. To make them possible, Shelton had been forced to fly in extra fuel from Adana, and for no obvious reason he had broken Beerli’s rule of only using C-130s, loading the fifty-five-gallon drums into a conspicuous double-decker C-124 instead. Quickmove was a distant memory. The airport watchers who the CIA assumed were retained by Moscow to monitor U-2 movements in Peshawar and Adana can seldom have been busier. The same was surely true of the Soviet listening post in the Caucasus, caught napping by Orlov earlier in the month. “Can you think of any better way to telegraph to the Russians that we were coming?” Beerli would ask.

  Article 360 was, moreover, a lemon. It had run out of fuel over Japan the previous year, leading to a belly landing and extensive repairs back in California. But one set of wing tanks was still not always feeding fuel to the engine properly. As Powers put it, “something was always going wrong,” and his good friend Bob Ericson agreed. Ericson was in the hangar as Powers’s backup and did not believe the plane would get to Norway.

  Even in a perfect plane, the odds against success would have been daunting. Grand Slam was the first mission to try to cross the Soviet Union from one side to the other, which would mean flying in a straight line for hours at a time. Ericson had shown on April 9 that continuous changes in direction helped to throw off pursuers; Powers would not have that luxury.

  The Soviet air defense forces were now on near-permanent alert. Despite its zigzags, the April 9 mission had been tracked by Soviet radar and followed by Soviet fighters for eight and a half of its nine hours. The National Security Agency may not have been able to eavesdrop on Khrushchev’s furious reaction, but it was reasonable to assume that Marshal Biryuzov and his men would do their utmost not to let another U-2 get away. Furthermore, the CIA knew the Russians had plugged its radar gaps in the Pamirs.* It had also come to believe the Russians were close to solving the guidance problems that made surface-to-air missiles so unreliable at very high altitudes, and it knew that S-75 Dvina missiles had been installed around Sverdlovsk. Officially the pilots were not privy to this intelligence, but they had collected much of it and knew full well that the window of opportunity for overflying Russia was probably closing.

  They did not know in any detail what they were supposed to be looking for, but Allen Dulles did, and as director of central intelligence he had admitted to Eisenhower in January 1960 that if the Soviets really had a crash ICBM program of the kind the U-2 was seeking, it would have been found already. Nonetheless, final planning continued for a May 1 overflight, even though it was a major Soviet holiday. Most military and civilian air traffic would be grounded for the festivities. An intruder, especially at seventy thousand feet, would stick out like a UFO.

  If Powers crashed or was brought down, Eisenhower’s hopes for a resolution to the Berlin crisis at the Paris summit—not to mention his shared vision with Khrushchev of large-scale nuclear disarmament—would almost certainly crash with him. Ike had thought this through in clairvoyant detail. “The President said that he has one tremendous asset in a summit meeting,” General Goodpaster wrote in another memorandum for the record on February 8. “That is his reputation for honesty. If one of these aircraft were lost when we are engaged in apparently sincere deliberations, it could be put on display in Moscow and ruin the President’s effectiveness.”

  But the truth was no one in Washington was listening to the arguments against overflights anymore. By the end of April even Eisenhower had given up. He considered himself a good judge of character but had completely misinterpreted Khrushchev’s silence on the subject of the U-2 at Camp David and the absence of protest notes since. His science adviser, George Kistiakowsky, thought the Russians were “practically inviting us” to continue with the overflights, and the president was coming around to the same view.

  The U-2 mission planners, now just two blocks from the White House on H Street, were still trying to prove a negative—the absence of a giant missile factory. This was not easy in a country the size of the USSR, and they still hadn’t photographed Plesetsk, the suspected ICBM site north of the Arctic Circle. They knew about the heightened risk now posed by surface-to-air missiles, but they used it as an argument for risk, not restraint; for cramming in as many missions as possible before overflights really did become suicide runs. At the latest meeting of the president’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, in February, General James “Jimmy” Doolittle had gotten in on the act. The hero of the Doolittle raid was now secretary of the air force and hardwired, like his predecessors, to press relentlessly for action. Toward the end of the meeting the sober Goodpaster, who knew his master’s mind more intimately than anyone else in the room, reminded those present of a brand-new spy plane in the Skunk Works pipeline that would be available soon and would fly higher and much faster than the U-2, making it almost impossible to intercept. Doolittle pounced. “The reliability of the new airplane is bound to be much lower,” he pointed out. “This is a special factor in this connection, since the embarrassment to us will be so great if one crashes.” The logic was contorted, but it had ground Ike down. He had given permission for a flight and they were going to use it.

  * * *

  Powers had spent Friday night playing poker. By Saturday night the waiting was getting to him, and so was the knowledge that he would be flying a less-than-perfect plane if the go code ever came through. But he was at least drowsy enough to get some sleep.

  In the Urals two pilots of the 45th Fighter Regiment of the Soviet air defense forces, Captain Boris Ayvazyan and Lieutenant Sergei Safronov, turned in expecting to have Sunday off. They were stationed outside Perm, an unlovely, smog-choked factory town west of the Urals on the Trans-Siberian railway. Two months earlier, Ayvazyan had shot an American spy balloon out of the sky. Statistically, the chances of his being called upon to land another blow on the American aggressors quite so soon were slim.

  A third pilot, Captain Igor Mentyukov, was en route from Novosibirsk to Belorussia in one of two brand-new Sukhoi Su-9s being delivered to an air base at Baranovichi. It was a long flight and hard to do in a single day given its low priority and the need for multiple refuelings. There was also a discouraging thunderstorm over the Urals that evening. Mentyukov and his partner were spending the night in officers’ lodgings in Sverdlovsk.

  In the woods outside Kosulino, Mikhail Voronov had let three of his officers go home for the holiday, but his rockets were still manned. One of those still on duty was Lieutenant Nikolai Batukhtin, graduate of the Gorkovsky Radio-Technical Institute in Samara and now the proud operator of the transmitter that sent in-flight guidance signals to the rockets. The fiasco of April 9 had stung them all, but by the thirtieth, he insists, “we were ready.”

  For the radar stations along the Osh-Khorog road, May Day would not mean family. No family could endure the endless cold and desiccated air of the Pamir plateau, never mind the stories whispered by the mountains of the man-eating snezhnyi chelovek—the abominable snowman. But there might be vodka, and that would take the edge off the boredom.

  In Adana, Barbara Powers was resigned to not having Gary back for Sunday evening. It would not be the first party she had enjoyed without him.

  In Washington, Richard Bissell (by this time thoroughly distracted by plans for toppling Castro in Cuba) was weekending with Walt Rostow, an old friend and a future liberal apologist for the Vietnam War. Bissell’s deputy, air force colonel Bill Burke, was handling U-2 matters.

  The weather over Russia looked better, though not perfect. Eisenhower’s permission was unclear as to whether a flight could happen on May 1 but quite clear that it could not happen after. That would be too close to the summit. It was now or never. Burke said afterward that he co
nsulted with Allen Dulles before issuing the go code, and Dulles concurred.

  The code took a long time to reach Peshawar.

  Powers was woken at 3:00 a.m. His routine restarted: long johns, breakfast, suit, hose. As he started purging his system of nitrogen, he received his flight plan. It was 4:30 a.m. and the first time he knew he would be heading for Norway. A few months later he wrote wryly that he was glad he’d already had his breakfast because after looking at the map he would have been too nervous to eat. Before he pulled on his helmet and started shutting out the rest of the world, Shelton came over and asked if he wanted to take a pin.

  Approved suicide methods had moved on from the L pill. For a reported three million dollars, the CIA had produced a needle dipped in highly concentrated curare poison from the South American jungle and hidden in a silver dollar. The coin was made to look like a souvenir brooch. One end of the pin protruded, ending in a flange. A quick twist and the whole thing came apart easily enough. Then a decisive jab anywhere in the body would bring on total, permanent anesthesia with no need for the sharp intake of breath required with cyanide.

  “OK,” Powers said. Shelton gave him the silver dollar and he put it in an outer pocket.

  He was told takeoff would be at 6:00 a.m. Normally the go code would come through four hours before that, but Powers was nearly an hour into his prebreathing and still it hadn’t come. Ericson helped him out to the plane anyway and strapped him in.

  Six o’clock came and went, and still no go code. As the sun came up, Powers waited and sweated. Ericson, who was waiting with him, took off his shirt and spread it over the canopy.

  Powers was convinced the mission would be scrubbed, and Shelton was getting anxious. He came over to say they were still waiting for clearance from the White House, which wasn’t true. It was past eight o’clock in Washington and all the approvals were in. Burke had sent the go code. It had reached Germany, and Turkey, but the communications chief there was having trouble retransmitting it. The CIA later identified the problem as ionospheric interference, which was not a euphemism for a hangover. It was a seasonal early-morning radio hitch, and it left only one option—to send the go code in unencrypted Morse on the aircraft emergency frequency, where at 6:20 a.m. on May 1 the comms crew in Peshawar eventually found it.

  Anyone else listening in could have found it too, but Powers was not to know this, and if Shelton knew he didn’t say. Powers started his engine, noted a half-hour delay in his logbook, and closed his canopy.

  At 6:26 a.m. the giant black crow carrying Barbara Powers’s husband, a fully loaded Hycon B camera, 1,300 gallons of fuel, and a two-and-a-half-ton Pratt & Whitney J-75 engine turned slowly onto the scorching runway. Powers was soaked in his own sweat and unable to wipe his brow because of the helmet clamped hermetically onto his suit. For the next nine hours he would be moving without moving, doing without thinking (he could think when it was over). But at least he had his orders, direct from his commander in chief. If this wasn’t proving himself, nothing was. He throttled up. Outside, they heard the familiar rising scream. Inside, he left most of the noise behind but felt the power in his back and then beneath him as the great black crow succumbed to its outrageous excess of lift over drag and hurled him into the sky.

  * * *

  There was no trouble getting the signal to Oslo. In his hotel, Stan Beerli took the call that said the mission was a go. The CIA station chief had a plane ready to take him to Bodo on the Arctic coast, where he was to be joined by a Quickmove recovery team in a Hercules that had been waiting in Germany since the twenty-seventh. The team consisted of a pilot to bring Powers’s plane back to Adana, Lockheed mechanics to ensure it was still airworthy, and enough fuel in fifty-gallon drums to keep the mission self-sufficient and thus secret.

  Beerli had fond memories of Bodo. He had spent three weeks there with Powers and others in 1958, waiting for the weather to clear over Plesetsk and getting to know the local Norwegian intelligence chiefs (whom he indulged with Scotch and, on one occasion, a crate of lettuce flown in from Germany). Now it was spring, and long, limpid evenings had come to the fjords. In other circumstances there would have been fishing and maybe hiking in the backcountry. This time Beerli was confined to the Norwegian air force base that filled most of the flat land between the mountains and the water.

  He had told the head of Norwegian intelligence in Oslo that the mission he was going to meet would be a signals run along the Soviets’ north coast. In Bodo, his point person was a General Tufti Johnson, and he had to be even less forthcoming with Tufti: they were doing atmospheric sampling. That was the line, he says, “but they weren’t fooled a bit. They knew.” And they knew the whippet-thin Beerli never brought enough to eat. “So this is May 1,” he remembers. “We’re sitting in the hangar, staying out of sight, not doing anything. And who should come walking in but Tufti Johnson with a tray full of hors d’oeuvres. And it’s on a big silver platter, so I know what he did. He just picked it up from the mess hall and brought it over. I’ll never forget that.”

  * * *

  The miner’s boy from Pound pricked the great imaginary bubble of Soviet airspace at 67,000 feet, flying more or less level. As his fuel load lightened, he would climb another 3,000 feet. Turning his head an inch or two inside his helmet, he could make out the brilliant, sculpted white of the high Pamirs nine miles beneath his right wing. Ahead, an ocean of cloud covered the cotton fields and the parched nothingness of Soviet central Asia. Everything else could have been anywhere else—Nevada, Turkey, California; the blue black of the stratosphere was a constant. So were the suit, the yoke, the reassuring slab of instruments, the soft hiss of the oxygen.

  Powers clicked his radio on, then off. Bob Ericson was listening out for it in the Peshawar radio van. He sent a click back, and Powers was on his own with 3,788 miles to go.

  “Everything was working perfectly,” he would write in prison five months later. “No excuses for aborting the mission and no returning. I had to continue.”

  He guessed he’d been airborne for thirty minutes. In fact the radar station on the Pamir plateau picked him up and logged him as an intruder after just ten. The calls started at 5:36 a.m. Moscow time: the Pamir station to Tashkent, Tashkent to the duty officer on Frunze Embankment, the duty officer to Marshal Biryuzov, Biryuzov to Marshal Malinovsky.

  It fell to Malinovsky as defense minister to wake Khrushchev on the secure Kremlin line. The call was patched through to his residence in the Lenin Hills, where the phone on the premier’s bedside table rang at 6:00 a.m. It was happening again. All units had been alerted. They would do their utmost.…

  Khrushchev came down for breakfast looking like thunder. “He sat at the table in silence,” his son remembered. “There was only the sound of his spoon clinking against the sides of his glass of tea.”

  For an hour Powers flew north over the Kara-Kum and Kyzyl-Kum deserts, unobserved for all he knew, but in Moscow they knew his location to within a few miles.

  Chauffeurs had been woken even earlier than Biryuzov and his senior staff to speed them through empty streets to the air defense forces’ command center, where they watched the U-2’s progress on the same map that had recorded the April 9 humiliation. The map was printed on a wall-sized glass screen. Behind it, a uniformed sergeant silently pushed a black cross toward Tyuratam as each new fix on Powers’s position came in.

  Over the Cosmodrome the cloud thinned and Powers switched on his cameras. Far below he saw the first contrails of pursuit planes, supersonic, first heading south, then with him to the north. He wasn’t worried. He pressed on.

  With Biryuzov was Alexander Orlov, whose tasks in the previous tense weeks had included plotting potential future U-2 routes. This was not one of them. The Americans usually flew loops over central Asia. True, they had taken a look at Sverdlovsk before, but why again? (It was a good question to which there was no good answer. To Stan Beerli, routing Powers over Sverdlovsk when the Agency knew it had recently received S-75s
was asking for trouble, and it still rankled decades later.)

  The first alarm woke Mikhail Voronov at seven o’clock: “Was I asleep? Of course I was asleep. It was the first of May. I was planning to walk over from the barracks to give my soldiers their traditional May Day congratulations. Instead I ran. We all did. We rushed to our positions and when we got there I told my commander that my battalion was ready to fire, ready to push the button.”

  For most of Voronov’s men this meant scrambling out of tents and into uniforms on the one day of the year when they could have expected an extra hour in their sleeping bags. It was a rude awakening, especially considering this was almost certainly a drill.

  Word came through that it was not a drill. Voronov passed it on: there was an intruder twenty thousand meters over the Aral Sea with who knew what in its bomb bay. The control cabin filled up: Voronov, Lieutenant Batukhtin, and five other guidance-control officers, one for each rocket.

  Silence fell over the encampment.

  Was this how it started? Was this what the Americans wanted on the first of May? “We were bewildered and shocked,” Batukhtin says. “We couldn’t understand how in the middle of the country an enemy plane had simply appeared in the sky. It was like a strike from the blue.”

  Yet no one panicked, least of all Voronov. The veteran of Kursk and Tula knew a thing or two about morale. As the silence stretched the nerves of the younger men in the cabin, he got back on the radio and asked his commander, a Colonel Gaiderov two villages away, if they could all have breakfast. Gaiderov gave them ten minutes.