Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  When Gary was shown the clipping a few days later in the long interrogation room in Moscow, he broke down and wept.

  (The KGB no longer had anything to gain by withholding from Powers the knowledge that his parents knew he had survived, since Khrushchev had made sure that the whole world knew. But Powers’s interrogators still wanted to know if he had sent a distress signal before going down. If he had, they reasoned, he could also have received radio messages in flight, including one alerting him to the SAM sites near Sverdlovsk. That might explain the strange kink in his route north of Chelyabinsk—but it would also point to a highly placed mole in the air defense establishment. When he finally told them he had maintained radio silence throughout his flight, they were more baffled than ever.)

  In Milledgeville, the Agency men on the Barbara Powers detail bowed to the inevitable when the news broke that Gary was alive. They sat her down in her mother’s kitchen and told her she was going to have to give a press conference. A doctor was on his way “to give you something to ease your nerves,” they said, and she was grateful. The Baldwin Hotel downtown was already full to bursting with out-of-town reporters, and now they descended on the pilot’s mother-in-law’s front yard. Barbara faced them from a swing seat on the porch and proudly joined the ranks of CIA-affiliated obfuscators.

  “I do not consider my husband a spy,” she told the throng. “He was assigned to reconnaissance flights, period. To me this is a big difference. Gary is definitely not the cloak-and-dagger type.”

  It was only a matter of time before someone asked about her leg, and she didn’t miss a beat. “I broke it in a waterskiing accident,” she said.

  * * *

  For nearly a week the men of Mikhail Voronov’s S-75 battery talked quietly and curiously among themselves. Having been alerted to the orange and white parachute on May 1, Voronov had sent an officer and two men to find the pilot, but the Moskvich car got to him first. Batukhtin and ten others from the regiment were assigned to cordon off the debris field but were told nothing about the debris. By the evening, reasonably sure they had scored a hit without starting a war, they celebrated with a few hundred grams of vodka.

  A Tupolev carrying a fearsome concentration of senior air force and KGB officers had touched down in Sverdlovsk soon after midday. Some returned to Moscow with the prisoner. Others supervised the search for evidence and summoned a crane to heave the U-2’s engine from a swamp. No one in Kosulino was told anything. Voronov’s first confirmation that he had shot down an American who was still alive came from Khrushchev himself, in his second speech to the Supreme Soviet.

  By then the remains of Article 360 were in Moscow, where the best and brightest of the Soviet aviation design bureaus would try, without much success, to reverse engineer it into a stratospheric dragon lady of their own. But first it was put on show.

  Khrushchev the exhibitionist was on a roll. For a few more days his “fetish for secrecy” (Ike’s grumpy sound bite) was subordinated to his fetish for propaganda. The dismembered U-2 was displayed in the Hall of Chess in Gorky Park, with captions in Russian and English and helpful wall-mounted displays on its route, cameras, pilot, and dastardly purpose. The pressure suit and pistol were there. So were the parachute and the poison pin. One of the first to take a look around was … Khrushchev. Trailing almost as many reporters as he had eight months earlier on Roswell Garst’s corn farm, he paused in front of the crumpled fuselage just in case anyone had any questions. As far as he was concerned, the summit was still on, he said. But was the same true of the Eisenhowers’ visit? At this he paused for fully half a minute. Those present thought he was genuinely thinking it through. “Put yourself in my place and answer for me,” he said at last. “I am a man, and I have human feelings.” If the visit happened, it was not going to be much fun.

  The next VIP ushered into the Hall of Chess was Powers, on his second and last outing before his trial. Shelepin wanted to squeeze him for technical information on the plane that many of the Soviet Air Force’s top brass had said could not exist despite the evidence of their own radar screens. Powers decided his strategy would be to “examine it curiously, as if seeing it for the first time.” In a sense he was: he had never seen the plane turned inside out and had no idea until then how many of its parts bore their manufacturer’s name. Words like “Hewlett-Packard” and “Pratt & Whitney” jumped out at him as shamelessly as if Kelly Johnson had etched “Made in USA” across the tailplane.

  Powers studied the tail with particular care. He saw no scorch marks or even scratches in the paint, leaving him more convinced than ever that he had been the victim of a near miss, not a direct hit.

  Then he was driven back to the Lyubianka and the floodgates were opened. The public formed queues that snaked endlessly through Gorky Park, and the squads of military attachés at the U.S. embassy were as curious as anyone. Professionally, they needed to find out if the wreckage was genuine and, if possible, how the plane had been brought down. Personally, they were fascinated by a piece of equipment that even they had not been cleared to know about. But they were also known to the KGB and did not want to give Mr. Khrushchev any more excuses for grandstanding. So instead of going themselves they sent a young political officer who had good Russian, an open, friendly manner, and next to zero knowledge of aeronautics. His name was Frank Meehan.

  “The line seemed to be miles long,” Meehan remembers. “I knew I could go to the head of the line and show my diplomatic ID and they would let me in. But I thought to myself that maybe they’d decide to make an incident of me. They were perfectly capable of doing that if they wanted to.

  “So I did a Hamlet. I argued with myself. I walked down the line, on and on and on, will I do it, won’t I do it. I finally got the courage up and went to the head of the line, and there was a militsianer—a cop. He looked at me, and I produced my ID, and he looked at me some more, the way they did, very cold, and he had some questions. I thought he was going to throw the book at me. And then he said, ‘Pozhalusta’—it’s your plane. Be my guest.”

  Meehan did his best, looked around, peered at the captions, wrote it up. “But what did I know about any plane? What I produced was an ignoramus’s report on what it looked like. Without the captions I wouldn’t have known which bits were which.”

  His report was fed into the embassy’s larger report on the exhibition and the state of the plane, which concluded that it was in “remarkably good condition” given that it was supposed to have smashed into the ground, having fallen apart at seventy thousand feet. That conclusion, in turn, fueled fast-growing rumors in Washington that Powers had not been downed by a missile at all; that he’d had a flameout and descended to restart his engine before being hit at about thirty thousand feet; or even that he’d landed, defected, and spent the evening in a Sverdlovsk nightclub.

  Kelly Johnson didn’t believe the missile story. Nor did Allen Dulles. Nor, later, did his successor, John McCone. They all knew that the Kremlin had an interest in letting it be thought that its surface-to-air missiles were lethal even at an altitude of thirteen miles. That would go some way to negating the threat posed by the U.S. Strategic Air Command’s fleets of nuclear-armed bombers. Allen and McCone were also privy to NSA decryptions of Soviet communications from the morning of May 1 that seemed to indicate someone had descended to thirty thousand feet before being hit at that altitude and bailing out. Someone had, of course—the ill-fated Sergei Safronov in his MiG-19—but no one outside Russia was to know that until after the cold war.

  In due course Powers would have to confront the men who thought they knew more than he thought they knew. That would test his patience and nearly destroy his reputation. But first he had to reconcile himself to the accusation of ruining détente.

  * * *

  In the second week of May, Powers and Khrushchev must have been the two most anxious men in Moscow. Nothing Shelepin or his minions said or did in the interrogation room persuaded Powers that they would spare his life. On the contrary, so
on after his visit to the wreckage of his plane he was told he would be tried for crimes against the Soviet state, which carried a maximum penalty of up to fifteen years in prison, or death. So he spent his days playing mental poker with his captors—telling the truth when he thought they already knew the answers to their questions and lying when they came back, as they so often did, to the U-2’s ceiling and the history of its overflights. He spent his nights in gloomy anticipation of a secret trial and a bullet in the head.

  Half a mile away, in his office in the Kremlin, Khrushchev’s public and private faces were coming unglued. In meetings with aides and ministers he was a parody of frothing indignation. In private he still desperately wanted a grand bargain in Paris, massive disarmament to fund fridges for the Soviet people, and a quiet shelving of the Berlin issue. After that, he still wanted to consecrate the deal on home turf with Eisenhower.

  A few days before leaving for the summit, he took an evening walk with his son near their dacha outside Moscow and “suddenly began talking about Eisenhower’s farm” at Gettysburg. They had visited the farm and admired Ike’s cows while staying at Camp David. So the president should come to the dacha and see the Khrushchevs’ vegetables, then take a boat ride on the Moscow River. “There was no indication that the visit might be canceled,” wrote Sergei Khrushchev, his father’s closest confidant.

  Nor was there any sign that Khrushchev senior had begun to doubt his own assumption that Powers’s flight had been planned and authorized by Dulles, not the president. Yet at the same time he was genuinely furious that so much hope and planning had been put in jeopardy. Had he not just laid off more than a million soldiers, including 250,000 officers? This was the one Soviet constituency with nothing at all to gain from détente, and the May Day outrage had given them the perfect opening to step up their mockery of Khrushchev’s trust in Ike, not to mention their challenge to his authority in general. Small wonder that on May 9, at a reception at the Czech embassy in Moscow, he made a beeline for Llewellyn Thompson. “I must talk to you,” he whispered in the American ambassador’s ear. “This U-2 thing has put me in a terrible spot. You have to get me off it.”

  What he meant was clear enough: throw me something—an apology if you can, or at least an undertaking not to send more planes across my country’s most sensitive nuclear sites. Thompson said he would try, but it was too late. In Washington a statement by the new secretary of state, Christian Herter, had already been approved for release. Instead of apologizing for the overflights, it defended them as essential given the Soviet drive to force the free world to choose between “abject surrender or nuclear destruction.” Instead of forswearing more flights, it pointedly failed to rule them out.

  At this, Sergei Khrushchev said, his father “simply boiled over.” Before taking off for Paris he huddled with his farewell committee under the wing of his Tupolev and decided to open the summit with an ultimatum: Eisenhower must apologize, punish those responsible for the Powers mission, and promise not to repeat it. Or the Soviet delegation would walk out. On the short flight, his speech to the summit’s opening session was rewritten as a harangue. He had brought forward his departure by two days, initially to give time for private talks with Eisenhower to put the unhappy U-2 business behind them. Eisenhower had also wanted to clear the air, but Herter advised against, saying the idea would be seen as a sign of weakness. The American invitation was never sent. Khrushchev told de Gaulle and Macmillan what he planned to say in advance but otherwise spent the weekend before the summit sulking in his Paris ambassador’s residence, hoping for a response from Eisenhower and not getting one. For his own part, Ike landed at Orly saying there was “too much at stake for profitless bickering” and then refused to respond to an ultimatum he had not received.

  Monday, May 16, 1960, was the day the laser was invented (by Theodore Maiman at the Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu). It was also the day the leaders of the world’s four nuclear powers could have stopped the arms race in its tracks. Instead, three of them listened patiently while the fourth unleashed a forty-five-minute tirade against, among others, the “small, frantic group in the Pentagon and [U.S.] militarist circles who benefit from the arms race and reap huge profits.” Khrushchev was not in fact paranoid. This was precisely the group against which Eisenhower warned the American people in his final televised address from the Oval Office. The only difference between the two leaders’ perceptions of the group was one of scale. Ike called it the military-industrial complex. Certainly, it was never so obliged. Goaded on by the silent, glowering presence of defense minister Malinovksy at his shoulder, Khrushchev issued his demand for an apology. He suggested that if he didn’t get one the summit be postponed for eight months (in other words, until after the U.S. presidential election). He rescinded Eisenhower’s invitation to Russia. He went even pinker than usual. Ike went red with anger. De Gaulle told Khrushchev not to shout, noting that the acoustics in the intimate dining room they were using in the Elysée Palace were perfectly adequate. Macmillan, whose idea the summit had been, found the whole thing “a most unpleasant performance.” At lunchtime they went their separate ways, the wasted opportunity dissipating almost visibly across the parquet.

  Looking back twelve years later, Macmillan called that day “one of the most agonizing as well as exhausting which I have ever been through except, perhaps, in battle.” Yet his agonies weren’t over. The following afternoon he and de Gaulle were still trying to get the nuclear behemoths back to the negotiating table—but the Russian was in the bath at his ambassador’s house, refusing to respond in writing to a fresh invitation until the others made clear whether it was for a preliminary session or the summit proper. He was, in his own half-crazed way, still begging for an apology, which he had admitted “our internal politics requires.” But Ike was in no mood to give it. In desperation, the British foreign secretary asked Herter why not. Herter: “Because he is not sorry.”

  And so the summit proper never happened. Khrushchev flew home via East Berlin, where he tried to make a virtue of having faced down the aggressors. In reality he betrayed the depths of his now-forlorn hopes for détente by refusing to renew his Berlin ultimatum. Eisenhower enjoyed a layover with the new Portuguese dictator, and Macmillan wrote to the Queen, saying he would not try to conceal his “shock and disappointment” at the way things had turned out.

  Not everyone was so dismayed. Notable for his high spirits at the Paris parties that had punctuated the abortive summit sessions was none other than Joe Alsop, the columnist who had done so much to inspire fear about a supposed missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union. Back in Washington he had greeted the U-2 story with a column headlined “The Wonderful News,” praising the CIA for having taken the missile threat seriously enough to take such risky pictures. It was a neat way of changing the subject from an actual gap to the idea of a gap and of appearing to own up to his own distortions while doing no such thing. In Paris he was in “wonderful” form, wrote Marina Sulzberger, wife of the New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger. More than that, he was “optimistic as never before and glorying in the company of … all those beautiful women he always has up his sleeve.”

  Alsop in 1960 was as guilty as Bush or Cheney in 2003 of ignoring the available intelligence about the enemy’s WMD for the sake of a compelling story. Not that he was bothered. His conscience never seemed to suffer any more than his reputation, which was helped enormously by the fact that Powers came down where he did. Sverdlovsk was eight hundred miles southeast of Plesetsk. Article 360 was still two hours from its main target when it fell apart, with the result that Richard Bissell’s air force never did photograph the only place left in the Soviet Union where it might have found operational ballistic missiles capable of reaching North America. Had Powers reached the site, switched on his cameras, and carried them safely to Stan Beerli’s waiting Quickmove crew, he would have provided the first documentary evidence of the number of ICBMs in Khrushchev’s stockpile—all four of
them. That was it; that was the extent of the intercontinental nuclear arsenal with which the Soviet premier seemed to have threatened to bury the West. The missile gap did not exist—a vital piece of information for politicians and military planners alike, and one that the U-2 never quite established.

  To most people the point was academic, especially when the CIA’s Corona satellites at last finished the job. But it was not academic to Alsop, or to Allen Dulles, or to history.

  As a journalist, Alsop could adapt his views to reality, and he did, eventually hailing the absence of a missile gap as a sort of personal victory—a bullet dodged thanks to alarms raised by people like him. As a political player, Dulles could not be so cavalier. Having given Eisenhower wildly conflicting signals as to the advisability of continued U-2 flights before the Paris fiasco, Dulles had the grace to offer his resignation. Ike turned it down but was still so angry that he asked his son to ensure that he and Dulles were never again left alone together.

  Dulles did not take it personally. In fact, his political antennae were already trained elsewhere. As the Eisenhower presidency wound down, in August 1960, he paid a call on the Democratic nominee for that year’s general election. It was ostensibly a courtesy that the director of Central Intelligence would have granted any nominee, but in this case it was more than a courtesy. He visited John F. Kennedy at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, and when the subject of the missile gap came up, Dulles looked Kennedy in the eye and said that in view of the failure of the Powers mission he could not categorically confirm that the gap did not exist. It was, in essence, the very opposite of the advice he had given to Eisenhower seven months earlier. It did untold violence to reality but was not an out-and-out lie. More to the point, it was what Kennedy needed to hear. He was able to continue to use the issue of the missile gap in his campaign, and three months later he won the White House by the narrowest margin in U.S. presidential history.