Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  In January 1961, on the night of his inauguration, Kennedy attended the customary round of balls and then, still in white tie, called on an old friend in Georgetown. Joe Alsop opened the door himself, and they talked into the early hours over warm turtle soup.

  Kennedy owed Powers. He owed Powers from the perspective of what actually happened over Sverdlovsk on May Day, 1960—a shoot-down that wrecked a summit and kept alive the idea of a missile gap until the presidential election—but also from the perspective of what might have happened. Had Article 360 gotten through to Bodo, the Paris summit might very well have proceeded constructively if not cordially. A sort of superpower peace, uneasy but still a vast improvement on nuclear brinkmanship and morbid mistrust, might very well have been Eisenhower’s triumphant legacy. And Nixon might very well have ridden his predecessor’s coattails into the White House. Such an analysis sits ill with the Camelot-as-destiny approach to presidential history, and it affords a journeyman American pilot and a dutiful Russian antiaircraft gunner unfashionably large roles in world affairs. Neither consideration makes it wrong.

  Kennedy owed Powers, but it was not a debt he had a mind to acknowledge. In fact he showed Powers nothing but disdain. According to one rumor that reached Powers’s hometown of Pound from Washington, and that was broadly accurate, the new president could have asked for Powers’s release at his first meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961 but chose not to. According to another rumor heard by Carl McAfee, far from admiring Powers’s heroism, “Kennedy wanted to prosecute his ass.”

  McAfee’s recollection was only slightly skewed. It was Bobby Kennedy, the new attorney general, who wanted to try Powers for treason on his return to the United States. But the president undoubtedly shared his brother’s contempt for the way Powers handled himself after having the temerity to survive his crash. Like many Americans, “Kennedy looked at this as a disgraceful incident,” McAfee remembered. Like many Americans who became indignant about Powers’s behavior as a prisoner, Kennedy second-guessed it without making the slightest effort to understand it.

  * * *

  When Powers was told he would be tried for espionage, he imagined a perfunctory hearing behind closed doors, followed by death. He was in for a surprise. The Hall of Columns occupies a large oblong of prime Moscow real estate on what is now Teatralnaya Ploshchad—Theater Square—but in 1960 was named, aptly, for Sverdlovsk. Wedged between the Lyubianka and the Kremlin, it was perfectly located for the show trial of an American spy. It was less than five minutes’ walk from the defendant’s cell, the prosecutor’s office, and the colossal Sovetskaya Hotel, where a carefully assembled cast of foreign observers would be accommodated. But the Hall of Columns was the obvious venue regardless of location. It was a showpiece of czarist splendor co-opted and refurbished by the Soviet Communist Party to intimidate the many and terrify the few. It was in the Hall of Columns that Bukharin had refused to prostrate himself to the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union (and the shadow of Stalin himself, watching from a high concealed window) at the zenith of the purges in 1938. Bukharin, and so many other loyal Bolsheviks, were taken back to the catacomb of tunnels beneath the Lyubianka and shot in the head within minutes of their sentences being pronounced. And it was the Military Collegium that would try Powers.

  In his honor, the hall was repainted in green and white. A gold-colored hammer and sickle set within a crest the size of a hot tub was hung above the stage and polished until it shone. A press center was set up in one of the hall’s cavernous anterooms, complete with two long tables of typewriters, an international cables desk, and a newfangled international phone booth. In another anteroom more tables would groan beneath the weight of caviar, smoked fish, cold cuts, pickles, layered sponge cakes, and pungent mineral water from the Caucasus.

  The fourth estate was to be kept fed and happy, and the majesty of Soviet justice was to be revealed according to a strict timetable: the complex was booked for three days and no more. Anyone hoping that any aspect of the trial’s timing, content, or outcome would be left to chance, or even to the force of unrehearsed argument, would be disappointed.

  Powers fell into that category. By the time he took the stand on Wednesday, August 17 (his thirty-first birthday), he was underweight, depressed, lonely, confused, and thoroughly frightened. The first two of these were linked. His involuntary fast was long since over, but even though his prison food was reputedly delivered from a canteen where KGB generals ate, he did not eat much of it. This was why, shortly before the trial, his digestive tract was examined from the bottom up in full view of “an audience of doctors, nurses, guards and interpreters.” Powers later called it the ultimate indignity, and it was surely intended as such.

  His loneliness and confusion were also linked. Having been denied any visits from the U.S. embassy, he had not met a single compatriot since his fall to earth. As a result, his minders were his only source of information on what was known of his fate back home; on how his actions were being judged there; and on whether the CIA understood that he had divulged only what he thought the KGB already knew. He had played exhausting mind games with his interrogators, trying to keep his lies consistent on how high the U-2 could fly and how often it had overflown the Soviet Union. He assumed those games would only get tougher at his trial and hoped against hope that the Agency would notice them.

  As for his fear, the cause was simple. He faced the death penalty.

  After the trial the British reporter James Morris (who covered the first ascent of Mount Everest for the Times of London but had since defected to the Manchester Guardian) wrote that Powers had “presented himself as a poor deluded jerk from Virginia, a part that I suspect did not require much playing.” It was a cruel assessment. It was also inaccurate in that the appearance of being deluded by his Agency paymasters was precisely the part of Powers’s trial persona that did require acting. But Morris touched on two truths: Powers had been violently deracinated and then dragged along a psychological assault course for which the CIA had left him completely unprepared.

  Like Kennedy after him, Eisenhower was unsympathetic. He complained in the first days of the crisis that Powers seemed to have started talking “the moment he hit the ground.” As the trial unfolded, squads of editorialists who had never been shot down or spent a day in solitary confinement pitched in with clichéd references to Nathan Hale and some marginally more apt ones to Rudolf Abel. Hale’s silence was golden. Powers was a blabbermouth.

  Powers was, in fact, a diligent pilot and a dependable follower of orders. That is why he found himself soaring over the Hindu Kush early on May 1 when common sense would have sent him back to Turkey. That is why he flew on toward the Urals even when his autopilot failed, and that is why, had the CIA instructed him to keep his mouth shut if captured, he would undoubtedly have kept his mouth shut. Instead, he dressed for his trial and made the short journey to Sverdlovsk Square on August 17 with one overwhelming fear—of execution—and one coherent piece of Agency advice to cling to: “You might as well tell them everything, because they’re going to get it out of you anyway.”

  Those had been the exact words of the intelligence officer at Adana when Powers had asked what he should do if captured in Russia. They were a recommendation to pursue the very strategy that the KGB itself urged Powers to follow: cooperate.

  Yet this was not in fact the strategy that Powers chose. A simpler soul in his position might have seen only a binary decision to make—to talk or not to talk. But the “deluded jerk from Virginia” assumed from the start that if he was to have any chance of saving his life, his honor, and the U-2’s most precious secrets, he would have to use his wits.

  He agonized for months about the chess game in which he found himself a pawn. “Barbara, I don’t know what is going to happen to me,” he wrote when first allowed to send a letter to his wife. “I will be tried in accordance with Article 2 of their criminal code for espionage. The article states that the punishment is 7 to 15 years i
mprisonment and death in some cases. Where I fit in I don’t know … I only know that I don’t like the situation I am in or the situation I have placed you in.”

  * * *

  Oliver Powers didn’t like the situation he was placed in either. He had seen his only son quit medical school for the air force and hadn’t liked it. He had seen him quit the air force for something that could not be named but smelled like the FBI and hadn’t liked it. He had found out from a pair of men in suits who showed up on his doorstep one fine day in May that what smelled like the FBI was in fact the CIA, and he’d liked that even less, not only because the CIA had lost his boy over Russia without a plan to get him back but also because when he formed a plan of his own the Agency had tried to muzzle him. He was fired up and apt to lose his temper.

  The plan in question was as simple as it was audacious. As things turned out, it gave rise to one of the more cinematic rituals of the cold war—that periodic pause for breath when each side was forced to level with the other and confess to small secrets in the hope of preserving larger ones and agree to a rendezvous somewhere quiet and secluded, preferably in fog, for a furtive human swap. It was not originally Powers’s idea. It had first been suggested in the New York Daily News eleven days after the shoot-down. But there is all the difference in the world between suggesting and doing, and Oliver Powers was a doer.

  Inevitably, the boy lawyer above his shoe shop became involved.

  “Bless his heart,” McAfee says. “Oliver was no dummy. He came up here one day and said, ‘Hey, listen, have you heard of Rudolf Abel?’ ”

  McAfee replied that he had; that he remembered the trial and the conviction. Abel was a Russian spy.

  “Well,” said Powers, “he’s pulling time in Atlanta and I’d like to see if he’s willing to be exchanged for my son.”

  McAfee suggested writing a letter. Powers suggested that McAfee was the one to write it. “So I found out where he was,” McAfee said. “I prepared the letter, in which I told him who I was and asked if he would be prepared to be exchanged for Gary Powers. I get a letter back saying would you please contact my wife in East Berlin. And not long after that some guy walks into my office and says he’s with the CIA and I am not to make any effort to contact Rudolf Abel again.”

  The Agency’s reaction to the letter “miffed Oliver to no end.” But contact had been made. A paper trail had been started, and Oliver Powers now had more than a hunch that the way to force the pace in the freeing of his son was to make sure he forgot to ask the CIA’s permission for anything.

  He observed the same rule when arranging to attend the trial. When the date was announced, he and McAfee slipped out of Norton, telling no one their destination. They headed north up Route 81, along the eastern foothills of the Appalachians toward the nation’s capital. They called in person at the consular section of the Soviet embassy on Wisconsin Avenue the next day and applied for visas to visit Moscow, which were granted in short order.

  A stampede followed. When Barbara Powers heard that her father-in-law and his lawyer were going to the trial, she decided to go too. When Ida Powers, Oliver’s wife, heard that Barbara was going, she told Oliver she would have to make the trip despite her angina and her emphysema. Instead of trying to dissuade her, Oliver asked his wife’s doctor to join the party. When Barbara learned that Gary’s mother would be going, she told her own mother to get packing, and her mother’s doctor for good measure.

  There was “a chasm” between Barbara and her in-laws, McAfee recalls. But on each side of the chasm the same question hung over the prospective Moscow-bound adventurers: who would pay? The CIA wanted to buy everyone’s tickets, and their loyalty, but Oliver was having none of it. He had already accepted an offer from Life magazine for his entire party’s expenses and a five-thousand-dollar fee in return for an exclusive story. The deal had been brokered by Sol Curry, a Norton department store owner, whom Life sent along for the ride and tasked with keeping their exclusive exclusive. He had his work cut out.

  The Agency did bankroll Barbara’s party, without her knowledge. It used the Virginia Bar Association as a proxy to expedite her visa applications, underwrite her travel expenses, and smother her with the attention of responsible grown-ups. Two of these were respected Virginia lawyers, an Alexander Parker and a Frank W. Rogers, ostensibly added to the group to help with Gary’s defense. In reality their main assignment, apart from keeping an eye on Barbara, was to try to debrief Powers for the Agency. Parker’s wife joined the party to help hold Barbara’s hand, sometimes literally, and Sam Jaffe, a CBS News correspondent based in New York, was unwittingly enlisted to the cause. He was given privileged access to the histrionic Mrs. Powers that delighted his editors but also forced him to participate as a restraining influence in her vodka binges, which he found acutely embarrassing.

  The ill feeling between the two Powers camps was intense throughout. Barbara and Oliver were each determined to be seen as Gary’s true protector, which meant constant efforts to upstage each other in the press and an undeclared race to get to Moscow.

  McAfee was first out of the blocks. Delayed by the task of securing visas for his wife and her doctor, Oliver Powers sent his lawyer on ahead to try to make contact with Gary. McAfee was willing and not easily intimidated, but he was new to the jet set. Apart from his travels in the navy, he had never left the country. At thirty, he had never even been to New York City until he changed planes there to catch a night flight with SAS to Copenhagen.

  It was delayed.

  “I got into Copenhagen late,” he says “Missed the flight from there to Moscow and pleaded with those people telling them I had to be in Moscow the following day. They sent my ass up to Helsinki.”

  The boy lawyer cooled his heels in Finland for an afternoon and reached Moscow at four the next morning. He had been expected the previous afternoon. No one was there to meet him, and as a result there were now two bewildered young men from Virginia in the Soviet capital. As Powers fretted in prison, McAfee fretted at the airport until Intourist could be alerted. Forty-eight sleepless hours after leaving Norton, he was swept into town in a Zil limousine and installed in the Sovetskaya’s Lenin suite.

  The rest of the Virginia contingent arrived in waves. Barbara’s team flew Sabena via Brussels, reaching Moscow on August 13. She and her mother were assigned a suite occupied by Vice President Nixon the previous summer. An uneasy Sam Jaffe was billeted on the same luxury floor. Oliver and Ida Powers and the family doctor came on a separate plane, which upset Gary when he heard about it but was the only arrangement his father would consider.

  Four days later, having consulted her older sisters and bought her own ticket, Jessica Powers-Hileman emerged alone and unexpected from passport control at Moscow’s miserable Sheremetyevo Airport. She hoped to be taken to her ailing mother, and eventually she was. “I’d given a telegram to someone I thought was a reporter in Stockholm,” she remembers. It had not been delivered. “It was my first time outside the United States. It was dark, it was midnight, and no one knew what to do with me. We thought the Russians had two heads and forked tails and all that, and I thought, ‘Gee, I’ll never be seen again.’ ” In desperation she showed a taxi driver her passport and pronounced her name. He understood—“Who didn’t know that name?”—and took her to the Sovetskaya. Looking back, she reckons she grew up quite a bit that day.

  * * *

  Why had they all come? For Barbara it was complicated. There was not much love left in her marriage, but she still had a husband to support, at least in public, and a father-in-law to stand up to. And she had little to do in Milledgeville besides drink and mope. For Ida there was a son to be prayed for and a daughter-in-law to be outnumbered. For Oliver the point was simple—to bring Gary home.

  At Oliver’s instruction, McAfee had assembled a fat dossier of affidavits testifying to Gary’s good character. He had also collected photographs illustrating Gary’s humble upbringing. He had even buried his nose in textbooks on international la
w and developed a theory that the Soviet Union had no jurisdiction thirteen miles up, having already conceded that it had no jurisdiction thirteen miles out to sea. McAfee and his client were going for broke. If the CIA wouldn’t let them arrange a swap of Gary for Rudolf Abel, they would try their luck with the KGB, asking for an acquittal on the basis of no case to answer.

  It was bold, imaginative, and doomed. McAfee was not allowed to visit Gary, but he did meet Gary’s Soviet defense lawyer, Mikhail Grinev, who accepted the affidavits and the photographs of blue-collar America but did not give the “no jurisdiction” theory a second look.

  Like Roman Rudenko, the prosecutor general, Grinev was a veteran of the Nuremberg trials. He was also a picture of gloom and a professional loser. A heavy mustache seemed to press his mouth into a perpetual grimace. If an unscripted thought ever sprang to life behind his hooded eyes, he did not let it out. His appointment to the case as Rudenko’s notional adversary was part of a general effort to remind the world of Nuremberg, where it was generally accepted that Soviet lawyers and due process had managed to coexist. But this did not give Powers much cause for hope. As Life magazine’s Moscow correspondent pointed out to McAfee, every German whom Grinev represented at Nuremberg was executed.

  On the stage of the Hall of Columns, fully six feet above the stalls, Grinev was to sit at a desk facing Rudenko. Powers’s place would be behind him in a dock that the New York Times said looked like a playpen. Between the lawyers and above them, behind a long table draped in red cloth, three senior generals would make up the Military Collegium.