Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  The hall started to fill up early on the morning of the seventeenth. It was gray outside and drizzling, but crowds gathered anyway. The press had reserved seats in a raised tier round three sides of the hall, and both groups of Powers supporters were driven to the hall from their hotel in plenty of time to talk to them. Oliver said the court would find out that his son was a good old boy and always had been. Barbara, in a black silk dress and black cloche hat, said he was the most wonderful person she had ever met. Most American reporters wrote generously that her eyes were red from weeping. Sam Jaffe noted later that a night of almost unremitting booze had played its part. (The drinking had been interrupted by a 3:00 a.m. taxi ride to the Lyubianka and back. Barbara had intended to find a door and bang on it until they let her in to see her man, but at Jaffe’s suggestion she made do with a sniffle and a prayer in the backseat of the cab. Debriefed after the trip by the FBI, he said that on their return to the hotel she grabbed him and kissed him and that on this, as on many other occasions, he could have “been intimate” with her but wasn’t.)

  A few minutes before 10:00 a.m. a bell rang in the hall. Forty-four chandeliers blazed down on a crowd of two thousand. Interpreters took their seats in soundproof booths to provide simultaneous translation via headsets in English, French, German, and Spanish. The Powers family and entourage were ushered into a box behind the press gallery. In the sea of heads in front them were those of Khrushchev’s daughter Yelena (her father was watching on television in the Crimea) and many of his ministers. Guy Burgess, the exfiltrated British spy, was there. So were senior diplomats from most of the embassies. It was, McAfee says, “like going to the Super Bowl.”

  At ten o’clock the generals took their seats behind the long red table and Powers entered, stage left, in a too-big double-breasted blue serge suit. Barbara started sobbing at once. The audience, which had risen for the entrance, now sat down. Powers sat too. The presiding judge ordered him to stand and stay standing for the reading of the indictment, which covered seventeen pages and took nearly an hour.

  Grinev had given him no warning about the setting. Powers wrote later that he felt as if he were being tried in Carnegie Hall and was extremely nervous. He hid it as best he could behind a mournful look that stared out from a thousand front pages the next day.

  There might have been aerial gunnery graduates of Turner Air Force Base who would have relished this strange moment in the glare of Soviet klieg lights, who would have deflected Roman Rudenko’s propaganda with a firm jaw and the glint of a fighter jock’s eye. Powers wasn’t one of them. He was the pilot who had suffered stage fright as a schoolboy but felt a preternatural calm in the cockpit. Even in rare group pictures of the Detachment B pilots in their pressure suits, helmets clutched like trophies under their right arms, he is the one who looks somehow uncomfortable. In the Hall of Columns he was miserable.

  Along with Powers, the indictment named Dulles, Nixon, and Christian Herter (the new secretary of state). They were its real targets—the instigators of the “gangster flight” dispatched expressly to wreck the Paris summit. In case anyone missed the point watching the trial, that day’s Izvestia carried a cartoon of Nixon, Herter, Eisenhower, and a generic uniformed villain from the Pentagon sitting in the dock next to Powers in his suit and helmet.

  He had read the indictment in his cell. Nearly half of it was an attack on the United States, not him. As he listened to it being read out by Rudenko, he looked “painfully ashamed,” one Soviet commentator said. Painfully alone would have been closer to the truth. When Rudenko finished, he pleaded guilty. A recess was announced. As he was being led out, he spotted Barbara waving from her seat and choked up.

  What he failed to understand was that almost nothing he could say at his trial would change its outcome, because nothing about it, or contemporaneous with it, had been left to chance. By way of countdown to that morning’s proceedings, a series of other American “spies” had been unmasked and expelled. Edwin Morrell, a student, had been thrown out in July. Colonel Edwin Kirton, air attaché at the embassy, had gone the previous Wednesday. The next day it had been the turn of Robert Christner, a tourist, and the next James Shultz, another student.

  America was incorrigible, shameless, obsessive in its meddling.

  And Russia?

  Fast-forward to day three of the trial. The verdict is near. The world waits to know Powers’s fate. The press room is full of newsmen banging out backgrounders. Some who have already filed are filling their bourgeois bellies with kielbasa and caviar in the refreshment room. Suddenly (according to Radio Moscow’s live commentary) “somebody brings joyous news.… I hear a correspondent dictating an account of the court proceedings on the telephone who interrupts his dispatch and almost shouts into the mouthpiece: ‘Stop. I have a flash. A new Soviet spaceship.’ ”

  The wizard of Baikonur has done it again. Sergey Korolyov has put into orbit a five-ton space capsule carrying not one but two live dogs and has brought them safely back to Earth. Never mind that five tons is the weight of an exceptionally large H-bomb complete with guidance system and heat-resistant nose cone. The man from Radio Moscow calls it “yet another peaceful star” and commiserates with Powers for sitting in the dock when he could be in training for space. Russia is irrepressible.

  Powers spent nearly seven hours on the stand. He fought rearguard skirmishes with Rudenko about his altitude when shot down—he stuck with 68,000 feet to remind the CIA that he was keeping the secrets that really mattered—and about the amount of advance warning he had been given before his mission (he said he had none). He impressed some of the American diplomats in the audience with his outward calm, even though by the end of his first four-hour session on his feet he was, he said later, quite ready to scream at the judges that they should “sentence me to death and end this farce.”

  He made two other claims in his memoir ten years later that hint at the pressure he felt to inject some heroism into the role history had given him. He wrote that in a break on the trial’s first day he saw a chance to escape when taken into a yard with an unguarded exit to the street, and that he nearly took it—“I tensed my legs, leaned forward slightly”—only to be foiled by a heavy hand on his shoulder. He wrote that in his cell before the trial he had visions of himself refusing to testify and of going down in history with Nathan Hale. He rejected these as “the heroic fantasies of a young boy,” convinced they would have cost him his life.

  Would they? Maybe not. With the luxury of half a century’s hindsight it seems likely that Powers could have “pulled a Milt,” like Willie Fisher in Brooklyn three years earlier. He could probably have said nothing, put his trust in geopolitics, and returned eventually to the United States not as the spy who spilled his guts but as the stoic son of Virginia who kept his mouth shut. It would have saved him a great deal of trouble.

  The purpose of his testimony was not to reveal anything the KGB did not already know. It was to provide a prelude to Rudenko’s closing harangue, which was in turn designed to shift the blame for the wrecked summit from Khrushchev back to the Americans. It wasn’t subtle. Rudenko was a fat-faced ideological yes-man who had reached the top of the ziggurat of Soviet justice by floating there on the shifting winds of change. As the New York Times put it: “He has purged and he has purged the purgers. He had helped to concoct false confessions and fantastic indictments, and he has dealt affably and studiously [at Nuremberg] before a tribunal run in the Anglo-Saxon manner.”

  Rudenko now reverted, on the morning of Friday, August 19, to a full-blown Marxist-Leninist critique of American militarism. This trial, he told his comrade judges and a vast live television audience, exposed not only the crimes of spy-pilot Powers, but also “the criminal aggressive actions of United States ruling circles, the actual inspirers and organizers of monstrous crimes directed against the peace and security of all peoples.” He let rip at the “bestial, misanthropic morality of Mr. Dulles” (for expecting Powers to jab himself with the curare pin); at Eisenhowe
r for promising to end overflights of Soviet territory and then allowing another one by a stripped-down Boeing RB-47 on July 1; and, most forcefully, at the unnamed masters of the American military-industrial complex who had reared and bred Powers and his fellow Powerses “in conditions of the so-called free world” to do their murderous bidding and ask questions later.

  “It is precisely these Powerses,” he proclaimed, “who would have been ready to be the first to drop atom and hydrogen bombs on the peaceful earth, as similar Powerses did when they threw the first atom bombs on the peaceful citizens of the defenseless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

  It was preposterous, of course, and it made Powers “sick at heart” to listen to. But it was not much more preposterous than William Tompkins’s undisputed claim at Willie Fisher’s trial that Fisher’s offenses posed a threat to “the free world and civilization itself.” Nor was it outlandish to suggest that Powers would have dropped a nuclear bomb if ordered to. He had been trained to do just that at Sandia Air Force Base in New Mexico in 1953 as a successful participant in “Delivery Course DD50.” Nor were Powers’s “masters” entirely innocent of contemplating a preemptive nuclear war. It was General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command who became famous for totting up potential casualties in the tens of millions and judging them tolerable. In fact Rudenko’s attack on the American military-industrial complex was strikingly similar to the more famous one by Eisenhower himself, but that was still five months in the future.

  In the case of pilot Powers, Rudenko asked for fifteen years’ imprisonment, but not death. Powers felt suddenly that he could breathe again. “I wasn’t going to be shot!”

  His father, in a dark suit and bow tie, stood up at the back of the hall and shouted, “Give me fifteen years here, I’d rather get death!”

  Barbara Powers wished afterward that she had told him to sit down and shut up but was “almost doubled up in our box, crying convulsively.” She was also heavily sedated.

  After a recess, Grinev wound up for the “defense.” To that point he had not challenged a single assertion by the prosecution or any of its expert witnesses (among them the KGB vet who had administered Powers’s poison pin to a dog and then, it turned out, to a mouse, which also died). Grinev was not about to change his tactics now. He merely requested sympathy for his client, noting his working-class origins, his upbringing in the shadow of “mass unemployment,” his seduction by the dollar, and his penitent cooperation as a prisoner. He asked for seven years.

  Powers had the last word. Grinev had told him again and again that his life depended on the sincerity of his expressions of regret, and in the end he stuck to a script the two of them had agreed, even though he knew he no longer faced execution. He started by saying he knew he had committed a grave crime and must be punished for it. He finished by asking to be judged “as a human being who is not a personal enemy of the Russian people … and who is deeply repentant and profoundly sorry for what he has done.”

  Carl McAfee spoke for everyone who had made the journey from Pound when he said later: “I think Gary should have said whatever it took to save his hide.”

  Ed Stevens of Life magazine spoke for most Americans when he leaned over and muttered in McAfee’s ear: “That remark is going to cost him.”

  The court took another recess. It reconvened at 5:30 p.m., past midnight for viewers of continuing live coverage in the Soviet Far East but well within deadline for reporters from New York and London. Lieutenant General Viktor Borisoglebsky, the presiding judge, delivered a final tirade against reactionary Americans leading the world to war, then, as a gesture of socialist humaneness, sentenced Powers to ten years’ confinement. On cue, most of the two thousand people in the hall stood and applauded.

  Powers managed not to flinch. He and Barbara could not see each other for photographers. She tried to take in what the sentence meant—only the first three years were to be served in prison, and only the locals understood that this meant the next seven would be in a labor camp. Gary was led offstage. Moments later, the family were taken to join him in one of the judges’ anterooms, where Gary finally broke down and sobbed in his parents’ arms.

  A posse of Russian photographers was on hand to record the reunion, ensuring that the tables of hors d’oeuvres provided by the Military Collegium remained in focus in the background. (“That was my first taste of caviar,” says Jessica Powers-Hileman. “I never did like it.”) The pictures were distributed by Tass that night, as were the musings of an obliging Danish Supreme Court justice, Christian Wilhelm Hargens. He called Grinev “outstanding” and the conduct of the trial as a whole “unimpeachable.” Above all, he said, “I am impelled to compare it with the Rosenberg case,” in which two people were sentenced to death on the strength of an indictment “the strength of which does not bear any comparison with the lawful character of the charge against Powers.”

  In London, the Times and the Daily Telegraph were predictably scornful of the Soviet parody of due process, but the News Chronicle called it “a coherent and cogent indictment of US aggression.” In New York, reporters went onto the streets and asked people what they thought of the verdict. One woman said that considering what he’d been paid, Powers had been lucky to receive such a light sentence. “You don’t get that kind of money for parting your hair.” On balance—and especially considering the timely return of canines Belka and Strelka from outer space to Kazakhstan—it was a banner day for Soviet propaganda.

  * * *

  Returning to his cell after an hour with his family, Powers realized he had brainwashed himself into expecting the death penalty. He also realized that having been spared it, the prospect of ten years in a Russian jail was, if anything, worse. But he had not reckoned with the depth of socialist humanitarianism, nor with the tenacity of his father and his father’s lawyer.

  His captors showed their true empathy a week after the trial. Barbara had stayed on in Moscow for a few days to shop in the GUM department store on the east side of Red Square and to petition Khrushchev for leniency on the west. She was not allowed to see the general secretary, but she was allowed to see her husband one last time, “without guards.”

  The conjugal visit has a long-established place in Russian penal policy, but it can seldom have been granted to two more surprised or grateful spouses than the Powerses. Gary was conspicuously coy in his description: “We were left alone three hours.”

  Barbara threw modesty to the wind. Left alone with him in a new cell with a couch, sheets, blankets, and an easy chair, she first kissed him and held him close, she wrote, tracing with a pin on the palms of his hands some messages from the CIA that Messrs. Parker and Rogers had asked her to pass on without being eavesdropped. She did not say what they were or whether Gary understood them, but they made for exquisite foreplay:

  With the preliminaries over, Gary and I began to make love. In nothing flat, Barbara Gay Powers was standing stark naked in a Russian prison cell.… And just that quick we were bouncing up and down on Gary’s cot, enjoying the true union of man and wife.

  We had intercourse three times in those three hours.

  Gary hadn’t been able to bathe for twelve days, and he smelled like a Billy Goat! But I didn’t mind. I was swallowed up by our passion. It felt like my husband was raping me. Once, between love sessions, Gary whispered—“You do realize the guards may be watching?”

  “I don’t give a good damn!” I retorted.

  Sated for the time being, she left for New York via Paris the next day.

  Carl McAfee, the young lawyer from Virginia, had less fun but more luck in pressing Powers’s case for leniency. Ed Stevens had advised him that the man to approach was not Khrushchev but the president of the Presidium, Leonid Ilych Brezhnev. A meeting was arranged, and the boy lawyer swept through the Kremlin’s northwest gate to attend it in the by-now-familiar Zil. Brezhnev received him in “the rinky dinkest office that I have ever seen,” McAfee remembers.

  The beetle-browed president
, who would later ruin the Soviet Union in the arms race that Khrushchev was so anxious to avoid, listened graciously as the young Virginian pleaded through an interpreter for a shorter sentence for his client’s son. Looking back, McAfee does not recall Brezhnev offering much hope—“and if he did it was in Russian and I don’t know what the hell he said.” But the visit was probably not pointless and was certainly unique in the annals of freelance diplomacy.

  The same was true of Oliver Powers’s efforts to arrange an exchange. He had not told his son about his letter to “Abel” in Atlanta, because the reply had been discouraging. What he did not know was that on the day Fisher sent it he also wrote a letter to his lawyer that was “electric with excitement.”

  When the Berlin wall went up, it cut the world capital of spying in half, but it still caught the West napping.

  On March 16, 1961, an American reporter named George Bailey predicted in a Washington political magazine that Khrushchev would soon “ring down the Iron Curtain in front of East Berlin—with searchlights and machine gun towers, barbed wire and police dog patrols.” Why? Because for sixteen years the young, the energetic, and the qualified had been voting with their feet and their suitcases, moving west in such large numbers that in the country they left behind “the mass of the population is either retired or approaching retirement.” East Germany was scarcely viable, let alone the socialist economic powerhouse that Khrushchev had been assured would overtake the West German economic miracle. Nothing tried so far had slowed the outflow. Something new and drastic had to be done. President Kennedy read Bailey’s article but did not act on it.

  On June 4 Kennedy received a new Berlin ultimatum from Khrushchev at their first meeting in Vienna. The Soviet Union would sign a peace treaty with East Germany in six months that would cut off NATO’s special access routes to West Berlin.