Then, tragedy. The Great Terror of 1937-38 brought mass arrests and murders, denunciations and deportations. Tupolev and Glushko were imprisoned and charged with sabotage. Korolev’s immediate bosses at RNII were executed; he himself was tortured and handed a ten-year sentence. Told that her father was a fearless pilot away on an important mission, Natalia Koroleva to this day vividly remembers her first memory of meeting her dad. It was at the feared Butyrka prison in 1940, under the supervision of an NKVD secret police guard. “But Father, how could your plane land in such a small courtyard?” she asked.
“Little girl,” the guard interrupted with a laugh. “It’s very easy to land here. Taking off again is much harder.”
• • •
Korolev, in the summer of 1957, was not the only one facing serious problems, whose career and possibly freedom were on the line. For Nikita Khrushchev, the chickens were also coming home to roost. The trouble, this time, began innocently enough with a telephone call. Khrushchev was having lunch at his official residence in Lenin Hills on June 18 when the special government hotline rang. Nikolai Bulganin was on the other end. “Nikita, come to the Kremlin,” he said, according to Sergei Khrushchev. “We’re having a session of the Presidium.”
Sergei Khrushchev recalled being struck by the unusual timing. “The weekly meetings were always held on Thursdays and this was a Tuesday,” he explained. His father also thought the sudden scheduling change strange. “Nikolai, what’s the hurry?” he asked, puzzled. Bulganin muttered something about going over a speech for the upcoming 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg, or Leningrad, as the city had been renamed. “We can do that on Thursday,” said Khrushchev dismissively. But Bulganin persisted.
The last speech Khrushchev had made in Leningrad in May had caused quite a stir in the Presidium. Speaking off the cuff, and without prior consultation of his fellow Presidium members, Khrushchev had predicted that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in meat and dairy production by 1960. “We will bury you,” he had roared in the heat of passion, choosing his words callously, because the world press interpreted the boast not as an agricultural duel but as a threat of nuclear annihilation. Even without the unfortunate reference to mass graves, the challenge was a tall order given that American farmers produced almost three times as much meat per capita as their Soviet counterparts. Apparently, Khrushchev’s competitive spirit, the same insecure desperation to upstage the Americans that Korolev had played upon, had gotten the better of him. But Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich had fumed that Khrushchev had thrown down a rash challenge that put the USSR in a potentially embarrassing bind. There was simply no way the creaky collective farms could triple their current quotas, and the exuberant Khrushchev had set up the Soviet Union to fail.
“Who’s there?” Khrushchev finally asked, growing uneasy. He had been around palace intriguers long enough to sense that something was up.
“Everyone who’s having lunch,” said Bulganin evasively.
The attack on Nikita Khrushchev began the moment he walked into the gilded conference room in the Kremlin’s main administrative building. A dozen pairs of hostile eyes followed his progress as he pushed past the tall padded door and made his way along the intricately laid parquet floor to his customary seat at the head of the long green baize table. Before he could sit down, Georgi Malenkov, a former prime minister whose demotion to minister of machine building Khrushchev had orchestrated during the post-Stalin power struggle, rose to speak. Khrushchev, he declared, should not chair the meeting. The extraordinary Presidium session had been convened to address his outrageous behavior, and it would be wrong for Khrushchev to preside over the discussions. Shaking with rage and slamming the table with such vigor that drinks reportedly rattled, Malenkov launched into a tirade outlining “error after error” and then nominated Bulganin to take Khrushchev’s place.
Khrushchev was stunned. For all his finely tuned political instincts, his decades of climbing the party ranks, and the considerable survival skills he had honed at Stalin’s court, the coup had taken him completely by surprise. And this was a coup, there was little doubt. It followed the exact same script Khrushchev had himself written four years earlier to get rid of Beria: the sudden session, angry accusations, arrest. Any moment now, Khrushchev could expect some ambitious KGB or army general to burst into the room with handcuffs. That was how Georgy Zhukov had earned his promotion first to deputy defense minister and then to defense minister and had received candidate Presidium membership. Now Zhukov’s predecessor, the crusty Stalinist soldier Kliment Voroshilov, declared Khrushchev “unbearable” and unfit to be party leader. Kaganovich called him a cow “knocking about the whole country” with his rash economic and de-Stalinization policies. When the young Leonid Brezhnev—a candidate Presidium member Khrushchev had rescued from the relative obscurity of the Naval Political Department—rose in his patron’s defense, Kaganovich turned viciously on him. “Leonid Ilyich barely had time to utter the first words,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. “Kaganovich, his mustache bristling, loomed over him. The last words Brezhnev heard were something like this: ‘You like to talk. You’ve forgotten how you were relegated to the [NPD]. We’ll chase you back there soon enough.’ Leonid Ilyich faltered, started to clutch the back of his chair, and sank slowly to the floor. A doctor was summoned. Guards carried the unconscious [Brezhnev] to an adjacent room.”
The insults continued, even from within Khrushchev’s own camp. “You’ve become the expert on everything—from agriculture to science to culture,” charged Dimitri Shepilov, the Pravda editor Khrushchev had appointed foreign minister to replace Molotov, who had held the post for nearly three decades. “Someone who’s illiterate can’t govern a country.”
Khrushchev was ousted as first secretary of the Communist Party by a margin of seven to three, excluding his own vote. But the expected arrest never materialized. For three days and three nights he stayed in the Kremlin waiting for the final ax, as the hard-liners celebrated. But the coup leaders had made a critical mistake: they had not arrested Khrushchev. “They couldn’t,” explained Sergei Khrushchev, “as long as Father retained the loyally of two key people: Zhukov and KGB chief Ivan Serov. He had appointed both of them, and they both knew that if he was replaced so would they.” Without the backing of the military and the secret police, Molotov and the other conspirators could not risk jailing Khrushchev. “I’m sure they planned on doing so later,” Sergei Khrushchev said, “once they were in complete control.”
The delay bought Khrushchev badly needed time. He knew that with the exception of the hard-liners, most members of the Central Committee backed him. He was a man of the people who traveled widely in the provinces, unlike his Stalinist cronies, and most rank-and-file representatives of the Communist Party approved of his liberal reforms. If he could just reach them. With Serov’s help, Khrushchev hatched a countercoup, and the two began secretly mobilizing the three hundred elected members of the Central Committee. In theory, only a full plenum of the Central Committee could override the Presidium. In practice, it had never happened before, and it posed logistical problems. Central Committee members were scattered across the Soviet Union, often in inaccessible provinces in Siberia and central Asia, and getting them all to Moscow on Aeroflot passenger planes could take days, and in some cases weeks. Only the KGB could contact them surreptitiously, without alerting Kaganovich’s forces. And only Zhukov’s new long-range jet bombers could fly them back to the capital in time to make a difference.
By the late afternoon of June 20, forty-eight hours after the coup began, Zhukov had managed to deliver eighty-seven Central Committee members to Moscow. His bombers were landing, refueling, and taking off to pick up more Khrushchev supporters. The new arrivals demanded that the shocked Presidium plotters convene a full party plenum to discuss the leadership crisis. Lest the conspirators forget where the military stood on the matter of Bulganin versus Khrushchev, the delegates descending on the Kremlin were led
by a parade of generals and marshals. By June 22, a weeklong plenum had been convened, and Kaganovich, Bulganin, and Molotov were in full retreat. It was now the war hero Zhukov, the savior of Moscow and conqueror of Berlin, who led the countercharge. The coup plotters, he said, were the very men who had been Stalin’s bloodiest henchmen, responsible for the worst of the purges. During a murderous eight-month rampage in 1938 alone, he alleged, Kaganovich, Molotov, and Malenkov had personally signed 38,679 execution orders. So had others, they protested. So had Khrushchev. But their tone was defeated. The fight in them had gone. Kaganovich, as Khrushchev noted in his memoir, no longer “roared like an African lion.”
Seated once more in the first secretary’s chair, Khrushchev could not suppress a satisfied sneer as his opponents squirmed for mercy. The attempted coup had been foiled. All that remained was for Khrushchev to decide the fate of the conspirators.
• • •
Sergei Korolev hadn’t had reason to laugh for a long time. But he was in unusually high spirits on the August morning he visited Boris Chertok at Moscow’s Burdenko military hospital. “Okay, Boris,” he cheerfully chided Chertok. “You continue playing sick, but don’t stay out for too long.” A half dozen jubilant engineers crowded around Chertok’s bed, teasing and poking their infirm colleague. The suspected radiation poisoning had turned out to be simply an exotic Kazakh bug that manifested similar symptoms. “This is the best medication,” assured Leonid Voskresenskiy, the daredevil chief of testing, pulling a bottle of cognac out of a bag. “So,” he said, once Korolev had finished his pep talk and excused himself on the grounds of an important meeting. “Here’s the pickle we’re in. Everyone congratulates us, but nobody other than us knows what’s really going on.”
The rocket, as Chertok already knew, had finally worked. Korolev had been given one final chance to prove himself, and at 3:15 PM on August 21, the R-7 had flown all the way to Kamchatka, landing dead on target next to the Pacific Ocean. Korolev had been so relieved, so euphoric, that he had stayed up till 3:00 AM the next morning, jabbering away excitedly about the barrier they had just broken. There was a slight hitch, however. The heat shield had failed, and the dummy warhead had been incinerated on reentry. Apparently, the nose cone dilemma hadn’t been solved after all. And without thermal protection, the R-7 was not an ICBM, just a very large and expensive rocket. That was why Korolev had just rushed off to meet with a group of aerodynamic specialists: to see if they had any solutions to what Voskresenskiy called “Problem Number One.”
Telemetry readings had shown that not only had the dummy warhead completely burned up ten miles over its intended target; it had also been rammed from behind in outer space by the main stage on separation. The bumping could be easily solved by venting some of the compressed nitrogen from the fuel tanks to slow the central block at the time of the warhead’s ejection, but the thermal shield failures had everyone stumped.
“We’ve only got one rocket left, number 9,” Voskresenskiy continued. “And we don’t know what to do to fix the nose cone.” The next test launch was scheduled for September 7, and it would have identical results. The R-7 would perform flawlessly; the dummy warhead would be completely destroyed on reentry, confirming the missile’s current uselessness as an ICBM and weapon.
“We need to take a break to make radical improvements on the nose cone,” Voskresenskiy told Chertok, leaning closer and lowering his voice to a mock-conspiratorial whisper. “While we’re working on it, we’ll launch satellites. That’ll distract Khrushchev’s attention from the ICBM.”
6
PICTURES IN BLACK AND WHITE
On the morning of August 28, 1957, the same day that Boris Chertok and Leonid Voskresenskiy would sip cognac and swap conspiratorial jokes at the Burdenko military hospital in Moscow, ground crews at a secret airstrip outside Lahore, Pakistan, readied a mysterious plane for takeoff.
The black, single-engine craft bore little resemblance to anything that had ever taken to the skies before. As with a glider that had been retrofitted for powered flight, its slender silhouette defied conventional design. The wings were disproportionately elongated and dog-eared at the tips. Strange metallic poles held them upright like overgrown pogo sticks. An alarmingly slim sail rose from the tall tail section, which seemed so frail that it might crumble at the slightest crosswind. The landing gear was equally unusual and flimsy and appeared to consist of a lone bicycle wheel.
In the predawn Punjabi gloom, the misshapen plane looked all the more alien against the sweltering backdrop of ancient battlements and mosques and the muezzin’s call to prayer that echoed softly from minarets in the surrounding hills. Though the heat index had already crossed an oppressively humid one hundred degrees, and shimmering waves would soon rise with the sun from the steaming tarmac, technicians in sweat-stained coveralls pumped an antifreeze additive into the plane’s huge fuel tanks. The specially blended gasoline was necessary because it was cold where the aircraft was headed, the coldest place imaginable. But the mechanics gingerly filling the tanks from portable fifty-five-gallon oil drums did not know where that was; their security clearances went no further than maintenance.
While the ground crews made their preflight rounds, another group of technicians, distinguished by their white gloves, fidgeted in a bay under the single-seat cockpit. There, next to three small-diameter portholes that contained the most sophisticated photographic lenses ever devised, they loaded a 12,000-foot-long spool of high-resolution Kodak film. The custom-made film and 500-pound Hycon camera were the only outward clues as to the plane’s true purpose. Otherwise, it had no markings, identification numbers, or insignias. No running lights winked under its dark fuselage, which had been painted dull black to better blend in with the night sky. Nowhere in its equally anonymous innards was there a manufacturer’s seal or anything else that would betray that the CL-282 Aquatone had been assembled at the top-secret Lockheed Skunkworks plant in Burbank, California.
Officially, the CL-282—or the U-2, as it would eventually be called—did not exist. Neither did the pilot, E. K. Jones, who was going through his own preflight routine in a small, barrack-style building near the runway. Like the twenty-man Quickmove mobile maintenance team and the fuel drums they had brought with them, Jones had been flown in the day before from the U-2 main staging base in Adana, Turkey, to minimize American exposure to prying Pakistani eyes. At 4:00 AM a doctor measured his temperature, pulse, and blood pressure and examined his ears, nose, and throat for signs of infection. The medical exam was a formality; like every one of the two dozen U-2 pilots on the CIA’s payroll, Jones was in excellent physical condition. Photographs of the era show a compact, muscular young man, with thick, dark hair and the slightly swaggering expression common to fighter aces, test pilots, and other alpha males of the airborne community. Pronounced fit for duty, Jones made his way to a tiny cantina, where cooks had prepared a high-protein meal of steak and eggs to sustain his stomach during his nine-hour mission. While he ate, a CIA supervisor went over the flight plan one last time and waited for the coded go-ahead message from Washington.
• • •
With the time difference, it was 6:00 PM on August 27 in the District of Columbia, and the afternoon rush hour was just beginning. Richard Bissell sat in his downtown office on H Street, across from the Metropolitan Club, and waited for Allen Dulles to call with the mission’s final authorization. Spread out on his desk was a map of Soviet central Asia with the rough geographic bearings of the Tyura-Tam ICBM test site, the latest weather reports indicating clear skies over Kazakhstan, and a copy of Jones’s flight plan.
Jones did not know that he worked for Bissell, though some U-2 pilots would later reveal that they had heard rumors that their orders came from a “Mister B in Washington.” Nor did the lawyers and ordinary business executives who worked in the suites next to Bissell’s office in the Matomic Building realize that their tall, avuncular neighbor with the round-rimmed glasses and easy smile ran the CIA’s most ambitious
and classified program. Such was the secrecy surrounding Bissell’s operation that to maximize security, the U-2 reconnaissance program was housed separately from the agency’s main headquarters near the Lincoln Memorial.
The U-2 had grown out of the same 1954 Killian report that had warned Eisenhower of Soviet missile gains and recommended that the United States fast-track its Atlas ICBM program to keep pace. “We must find ways,” the report had also stated, “to increase the number of hard facts upon which our intelligence estimates are based… and to reduce the danger of gross overestimation or gross underestimation of the threat.” There was a virtual information blackout on the Soviet Union, as the bomber gap would amply demonstrate, and new technologies had to be harnessed to collect more accurate data about Russian intentions. Specific recommendations were made in a separate, more classified report, which was circulated within a narrower audience at the National Security Council. It had been prepared by Edwin Land, a flamboyant Harvard dropout whose Jewish grandparents had emigrated from the very same part of Odessa where Korolev had grown up. Land had founded the Polaroid Company and was known for his “spellbinding performances” at Polaroid annual stockholders meetings, where he wooed investors like “a Broadway star.”
The United States, Land urged in his corollary report, had to begin the immediate development of two different types of high-altitude photo-reconnaissance platforms. The first of these, the construction of a state-of-the-art surveillance plane, was approved by Eisenhower in late 1954; the second, a technologically more complex option that involved outer space, struck some at the time as the stuff of science fiction. It was put on the back burner.
Red Moon Rising Page 14
