At the CIA, the forty-five-year-old Bissell was put in charge of the spy plane project. A Groton and Yale man, and an amateur ornithologist with the right WASP connections, Bissell hailed from a prominent Connecticut family with interests in the insurance and railroad industries. He had grown up in the famous Mark Twain House—the rambling Victorian mansion that Samuel Clemens had built with his literary proceeds—and he had summered aboard his family’s string of ever larger yachts, fostering a lifelong love of the sea. Trained as an economist, Bissell had presided over some of the financial aid programs disbursed in Europe after the war under the Marshall Plan, earning a reputation as a good planner with a disdain for convention and bureaucracy. Like Medaris, he possessed a rebellious nature when it came to following rules, and he was notorious for driving the wrong way down one-way streets in Washington whenever he was in a hurry.
At once charming and aloof, garrulous and yet secretive, Bissell was the sort of highborn gentleman scoundrel that the CIA, under Allen Dulles, loved to recruit. At the agency, he quickly proved his organizational mettle by helping to orchestrate the overthrow of the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, which had threatened the interests of the politically connected United Fruit Company. (Allen Dulles was a significant shareholder in the company, which John Foster Dulles had once represented as legal counsel. The director of the National Security Council, Robert Cutler, had sat on United Fruit’s board, and Spruille Braden, the assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, and Walter Bedell Smith, the undersecretary of state, would both join United Fruit’s board after the coup.)
Bissell’s success in Guatemala, and a similarly staged restoration of the pro-Western shah in Iran (to preserve the holdings of the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company), had marked him as a rising star within the agency. Allen Dulles was said to be grooming Bissell as his successor, and the two shared a love of sailing and socializing, though Bissell was not blessed with his boss’s famous wit or his infamously roving eye. (Dulles’s marital indiscretions were perhaps the CIA’s worst-kept secret.)
To find the right airplane for the job, a craft that could fly unmolested deep into Soviet territory, Bissell turned to Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the legendary aeronautical engineer who headed Lockheed’s most classified “black” military programs. Johnson had a blueprint for such a super-high-altitude jet-glider, the CL-282 Aquatone. He had proposed it to the air force, but Secretary Quarles had opted to go with a rival design by Bell Labs, the company he once headed, to reconfigure British bombers for reconnaissance duty. The Aquatone had been deemed too frail and ungainly for regular air force service. Besides offending the air force’s aesthetic sense, the radical weight reductions that would allow it to fly so long and so high necessitated cutting too many standard safety and redundancy systems. But it suited Bissell’s needs. He had only two requests: it had to be built quickly and quietly.
The contract was shrouded in such secrecy that the Aquatone was listed innocuously as “utility plane number two,” hence its eventual designation as the U-2. Only eighty-one people at Lockheed had been permitted to work on the Aquatone/U-2, in contrast to the thousands who typically labored on such projects, and they finished the prototype in a record eighty-eight days. During that time, janitors were not even permitted in the hangar where it was assembled. To further minimize potential security leaks, Bissell demanded that subcontractors deliver component parts to front companies at fictitious addresses, and he bypassed regular accounting procedures by paying for the plane with a series of $1,256,000 checks made out personally to Johnson and hand-delivered to his Encino home address. As far as Lockheed and the U.S. government were concerned, the U-2 was entirely off the books. Even within the White House staff, only two people—Eisenhower’s personal assistants General Andrew Goodpaster and Gordon Gray—initially knew of the plane’s existence.
A similarly circuitous route had been used to recruit and train air force pilots, who were interviewed in dingy motels around the SAC bases in Georgia and Texas and sent for reconnaissance training to a nuclear testing ground near Groom Lake, Nevada, where Bissell reasoned that the fear of radiation poisoning ensured privacy. Formally engaged as civilian employees of the Second Provisional Weather Squadron, Bissell’s boys operated under the cover of high-altitude weather research. Like the unmarked planes they flew, Jones and his fellow aviators carried no identification papers or dog tags, and no regimental crests or badges adorned their flight suits. Before each mission, their undergarments were carefully vetted to remove identifiable features that might point to a U.S. manufacturer. Even incriminating American accents could be rendered stateless in the event of capture with the one item supplied to all U-2 pilots in addition to the revolver, packets of rubles, French francs, and gold trinkets they carried in their zipper pockets: a glass cyanide capsule, the “L” suicide pill. “The ampoule should be crushed between the teeth. The user should then inhale through the mouth,” the CIA manual instructed. “It is expected that there will be no pain, but there may be a feeling of constriction about the chest. Death will follow.”
The gun and money were mostly for effect, to make the pilots feel better about their chances of survival, which Allen Dulles privately estimated at one in a million. “We told Eisenhower that it was most unlikely that a pilot would survive,” Bissell recalled, “because the U-2 was a very light aircraft, more like a glider, and would disintegrate” if it were shot down. Only three bolts, for instance, connected the tail section to the fuselage. “Holy smokes, this thing is made out of toilet paper,” the test pilot Bob Ericson had exclaimed on first seeing the craft. During a training exercise in Germany, a U-2 had broken apart by simply flying into the turbulent wake of another jet. If anything ever went wrong, Eisenhower was assured, there would be no evidence of the intrusions. The president, however, had not been entirely convinced. “Well, boys,” he had said, “I believe the country needs this information, and I’m going to approve [the program]. But I’ll tell you one thing,” he added prophetically. “Some day one of these machines is going to be caught, and we are going to have a storm.”
Bissell, Eisenhower later recalled, had agreed with his assessment of the political dangers. But John Foster Dulles, ever the hawk, “laughingly” scoffed at their concerns. “If the Soviets ever capture one of these planes, I’m sure they’ll never admit to it,” he said haughtily. “To do so would make it necessary for them to admit also that for these years we have been carrying on flights over their territory while they had been helpless to do anything about the matter.”
Secretary Dulles’s overconfidence, and his policy of purposefully provoking the Soviets, would later earn scorn from historians, who would label him “reckless.” But on that day he carried the argument, as he often did. Eisenhower relied on his foreign policy adviser and trusted his judgment on international affairs, even if he had reservations about his frosty personality, as his diary entries made clear. Some said Ike was even a little intimidated or scared of Dulles, who was frequently so forceful with the mild-mannered president that Bissell initially wondered “who was really in charge” in the White House. But after observing the pair’s interactions for several years, Bissell came to the conclusion that Eisenhower really ran the show.
• • •
Shortly before 5:00 AM in Lahore, E. K. Jones was “integrated” into a fully pressurized suit and began breathing pure oxygen for the hour prior to takeoff. He did this to lower the nitrogen level in his blood to avoid getting the bends, in much the same way deep-sea divers decompressed in special chambers before surfacing—only in reverse, as he would be climbing rather than descending. The pressurized suit Jones wore would keep his body from boiling and exploding at the altitude he would travel, a height where the air is so thin that atmospheric pressure drops to one-twenty-eighth that of sea level. Gases at such low-density atmospheres expand rapidly, and the boiling point of liquids falls to ninety-eight degrees, just below body temperature. Wernher von Braun h
ad demonstrated this effect, known as Boyle’s law, for television viewers on one of his Disney programs. Explaining why astronauts would need pressurized suits to survive, he had shown training footage of a special chamber designed to simulate the vacuum of outer space. Inside the chamber was a beaker of water at body temperature. At 14.7 pounds per square inch, the atmospheric pressure at sea level, the liquid was stable. But when a thin membrane sealing off a powerful suction device was popped, the air was instantly sucked out of the chamber, the pressure fell to near zero, and the water in the beaker suddenly convulsed with bubbles and boiled over. “This is what would happen to an astronaut’s blood if he was not wearing a protective suit,” von Braun explained somberly.
Jones would not be traveling into space. But at the height the U-2 reached, he would skirt the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, and his special orange flight suit would keep the gases in his intestines from expanding and bursting like overinflated balloons if the U-2’s cabin pressure suddenly failed or if he had to parachute out of the plane. Unfortunately, there were no further contingency plans for either of those unpleasant scenarios. To save weight, the early versions of the U-2 were not equipped with an ejection system or a burdensome second engine. The plane had to travel light to reach its lofty objectives, and redundancy systems would weigh it down. Nor had the designers bothered to install a long-range radio, because in case of a mechanical malfunction deep in enemy territory, no aid would be forthcoming. The U-2’s only defense was altitude; no other aircraft could fly as high. As long as the plane stayed at its ceiling of 70,000 feet, it was untouchable. But if its single J57 turbo-jet engine malfunctioned, stalled, or flamed out, as it had a nasty habit of doing, and the pilot had to dip below 40,000 feet to restart it, he would be exposed and completely helpless. The men who flew U-2s understood that if something went wrong, there were no backup systems. They themselves were not expected to survive. In fact, they were under instructions not to survive, and already five had died during training exercises.
“I was assured that the young pilots undertaking these missions were doing so with their eyes wide open,” Eisenhower later wrote, “motivated by a high degree of patriotism, a swashbuckling bravado, and certain material inducements.”
It took a special breed of person to accept the U-2’s peculiar conditions of employment. The high hazard pay—three times regular air force salary, plus bonuses—could not have been the principal motivation for volunteering into the airborne espionage service. To be sure, the money was nice. Some U-2 pilots drove Mercedes convertibles, and Jones earned more than twice the annual wage of a senior technocrat like von Braun, another Mercedes aficionado. But risk rather than reward was the primary recruiting tool. At the Lovelace Clinic near Albuquerque, where pilot prospects were sent, Bissell had devised a very elaborate psychological profile of the sort of men he sought: patriots, naturally, but people who liked living on the edge, for whom death was not a deterrent.
Bissell’s pilots had to meet one other critical criterion: they had to be exceptionally gifted airmen, because the U-2 was among the most difficult aircraft to fly. Simply positioning the plane for takeoff required great skill. Its turning radius of 300 feet was nearly ten times that of a regular fighter jet, and visibility from the cockpit was virtually nonexistent. The plane had another troublesome characteristic. At high altitude, where even the U-2’s 200-foot wingspan barely generated lift in the thin air, its 505-miles-per-hour stall speed and 510-miles-per-hour maximum speed converged in what pilots called the “coffin corner,” leaving a scant margin of error. On landing, the massive wings—three times longer than the sixty-foot plane itself—also required deft handling. To get the U-2 down safely, the pilot had to stall the plane precisely two feet off the tarmac, exactly on the center line, and keep the massive wings off the ground by flying the aircraft down the runway in perfect equilibrium. If the U-2 tilted a few feet to either side, a wing tip could slam into the concrete and sheer off or send the plane cart-wheeling. The balancing act was all the trickier as it had to be performed after nine grueling hours of unremitting stress—of working without food or drink or respite from the tension of flying over enemy territory.
At a little past 8:00 PM Washington time (6:00 AM in Lahore), Bissell’s phone finally rang. It was Allen Dulles. He and his brother had just spoken to Eisenhower. Every U-2 flight required presidential approval, and the “brothers-opposite”—Allen, affable and attractive in his tweed jacket and pipe; Foster, rigid and righteous in his somber suits—had jointly persuaded Eisenhower that mission number 4058 of Operation Soft Touch was a “Go.”
Half an hour later, Jones was lined up at the edge of the Lahore runway, pointing his U-2 into the rising sun. Ground crews popped the safety pins from the wheeled “pogo” outriggers at the end of each wing, and the pilot gunned the big Pratt and Whitney engine. As the wings gathered lift, the outriggers fell away, and Jones put the plane into a steep incline of 15,000 feet per minute. It was at this moment that the craft was most vulnerable to being photographed by KGB spies, and Jones hastened to recede from view. But he had to be careful to taper off his ascent after 35,000 feet. Boyle’s law affected the expanding gases in the fuel tanks in much the same way as it did the human body. A U-2 had exploded once when the pilot climbed too high too fast and his tanks blew up. So Jones eased off the control pedals to reduce his rate of climb. Soon the U-2 was a speck in the Pakistani sky as it continued its ascent beyond the range of telephoto lenses. At 70,000 feet, as the outside temperature dropped to 160 degrees below zero, Jones leveled the U-2. The skies above blackened and filled with stars, and over the horizon Jones could see the blue and white curvature of the earth. Beneath him, the mountain passes of the Hindu Kush unfolded like an accordion; beyond that, Afghanistan, and the endless orange plains of Soviet central Asia. He pointed the plane north and crossed into Soviet airspace.
• • •
The first U-2 mission over the Soviet Union had coincided with a goodwill visit by Nikita Khrushchev to Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s official residence in Moscow, on July 4, 1956. While Khrushchev toasted America’s 180th birthday with Ambassador Charles Bohlen, a U-2 snapped aerial photographs of the Kremlin before heading off to photograph the naval and air bases around Leningrad.
Allen Dulles had worried about the timing of the mission and “seemed somewhat startled and horrified to learn that the flight plan”—which had included a pass over Poznan, the scene of Polish rioting only a few days earlier—“had covered Moscow and Leningrad,” Bissell recalled. “Do you think that was wise the first time?” Dulles asked.
“Allen,” Bissell replied, “the first time is always the safest,” since the Soviets were not expecting the mission. But he was wrong. Bissell had presumed that because the U-2 had evaded most American radars during its test, the Soviets would not be able to pick it up either. What he didn’t realize was that the USSR had recently deployed a new generation of radar capable of tracking planes at much higher altitudes.
Khrushchev had immediately been informed of the flight and viewed the timing of the incursion as a personal affront. The way he saw it, the Americans had humiliatingly thumbed their noses at him, violating Soviet airspace even as he stood on U.S. sovereign diplomatic soil, and challenging him to do something about it. Worst of all, he had been powerless to respond. Soviet air defenses had nothing in their arsenal that could hit the U-2. MiG-19 and MiG-21 fighter jets buzzed like angry hornets under the U-2, catapulting themselves as high as possible, but their conventional engines and stubby wings couldn’t generate the necessary lift to reach it. Antiaircraft batteries sent useless barrages that also fell well short. Only the new P-30 radar had been able to track the intruder with a surprising degree of sophistication, as the diplomatic protest the USSR privately filed on July 10, 1956, indicated.
According to fully confirmed data, on July 4 of this year, at 8:18 AM, a twin-engine American medium bomber departed the American occupation zone in west Germany, flew over th
e territory of the German Democratic Republic and entered Soviet airspace at 9:35 AM in the area of Grodno from the Polish People’s Republic. The plane violated the airspace of the Soviet Union, following a course which took it over Minsk, Vilnius, Kaunas, and Kaliningrad, penetrating up to 320 kilometers into Soviet territory and spending one hour and thirty-two minutes over it.
The accuracy with which Soviet radar had plotted the U-2’s course had stunned Bissell, though he took some comfort in the fact that the Russians had mistakenly identified the spy plane as a twin-engine medium bomber. At least that meant that the U-2’s secret was still safe, that the Soviets had no inkling of what they were dealing with, or how to counter it. In its protest, which was not made public, the Kremlin had purposely omitted mentioning the plane’s detour over Moscow and Leningrad. That was simply too embarrassing to admit. “What I remembered most about the U-2 flight is how reluctant Father was to send a protest note to the U.S. government,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. “All his injured pride resisted…. He thought the Americans were chortling over our impotence.”
For Khrushchev, this latest incursion had come on the heels of Curtis LeMay’s mock attack on Siberia. Only this time, the Americans had not overflown some remote corner of Russia’s empty Arctic wasteland. They had brazenly put a plane right over Red Square, the symbol of Soviet power, and the most heavily defended piece of airspace in the entire Communist bloc. It was a provocation designed to end any chance of rapprochement. “Certain reactionary circles in the United States,” the Soviets protested, in a thinly veiled swipe at LeMay and the Dulles brothers, were trying to sabotage “the improvement of relations” between the two countries. The Soviets openly blamed “renegade” elements in the U.S. Air Force, though, as John Foster Dulles had predicted, they were careful to keep their complaints quiet.
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