Bridge of Spies (10 page)

Land believed that the mature, civilized, responsible way of bearing this burden was straight out of
Popular Mechanics:
“a jet-powered glider,” “an extraordinary and unorthodox vehicle” that his good friend Kelly Johnson at the Lockheed Corporation had already designed and offered to build in total secrecy to fly over the Soviet Union at seventy thousand feet and photograph in minute detail on each clear-weather mission a strip of Russia two hundred miles wide and 2,500 miles long.

The “Lockheed super glider,” Land went on, would fly “well out of reach of present Russian interception and high enough to have a good chance of avoiding detection.” But even if it were detected, he averred quite wrongly, it would be “so obviously unarmed and devoid of military usefulness, that it would minimize affront to the Russians.”

For an inventor, Land had an impressive grasp of the military-strategic balance. He was also a terrific salesman. The clock was ticking, he said: Russian fighters and surface-to-air missiles were flying ever higher, meaning that “the opportunity for safe overflight may last only a few years.… We therefore recommend immediate action through special channels in CIA in procuring the Lockheed glider and in establishing the CIA taskforce. No proposal or program that we have seen in intelligence planning can so quickly bring so much vital information at so little risk and at so little cost.”

The letter was sent on November 5, 1954. Two days later a B-29 (combat ceiling 36,000 feet) was shot down over the Sea of Japan while photographing a Soviet base in the Kuril Islands. On November 24, at 8:15 a.m., Eisenhower sat behind his desk in the Oval Office as his most senior military and intelligence planners, including Dulles, his number two at the CIA, and a somewhat grudging General Nathan Twining of the air force, filed in and made the case for the U-2. By 8:30 a.m. they were filing out again. At four that afternoon a call was placed from the Pentagon to Kelly Johnson in his windowless Burbank office. He could go ahead and build his glider.

*  *  *

In the love story of Frank and Barbara Powers, both principals would have looked at home on an eight-by-ten-foot movie poster. He was the fighter pilot with the dreamy eyes who blushed deep red when introduced to Barbara at the air force cafeteria where her mother worked the night shift. She was the eighteen-year-old secretary who called in there most evenings on her way home from work. They fell hard for each other despite her reputation for trouble among his friends and fellow fliers. Or maybe because of it.

They were married in the spring of 1955, and the first night of their new life, at least, was happy. “Lordy, but how that handsome Ridge Runner of mine could make love!” Barbara would write. (She always gave him credit for his performance in bed, even when she gave him credit for nothing else.) Disappointment set in early. Nine months after a blissful honeymoon in the Bahamas, her husband came home to tell her he was leaving the air force—the next day. For the time being he was also leaving her. He would be gone for three years but could not say where or why; only that he would still be flying.

Both would later plead their cases in the divorce court of public opinion. In Barbara’s account the “bombshell” is a fait accompli. After dropping it her husband even has the gall to accuse her of worrying first about how she will pay the bills. In Frank’s version, he is offered “risky but patriotic work” outside the air force but his first reaction is to turn it down for Barbara. He changes his mind only when she points out that they could use the extra money it would bring: “We had recently made payment on a new car; the balance was still due.”

It was the perfect rationale for the imperfect spy. Money was always a concern for Powers, as his sister Jessica was reminded when he called on her in Washington soon after starting his new job.

“I was nineteen, working in DC and living there with my sister Janice,” she recalls. “He dropped in to see us and the only thing he ever said about his work was: ‘I pay more taxes than you make.’ And I thought,
hey, you got a good job
. He was not giving anything away. But you sort of got the idea that he was proud of what he was doing, or proud that he was making so much.”

Or, most likely, both. Powers was his father’s son, driven by a sense of obligation to provide. But in his own unspoken thoughts he was also an all-American hero, a brother to five adoring sisters, a Kentucky college
track star, and now master of the seven thousand pounds of thrust that he could blast from the rear end of a Thunderstreak. From such beginnings serious accomplishment was surely possible. He might have been a soft-spoken spelunker on the outside, but that hid a tightly wound coil of potential.

The meeting at Turner AFB wing headquarters was at 8:00 a.m. A handful of other pilots showed up. A major from wing command made a simple announcement. On account of their exceptional pilot ratings and top secret clearance, those present were invited to apply for unspecified non—air force work. No further information was available, but anyone wanting to know more was told where to go and when. Powers wanted to know more. At 1900 hours that evening he knocked self-consciously on the door of cottage 1 at the Radium Springs Motel, not far from Turner. As instructed, he wore civilian clothes and asked for a Mr. William Collins.

Mr. Collins was not alone. He was one of a small group of youngish men in trim civilian clothes who had checked into the motel as if for a convention of clones. There was nothing remarkable about any of them except their sameness and their calm professionalism.

“The rationale for meeting off base was to have an environment where a pilot can feel free to talk if he expresses an interest in separating from his normal air force activity,” says one of those who played the Collins role from time to time. Perhaps. But there were two other reasons for the peculiar venue: to keep the meetings secret and to generate a certain excitement. Who the heck was Collins? What did he mean by the chance to do “something important for your country”? Why the backdrop of king-size beds and shower curtains?

He was with the CIA, Collins said at a follow-up meeting the next day, as if that explained it.

In a sense, it did. In 1956 the Central Intelligence Agency was still a genuine mystery to everyone except those who ran it, and to some of them as well. Almost no one could point to it on a map, since its headquarters in Virginia was not yet built. No one knew for sure where its responsibilities started and those of the Pentagon and State Department ended, because it was in the process of stealing territory from both. And no one could equate it with disastrous arrogance or extra-judicial adventurism, because the Bay of Pigs was still a little-known
beauty spot on the south coast of Cuba. To the likes of Francis Gary Powers there was just the acronym, and whatever it made him feel felt good.

The agency was building a brand-new plane, Collins said. It would fly higher than anything he had ever flown before. It would penetrate deep into Russia. It would photograph whatever they were building there that Mr. Khrushchev wanted to keep secret, and it needed pilots willing to take it there for $2,500 a month.

“I was amazed,” Powers wrote later. “And immensely proud, not only of being chosen to participate in such a venture, but, even more, proud of my country … for having the courage, and guts, to do what it believed essential and right.” Those words were written in 1970 with a skeptical public in mind, but they ring true. Forget Korea—
this
was the summons he had been waiting for. This was the call-up that suited his quiet ambition, that would catapult him from the great herd of combat-ready but untested first lieutenants into an elite of specialists. This was real. Its secrecy made it so, because secrecy was currency in the existential standoff with Communism that brought duck-and-cover drills to Minnesota high schools and ever-bigger mushroom clouds to the evening news. Powers would be airborne in a silhouette that Jack Goff wouldn’t recognize even if he could see it, squinting up from Big Stone Gap or wherever Jack was working nowadays. And the pay would be five times what Frank was earning at Turner. He was in. He said so there and then at the Radium Springs Motel, even though Bill Collins insisted that he take another night to think it over.

So it was that Francis G. Powers left Turner AFB on orders for temporary duty off base, and Francis G. Palmer checked into the Dupont Plaza Hotel in Washington. He went to his room and waited for a call.

He left behind a wife whose world had been upended. It might have helped their marriage if Powers had been allowed to tell her more about his work, but Bill Collins had forbidden it. He had supplied a PO box number in California for wives who wanted to write letters and a phone number in Virginia for emergencies. Still, for all Barbara knew her husband had been recruited to fly drugs in from the Caribbean. She wasn’t happy.

The same was true of many of those left behind, pilots as well as relatives. Soon after Powers’s disappearance, flight commander Lieutenant
Jerry McIlmoyle reported for duty with the 515th Strategic Fighter Bomber Squadron at Malmstrom AFB in Great Falls, Montana. He had been home on leave. In his absence, three friends had gone. Lieutenants Barry Baker and Jim Barnes and Captain Frank Grace had resigned and vanished without saying anything to anyone.

“We just never heard from them again,” McIlmoyle would write. “I thought Frank, Barry and James had been good and close friends. We had all been in Korea together; we partied together, played bridge and poker and camped out together. Christmas rolled around and we received no cards, no phone calls, absolutely nothing from any of them. I really didn’t understand why.” There were chance encounters in the decades that followed, “but there was no camaraderie, just a handshake and smile, no small talk. I was reminded of the old Pentagon euphemism: those three friends ‘evanesced.’ ”

There was nothing like a disappearing pilot to spark rumors about where he’d gone. When one of them died—it turned out to be Frank Grace—those rumors gathered urgency. McIlmoyle and others were ordered to fly four Thunderstreaks to Texas for the funeral. They learned en route that Grace had hit a telegraph pole while taking off at night from an unlighted airstrip, but they were ordered “not to ask any questions about the crash, where, what, how, when and most especially not about what aircraft he had been flying.”

So what
had
he been flying? Human nature demanded an answer. The CIA conspired heroically to withhold it. With no closed cities, no six-thousand-mile fences, no way of muzzling the press, and no standing threat of a no-questions-asked bullet for suspected traitors, this wasn’t easy, which is why Powers found himself booked into the Dupont Plaza in someone else’s name, sitting on the bed and waiting for the phone to ring. He felt “more than a little foolish.” When the call came through, it was Bill Collins again, directing him to another room in the same hotel for a more detailed briefing on the mission and a primer on rudimentary tradecraft. There were several other recruits in the room. Whenever Collins talked, he kept the radio on. When Powers turned it off to hear better—which he did only once—Collins fell silent.

Briefing over, the pilots were invited individually into an adjoining room to take a lie-detector test. Powers went through with this even though he considered it an unpardonable affront to his integrity. He
was then dispatched—via Saint Louis, Omaha, and Saint Louis again, to shake off any tails—to New Mexico.

At the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, Colonel Flickinger of the Air Research and Development Command had devised a medical exam to test the sinews and sanity of the toughest pilots in the business. It was in their best interests, of course—Flickinger had done pioneering work in “upper air medicine” to help pilots flying transports over the Himalayas during the war. It just didn’t feel like it.

The tests lasted a week. In his memoir Powers called them “incredibly thorough” and left it at that, but he admitted to his friend Jack Goff that after a subsequent checkup he flunked an important exercise and had to fly back to Albuquerque to redo it. It was deceptively simple: he had to sit on a chair in a silent room for two hours, but he had fallen asleep.

Tony Bevacqua rememberes some of the more uncomfortable tests. “We had to put an arm in a bucket of ice until we didn’t want it to be there anymore, and they had us hyperventilate on purpose to see if we’d have some kind of fit or seizure. We ended up with our arms rigid across our chests, like a corpse, and then they’d try to force them open again.”

There was more. The pilots were spun in centrifuges, sometimes until they blacked out. They had electrodes attached to their scalps for hours at a time and barium inserted “everywhere you could think of.” They were even asked for semen samples. Why? It turned out that the U-2 boys were being used as guinea pigs for the Mercury astronauts’ physicals, though whether John Glenn’s sperm count or motility was ever a factor in his selection remains unknown.

Glenn was compensated for his privations at Lovelace with space travel, enduring fame and a career as a U.S. senator. The U-2 pilots were required to suffer in silence. Only one of Powers’s group was eliminated at this stage. The rest were handed sheaves of airline tickets and ordered to report to a manufacturer of ladies’ bras and girdles two time zones to the east.

The tickets took them, one at a time, to the David Clark Company of Worcester, Massachusetts. Mr. Clark still made bras. He also made pressure suits. As part of their training, the pilots would be shown why. They would sit in a depressurization chamber at the Wright Field
aeromedical laboratory wearing a pressure suit and holding a condom full of water. As the pilot breathed piped oxygen and the suit gradually inflated, the air would be sucked out of the chamber to simulate increasing altitude. At about 55,000 feet the water in the condom would begin to boil. At 70,000 sudden depressurization in a cockpit would kill an unprotected pilot in ten seconds, and sudden depressurization happened in U-2s all the time: the power source for pressurizing the cockpit was the engine, and engine flameouts because of the thin air were practically routine.