Bridge of Spies (12 page)

In the end the only real answer to the midair disintegration problem was to beg the pilots to take it easy and stay above any turbulence. But solving one set of altitude problems created another. The higher the U-2 flew, the thinner the air rushing over its wings and into its engine. That meant an ever-narrower gap between stall speed and “Mach buffet” and an ever-greater chance of the engine packing up. These were occupational hazards the pilots would have to learn to live with.

Powers did just that. He was a natural in the U-2. Unlike Marty Knutson, he never complained about the yoke. He came through his two months at the ranch without a hitch (and with high praise for the food, which, with pilot morale in mind, was “exceptional by any standard”). He wrote later of a “special aloneness” in the cockpit, which seems to have suited his temperament. There were discomforts to be borne in return for membership in the U-2 elite, including long hours in the pressure suit and prebreathing of pure oxygen before each flight to purge the body of nitrogen as a defense against the bends in the event
of depressurization. But he took them in stride, marveling instead at the extraordinary views to be had of the American West from thirteen miles up. On one flight, when his drift sight showed the Colorado River slicing through Arizona below him, he could see a six-hundred-mile sweep of the West Coast up ahead, from the Monterey Peninsula to Baja California.

The flight training was thorough. It had to be. The only easy part about flying the U-2 was taking off, which Tony LeVier discovered on his first test took place automatically at seventy knots (he had not intended to leave the ground). The initial climb was spectacular, but if the pilot forgot to ease his angle of attack at 35,000 feet the plane was liable to explode because of the expanding fuel in its wings. At 70,000 feet the giant Pratt & Whitney engine that occupied most of the fuselage had 7 percent of the power it boasted at sea level. That high up, the margin between stalling and speed wobble was no more than five knots, meaning that in a tight turn one wingtip could shudder for one reason and the other for the other. All of which was straightforward compared with landing. The U-2 was supremely reluctant to lose height. It was designed to have a gliding radius of 250 miles in the event of engine failure, and some pilots found they could double that. Close to the ground, especially the hot ground of Groom Lake, it defied Newton. A pilot could be ten feet from landing and yet not land. Even with its engine idling, Mr. Johnson’s albatross would skim clear across the lake bed unless actively forced down. Johnson assumed the way to do this was nose first, but his prototype nearly disintegrated when LeVier tried it. LeVier eventually made landing look easy with a more conventional tail-wheel-first approach, but even then it was a delicate business requiring a countdown from a chase car and a stall timed to perfection. For him, as for those who followed, there was no simulator, no copilot, and no ejector seat.

In the end, each pilot had to figure out the U-2 for himself. It could be a hairy business. One afternoon Bissell was in his office in Washington when Groom Lake called to say that a U-2 had reported an engine flameout over Tennessee and was gliding toward an air force base near Albuquerque.

“He believed he could make the base in about half an hour on a long, flat glide,” Bissell recalled. “I got on the telephone to the commander of
the Albuquerque base and told him that in about 30 to 40 minutes he should expect a special aircraft, a U-2, to land; he was to move it to a remote part of the base as quickly as possible, have a tarpaulin put over it to disguise its shape, and post a guard. I can only imagine his surprise at receiving a call from the CIA, but 45 minutes later the phone rang and he reported that the flight did indeed land … and the pilot was available to speak with me.”

When Bissell flew to Groom Lake to inspect the faulty engine, he reached into its tail end and pulled out the remains of a compressor blade that had crystallized and disintegrated in the extreme cold of seventy thousand feet.

Powers was lucky. He had no near misses in training and no doubt that he would be able to glide down and restart his engine if it flamed out over the United States. What nagged at the back of his mind was what to do should it happen over Russia, but it was not a question anyone actually asked—or answered.

Each group that passed through the ranch spent a week at a CIA farm back east, part of which had been converted to resemble a Soviet border installation. The pilots learned how to scramble under a fence and walk across a plowed field without leaving footprints, but there was no discussion of what to do if the border was a thousand miles away. Powers concluded that the exercise was more for psychological than practical purposes. He was surely right. And he would just as surely have been disturbed to know that both Bissell and Dulles had assured Eisenhower it was “a given” that no pilot would survive a crash on Soviet territory.

By the end of his time at Watertown, reports were reaching the CIA of tests on a monstrous Russian rocket engine designed to develop 450 tons of thrust—enough to hurl a thermonuclear warhead five thousand miles through space. A National Security Agency listening post in Iran, in the mountains near Mashhad, had picked up signs of missile tests deep in the Soviet hinterland and farther east than the known test range at Kapustin Yar. It was past time to find out where.

Powers’s group was given two weeks’ leave, then sent to Turkey. He dropped in on Pound and dodged questions about his work but failed to allay his father’s suspicions. When he telephoned from the airport to say a final good-bye, Powers senior said he’d figured out that Frank was
working for the FBI. His sister Jessica was less suspicious but had more evidence to work with. Frank had paid her a visit too. “I had a folding canvas cot and we asked him if he’d like to stay,” she says. “He said yes, and he took off his shirt and it looked to me as though you could play checkers on his back. I didn’t ask—he could have been in a fight. But I guess now it was that suit.”

*  *  *

Powers’s departure for foreign parts had a peculiar effect on his friends and family. A large number of them followed him. Jessica would be among them, in circumstances she could scarcely credit and that even now she struggles to believe were real. But before her there was her brother’s wife.

Barbara Powers had a good deal in common with her father-in-law, including an instant mutual dislike. Like him, she was hardworking, hotheaded, mainly self-taught, and not easily intimidated. Like him, she made up for what she lacked in formal education with a ferocious impatience with anyone who might be keeping something from her. With Frank’s disappearance, that meant Frank, but also the whole damned outfit he was working for. It was not an outfit that particularly wanted to hear from her.

In Richard Bissell’s air force, deniability was everything. His aircraft flew without markings. His pilots flew without dog tags. Their underpants had no labels, and the brand names were ground off the zippers on their pressure suits. His Washington headquarters was a decrepit suite of upstairs offices in an old brothel on E Street, and his business, should anyone ask, was meteorology.

The cover story he approved for the first detachment of U-2s and pilots shipped overseas was that they would be gathering high-altitude weather data for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. An unclassified press release announced that by arrangement with the USAF’s Air Weather Service the planes would be studying the jet stream, convective clouds, and cosmic ray effects at 55,000 feet. It was the same story for Powers’s detachment, Detachment B, which would be based in “Greece.” NACA went along with it, and so did most pilots’ families.

Not Barbara. Shorn of her husband, she had left Turner Air Force
Base and gone home to Milledgeville, Georgia, to live with her mother. The plan had been to sit tight and bank Frank’s implausible earnings for a down payment on a house. It palled quickly. He had been gone all of three months when she dialed the number Frank had left her for emergencies and told a startled agency man that she would be flying to Athens the following day to find her husband.

The agency man tried to put her off, but it was too late. The tickets were bought: Air France via Paris.

“All right, then,” he told her. “You are instructed to go to the King George Hotel immediately upon your arrival.”

Later that day, Turkish time, Powers climbed out of a U-2 after a training flight, his long johns drenched in sweat and his head spinning with tactical pilotage charts of the Soviet border, to be handed a note by an irritated detachment commander, a Colonel Perry. He couldn’t take it in, so Colonel Perry had to spell it out. Barbara was on her way.

There was time, as things turned out. A few hours out of Washington Barbara woke to see two of the Air France Constellation’s four engines on fire. She was marooned in Newfoundland for five days.

She was eventually reunited with her husband, as instructed, at the finest hotel in Greece—two bright young things enjoying peerless views of the Acropolis and all the freedoms of the Pax Americana. They enjoyed each other’s company as well, until Frank screwed up his face and broke it to her that he was not based in Greece; nor could he say where he’d flown in from.

Barbara was dismayed but not defeated. He’d flown in once. He could do it again. She would stay in Athens.

The agency appears to have sensed quickly that it would be counterproductive to pick a fight with the redoubtable Mrs. Powers. With some discreet nudging she was found work as secretary to an air force judge advocate based in Athens, a Captain Reuben B. Jackson. It was a humane arrangement, and soon a human one. Captain Jackson, whose wife and three children had tired of the expat life and returned home, asked Barbara to perform the role of hostess at his cocktail parties. She obliged; he fell in love.

Barbara later claimed she was entirely unaware of Captain Jackson’s feelings for her until he stunned her with a letter saying he was seeking a divorce. Frank wanted to believe her, but friends of his who knew
her couldn’t. “How d’you tell your buddy?” Tony Bevacqua muses. “She was a lush.”

*  *  *

Powers the pilot tried to seal off his life from that of Powers the conflicted husband. It wasn’t easy. For his first three months in Turkey there was little to do except train, play poker, and wait for a go code from Washington for the type of mission the U-2 had been built to fly. The food was dreadful, he remembered. There was the small matter of the Suez Crisis to monitor—and it certainly added to Eisenhower’s irritation with Sir Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, that he was not informed in advance of British troop movements near the Suez Canal when his U-2 pilots could see them quite clearly through their drift sights. But Europe’s postimperial delusions were not really the U-2’s business. The black planes with the drooping wings at Adana were there to penetrate a newer and more frightening sort of empire.

It was only a matter of time before the order came. On July 4 that year, under budget, on deadline, and on Independence Day, Richard Bissell’s hunt for WMD had started with the taut roar of a J-57 engine and a flight plan of epic impertinence. The pilot assigned to fly it was Harvey Stockman of the first NACA Weather Reconnaissance Squadron (Provisional).

Fewer than ten souls on earth knew exactly where Harvey Stockman was headed or why, and not one of these was in the White House. The only people definitely in the loop were Bissell, a small handful of flight planners on E Street, Stockman’s detachment commander, and Stockman himself.

The go code was an encrypted one-line cable sent over secure CIA lines to a tightly guarded communications room at Wiesbaden Air Force Base in Germany. It was authorized by Eisenhower, but the precise route and timing were up to Bissell. He launched the mission shortly before midnight on June 3, Washington time. In Germany Stockman’s plane was fueled with 1,200 gallons of kerosene, specially modified so as not to freeze solid in the sub-Arctic temperatures of seventy thousand feet.

Stockman took off from Wiesbaden at dawn, fortified as usual with steak and eggs and oxygen. As he brought his nose up to its absurd fifty-five-degree
climb-out angle and set course for Poznan, he probably didn’t dwell on the sociohistorical significance of the moment. Still, it was considerable. Trussed in Dave Clark’s two-way stretch fibers, half hidden by helmet and oxygen mask, encased in a pressurized titanium capsule, and headed for the penthouse viewing platform of the upper troposphere, he embodied American conviction and American hypocrisy; the conviction that no problem could not be surmounted with ingenuity and hard work, and the hypocrisy of the spy whose president traded on his reputation for openness and honesty in his dealings with an otherwise duplicitous world.

Stockman flew northwest over Poland and Minsk before turning left for Leningrad. In his payload bay, a Hycon B camera the size and weight of a substantial stove, loaded with six thousand feet of ultrathin Mylar film on two contra-rotating drums, clicked away at three long-range bomber bases near the city. Then it turned its attention to a series of naval shipyards on the Baltic coast that were being rapidly expanded to build nuclear submarines. As Stockman turned for home, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow was treating Khrushchev to a traditional July 4 barbecue at his official residence. Khrushchev was not informed of the incursion while a guest of the Americans, but he knew soon enough.

Even Dulles did not know that Stockman was headed for Leningrad. When Bissell strolled into the then CIA headquarters building on H Street on the morning of July 5 and told him, Dulles blanched. “The first time is the safest,” Bissell reassured him.

It was the attitude of a tightrope walker so confident that he performs without a net. The U-2 was an astonishing piece of aeronautical improvisation that had broken its own altitude records time and again on training flights from Watertown and infuriated the very few air force brass who knew about it but had not been able to get their hands on it. But Bissell’s confidence belied reality. He did not know whether Soviet radar would pick it up. What he
did
know was that if Stockman had a flameout over Leningrad there would be hell to pay.