Bridge of Spies (13 page)

Stockman didn’t have a flameout. After eight hours and forty-five minutes in the air, he returned to Wiesbaden and staggered out of his cockpit while technicians transferred the two great rolls of film from his camera to a waiting plane that left at once for Washington.

While Stockman made up for lost time at the officers’ club, another
pilot tried to sleep. Carmine Vito was up next. At dawn on the fifth he was suited up, strapped in, and dispatched to Moscow. He photographed the Kremlin, the city’s air defenses, and a rocket engine test site in a northwestern suburb best known today for its IKEA.

The U-2s kept coming, each one an enormous calculated risk; each one an expression of Bissell’s relentless curiosity. On July 9, Marty Knutson, who had been so disgusted by the U-2’s yoke, sublimated his objections and flew a historic mission up the Baltic coast and over an air base southeast of Leningrad. He identified it as Engels Airfield. It has since been confused by historians with another Engels air base near Saratov on the Volga. The one Knutson saw remained etched in his mind because of what he saw, peering down through the drift sight that protruded from his instrument panel to give a view of the ground directly beneath him. Glinting in bright sunlight thirteen miles below were thirty long-range Bison bombers drawn up next to the runway.

“Pay dirt” was what Knutson called the pictures he took that day, but it was an alarming sort of pay dirt. The Bison was a malevolent-looking bomber with a range of five thousand miles and room in its belly for twenty-four tons of nuclear ordnance. At a rehearsal for the May Day fly-past over Red Square in 1955, Western journalists and military attachés had looked up in awe as dozens of them had thundered overhead. In practice a mere handful had circled several times over the city, but the ruse was enough to sow fears among security hawks in Washington of a “bomber gap” being neglected by a president who was overly confident of his security credentials.

Senator Stuart Symington, a stainless steel tycoon and Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, formally accused the administration of “misleading the American people … as to the relative military strength of the United States vis a vis the Communists.” As a former secretary of the air force, he was especially vexed by Eisenhower’s decision to slow down production of the Big Ugly Fat Fella, as the mighty B-52 American long-range bomber was known to its admirers.

Knutson’s pictures seemed to confirm that the Soviets did have Bisons in numbers. But they were the only ones spotted in nine U-2 overflights of European Russia that July. What was more, they were in plain
view and were unlikely to have been exposed at one base and hidden at others. The conclusion was inescapable: if this was all the Soviets had, it was less than a third as many as Symington and his friends in the air force claimed. In five days flat the U-2 had demolished the bomber gap.

The film from the returning planes was rushed to Washington and analyzed above a car repair shop near Mount Vernon Square. Then the best prints were taken to the White House, pinned to boards five feet across, and presented to the president.

He was entranced. Dulles later said he and Eisenhower pored over the images on the Oval Office floor “like two kids running a model train.” Here was the enemy, as promised, stripped of Khrushchev’s posturing, in black and white.

It was not just the military sites that fascinated. As Herb Miller, a senior CIA official, wrote in an excited memo after the first overflight, “We are no longer dependent on an ‘estimate’ or ‘judgment’ or ‘assessment’ of what the situation is. We now have a cross section of a part of the whole of Soviet life for that date—their military systems, their farms, their irrigation systems, their factories, their power systems to feed the factories, their housing for the people who run the factories, their recreation, their railroads and the amount of traffic they carry.”

The pictures also revealed that even though Soviet radar was all over the U-2, “fighter aircraft at the five most important bases covered were drawn up in orderly rows as if for formal inspection on parade.” Bombers were not dispersed for their own protection. Antiaircraft guns were not pointing skyward for anyone else’s. They were at ease, horizontal. “These are but a few examples of the many things which tend to spell out the real intentions, objectives and qualities of the Soviet Union that we must fully understand and appreciate if we are to be successful in negotiating a lasting peace for the world,” Miller concluded.

In hard cash terms the images were worth billions, literally: Congress had demanded at least four billion dollars to modernize the air force against the apocalyptic threat talked up by the bomber-gap lobby. Having seen the U-2 pictures, the president allowed less than one billion dollars. Furthermore, they had been brought back without the loss of a plane or pilot. Willie Fisher and his handlers in Moscow had never dreamed of intelligence gathering on such a scale or with such swift and tangible results.

That was the good news. The bad news was that, unlike Fisher, the U-2s’ cover had been blown the moment they went to work.

The official protest was hand delivered to the State Department by the Soviet ambassador to Washington on July 10. It was also published in every major Soviet newspaper. It was not accurate in every detail, but it was on the right track. It timed Stockman’s entry into East German airspace at 8:18 a.m. on the fourth and charted his route over Grodno, Minsk, Vilnius, Kaunas, and Kaliningrad.

Fighters scrambled to intercept the intruder had not come within fifteen thousand feet of its cruising altitude, but the CIA knew from receivers inside the U-2 that Soviet radar had followed it all the way. It was the same with every ensuing flight. At one point on Knutson’s foray toward Leningrad he counted fifteen MiGs in his drift sight, climbing toward him and falling away as their control surfaces lost grip in the thin air.

On July 19, Eisenhower summoned Dulles to his office and reminded him that he had been assured the U-2 would be virtually undetectable. More even than golf, Ike liked the idea of a legacy of superpower peace. From the outset the U-2 program had struck him as a potential destroyer as well as creator of that peace. He admitted that if a hostile power tried to fly reconnaissance planes over the United States he would consider it an act of war. Long after it was too late, he wrote in his memoirs: “I was the only principal who consistently expressed a conviction that if ever one of the planes fell in Soviet territory a wave of excitement mounting almost to panic would sweep the world.”

The protest note was deeply embarrassing for Khrushchev to have to send, since it implicitly acknowledged he had been powerless to bring the U-2s down. But he would manage that soon enough, as Edwin Land had pointed out as part of his original pitch for the “super glider.” (“The opportunity for safe overflight may last only a few years,” Land warned, “because Russians will develop radars and interceptors or guided missile defenses for the 70,000 foot region. We therefore recommend immediate action.”)

Two years on, Eisenhower told Dulles he was already falling out of love with the U-2. From now on he would personally approve each overflight. There would be no more blanket permissions for Mr. Bissell and no more flights at all unless the benefit clearly outweighed the
potential cost. And there the program might have died, but for Khrushchev’s tragic tendency to overplay his hand.

On November 5, 1956, as Barbara Powers killed time in Athens and her husband in Adana, Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian revolution, killing twenty thousand civilians and taking fifteen hundred casualties themselves. Khrushchev had agonized for two weeks before deciding that the only alternative to invading was the collapse of the Soviet empire. “We have to act,” he told his closest ally. “We have no other course.” Two weeks later he overcompensated for his earlier hesitation by issuing his notorious threat to bury capitalism. Toward the end of his rant to Western diplomats, they started walking out, but his words rang in their ears and flashed down cables to their respective capitals. This was the leader who earlier in the year had said he was “quite sure that we shall very soon have a guided missile with a hydrogen-bomb warhead which could hit any point in the world.”

There was a wild man in the Kremlin, no doubt about it.

Eisenhower was more concerned than anyone not to provoke him. But he also knew better than most how much of Khrushchev’s foreign policy was bluff and how badly the United States needed to know the realities behind it.

Bissell had responded nimbly to the news that the president was unhappy that his secret air force had been detected so quickly. He had sent Detachment B to Turkey. From there, he argued, U-2s would encounter sleepier radar stations and fewer fighter squadrons than the Wiesbaden group. It was another hunch, but Eisenhower was angry with the butcher of Budapest and politically confident, having just been re-elected to the White House. He bought it.

Powers and the other seven pilots were sleeping two to a trailer. Their officers’ club was a Quonset hut with a single bare bulb. The agency was processing a request for water skis and a power boat, but they had not arrived and the summer had been hot. The pilots’ poker games could last three days. Adana felt like Watertown without the food.

On or about November 18, Powers happened to be walking past the base’s secure cryptographic unit to which orders from Washington were sent. The detachment commander saw him. “You’re it, Powers,” he said. Weather permitting, he would be making the first overflight from Turkey. The coal miner’s son from Virginia would be the first American
to peer beyond European Russia into the empty spaces where some people said the arms race was being won.

There was still no word from the agency on what he should do if shot down. There were only hints. A survival kit stowed under the pilot’s seat included a selection of men’s and women’s gold watches, heavy winter hunting gear, two dozen gold Napoleon francs, a message in more than a dozen languages requesting help and promising to do no harm, and a .22-caliber handgun with silencer, presumably in case the message was not understood.

Powers was also offered an L pill. “L” stood for lethal. It was a glass cyanide capsule to be crushed between the teeth if he wanted to commit suicide, and he was by no means the first American to be given the choice. The B-29 crews who dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were given L pills in case they were captured and tortured for information about the weapons in their bomb bays. U.S. agents in the Korean War were also often offered cyanide in case of torture. A CIA manual from that era stated that after crushing the pill the user should inhale through the mouth. The manual continued: “It is expected that there will be no pain, but there may be a feeling of constriction about the chest. Death will follow.”

As recently as 2007 it was claimed in an otherwise authoritative study of the early arms race that U-2 pilots “were under instructions not to survive.” In fact, the one life-threatening aspect of these flights on which the CIA was crystal clear was that taking the L pill along for the ride—never mind ingesting it—was strictly optional.

Joe Murphy was the CIA security officer at Adana with Powers in 1956 and again in 1958. He says: “There was never an instruction to these guys to take their own lives. They had the capability to do that were they in a torture situation, but there was never an instruction.”

For this flight, Powers did not even pack an L pill. On November 20 he took off from Adana, turned east, and crossed into Iran. Then, as his wife and sisters and most of the free world slept, he checked his drift sight, eased his yoke very carefully to the left, and headed north, up the middle of the Caspian, into the unknown.

Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes, attracts both main tribes of Western traveler—the tourist and the wanderer. They mingle warily among its ancient walls. They recognize each other by their sneakers and their boots. They may briefly forget who they are, swept up in the magnificence of the views of the mountains and the Urubamba River, but they almost always come and go as separate species. Only occasionally do they arrive together.

In the summer of 1955, twin twenty-two-year-old brothers from Mansfield, Ohio, flew to Lima and made the spectacular journey to Cuzco and the lost city of the Incas on a trip funded by their father to celebrate their recent graduation. They were sons to be proud of: tall and handsome but also quiet, curious, and unfailingly polite. Each had a sense of humor, one more evident than the other. Both were expensively educated. Their names were Millard and Frederic Pryor.

After a few days in the mountains they parted, Millard for home.

“That’s it,” he said, “I have a job to do.”

“He was going to be assistant to the president of some small company, something in business,” Frederic recalls. “My brother was a very hardworking traditional bourgeois who made tons of money.”

For his own part Frederic headed south. He had a backpack but no idea what he wanted to do with his life and no inkling that it would lead him surprisingly quickly to somewhere much more unsettled and
unsettling than South America. He took a train across the Bolivian altiplano and tumbled out of the highlands in the general direction of Paraguay, where he had a notion he might find utopia.