Bridge of Spies (21 page)

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When Gary Powers took off in November 1956 on the first overflight of Soviet territory from Turkey, he did not know about Ericson’s trouble over Arizona or Nole’s over Texas or Kittinger’s balloon jumps; they hadn’t happened yet. But he did know about what
had
happened. He was flying-safety officer for lonely Detachment B, and even though the agency had not yet supplied it with water skis or speed boat, it supplied Powers with U-2 accident reports from wherever they happened, whenever they happened, in the hope that the detachment might learn from others’ mistakes.

So Powers knew better than most U-2 pilots what could go wrong. He knew, for instance, that his good friend Marty Knutson had stalled and spun at twenty thousand feet in training over Groom Lake and had not bailed out only because his canopy had jammed shut. (Knutson managed to recover from the spin.) He knew that a pilot who had followed him to the ranch had died there trying to shake one of the U-2’s detachable stabilisers off his wingtip after it failed to drop away automatically. (The Lockheed people decided that too much fuel must have rushed to one wingtip in a tight turn, making the plane impossible to balance.) He knew about Frank Grace’s death, also at the ranch, and unlike Grace’s friends from Malmstrom who flew to Texas for the funeral, he was allowed to know how it had happened. (Grace climbed too steeply on takeoff after dark and stalled fifty feet off the ground.
His left wingtip dipped and snagged the lake bed, throwing the plane into a cartwheel that ended when it hit a pylon.) And he knew about Howard Carey. Powers and Carey had trained together at Watertown, but Carey had been sent to Germany instead of Turkey. He was returning from an overflight of Eastern Europe when a Canadian-manned early-warning station in France picked him up high over central Poland. The Canadians took him to be an intruder and scrambled four of their own CF-86 Sabre Jets to intercept him. Carey was easy prey: relieved to be back in Western airspace, he descended quickly toward Wiesbaden. Two of the Sabre Jets took up positions on his wingtips and a third behind him. The visitor was unmarked and unrecognizable and did not respond when invited to identify himself. Flight Lieutenant John McElroy armed his guns but never fired them; the U-2 had already fallen apart in the turbulence created by the Sabre Jets.

Other explanations have been offered for Carey’s death, but this is the fullest and most plausible. Richard Bissell, the U-2’s most ardent fan in Washington, would never have said he found it reassuring, but he did cite it in 1960 as evidence that the U-2 would “pretty much break up in a mishap.”

To know the U-2’s weaknesses so intimately would have exposed an imaginative pilot to paralyzing fear. No one ever accused Powers of being too imaginative. When he saw his first MiG contrails, peering into his drift sight while sailing over Baku on the morning of November 20, 1957, he trusted that the MiGs wouldn’t be able to reach him and flew on. (He counted fifty-six Soviet fighters in the sky below him that day.) When his electrics malfunctioned over Yerevan he calmly rerouted himself home via Mount Ararat, cutting out a detour to Tbilisi. This time he reached Adana in one piece and had his long martini.

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In Turkey they drank gin martinis, never mind the Rat Pack and its predilection for vodka. Turkey wasn’t Vegas. The PX at Adana sold fine British Beefeaters flown in from Wiesbaden and not much else in the liquor department, and the U-2 boys developed a certain loyalty to it.

They had plenty of time. That first flight by Powers was the only true overflight of Soviet territory by Detachment B in its first nine months at Adana. Had American taxpayers known, they might have vented
their indignation over the U-2 pilots’ thirty thousand dollars in annual pay much earlier than they did—and it was true that Powers’s fifteen dollars per operational mile flown over that nine-month period was a handsome rate by any standards. Even so, it is hard with hindsight to argue that it was not deserved.

Of the era’s three military-trained airborne elites, the most famous—the
Mercury
astronauts—risked their lives and undertook genuinely historic missions but did not actually fly. As Tom Wolfe put it, they sat on top of an enormous roman candle and waited for someone to light the fuse. The fighter jocks did all their own flying, but never into the bear’s lair; unlike Slim Pickens in
Dr. Strangelove
, they never went toe to toe with the Russkies. Only the U-2 pilots did both. They did not ask to be killing time on the concrete outside Adana, and they didn’t much like it. Three of them were sent home for want of anything to do, and the stay-behinds started saying that the place existed because the world needed an enema. Month after month the decrypted orders from project HQ to the wireless hut read “as you are,” or words to that effect. During the Suez crisis in 1956 there was plenty of operational flying over the Middle East, but after that most U-2 flights from Adana were test flights over Turkey or “ferret runs” along the northern edge of the Black Sea to test the Soviets’ reactions. Even these were rare because the U-2 did not seem to have been built to last and no one wanted to wear it out. “No one thought the operation would last long,” Joe Murphy says. The truth was, no one knew, but Richard Bissell was darned if he was going to let it fizzle out, which was one reason why Jim Cherbonneaux found himself ripping frantically at the main front zipper of his pressure suit on the scorching afternoon of August 22, 1957.

Cherbonneaux was one of those ordered to stay behind. He had trained with Powers, deployed with Powers to Turkey, and then suddenly packed up and moved again with most of the detachment to a borrowed hangar outside Lahore in Pakistan. By the time his black plane dropped quietly through the haze that afternoon, flaps fully extended and compressors idling in the hot, humid air, Cherbonneaux was beyond desperate. He had been airborne for nine hours and acutely aware of his bladder for an hour and a half. He would have soaked his long johns if he could, but when he tried he felt only agonizing spasms. As the aircraft rolled to a stop in an out-of-the-way corner of the airfield,
two technicians pulled alongside with a step ladder to open the canopy and help the pilot out. But he was practically out already, scrambling from the cockpit as if on fire. He had three layers to get through—outer suit, pressure suit, and those long johns. Moments later, he told Ben Rich, “not heeding privacy, I set a new world record on that tarmac.”

It was a release in more ways than one. After nine months of inactivity and sagging morale, Detachment B had proved its worth in one spectacular flight. Spooked by the Russian protest note of July 1956, and by Soviet radar’s ability to track U-2s over the Caucasus, Eisenhower had suspended overflights in November that year. He allowed them to restart the following summer with three flights in one day, because the Skunk Works had radically shrunk the U-2’s radar profile with a heavy coat of iron ferrite paint; because Pakistan had allowed the use of the Lahore base in return for a substantial increase in U.S. aid; because Soviet radar defenses seemed to be at their weakest in central Asia; and because central Asia seemed to be hiding the development of a truly terrifying superweapon.

The day before Cherbonneaux relieved himself at Lahore, Sergey Korolyov’s outsize R7 missile at last made a successful five-thousand-mile test flight from Tyuratam to the volcano-strewn Kamchatka Peninsula in the Pacific. This much the CIA knew because its partners in the National Security Agency could eavesdrop on Soviet military communications, which still used old-fashioned radio relays to reach across the country’s eight time zones. But what sort of warhead could the R7 carry? Where were the warheads being tested and with what success? Was the successful R7 test a fluke or a taste of things to come? Was another test imminent? These were questions only the U-2 could answer.

At ground level, Cherbonneaux’s route would have been a backpacker’s dream. It took him straight over K2, the second-highest mountain on earth, then northwest over the cotton fields and tobacco plantations of Uzbekistan’s lush Fergana Valley and deep into northern Kazakhstan. Above Karaganda (at that time still an important node of the Gulag archipelago) his flight plan required a sharp right turn and a straight run east with his cameras on. He did not know why; it was a route compiled by intelligence analysts in Washington. He found out what they were interested in three hours into the mission, high over the eastern steppe, near where it begins to merge with the grasslands
of Mongolia. Where Genghis Khan’s horde had fanned out seven centuries earlier in search of settlements to seize and raze, Cherbonneaux saw in his drift sight a familiar pattern of craters and faded blotches. Each blotch was linked to the others by a web of dirt roads, but whatever had made the craters had wiped the desert clean around them. The pattern was familiar from the Nevada nuclear test site. Cherbonneaux selected maximum magnification on the drift sight and stared down it, heart pounding, at a large object on top of a makeshift tower. He had found the Semipalatinsk test site, or polygon, and a weapon apparently primed to blow. But when? Who knew? This was not the kind of scenario they put you through at the Lovelace Clinic. If it had been, he might have failed on account of the propensity of his pulse to surge at moments of acute anxiety. He came as close as a U-2 pilot ever did to panicking, yelling into his faceplate for the Russians to hold their fire.

The bomb on the tower went off the following month, but a separate half-megaton airburst detonated over the site five hours after Cherbonneaux passed through, more or less as he was peeing on the tarmac at Lahore.

A week later another Detachment B pilot found Tyuratam, holy of holies of the Soviet space-industrial complex, one hundred miles east of the Aral Sea. In one sense the razor-sharp pictures taken that day by E. K. Jones confirmed the CIA’s worst fears. They revealed a huge launch complex, far bigger than anything at Cape Canaveral, as if the Russians had decided to win the space race before it had begun by planting a cosmonaut on Mars.
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The launchpad was not in fact a pad. It was a steel grid fifty meters square, held in place by sixteen concrete bridge trusses over the fat end of a huge pit shaped like a chemistry flask. Fuel and equipment trains had direct access to the grid along a spur from the main line to Moscow. This gateway to the cosmos was big and deadly serious, but what the U-2 confirmed was that there was only one. The Russians might
be going to Mars from Tyuratam, but they were not about to use it to launch a preemptive salvo of ICBMs. That knowledge would underpin Eisenhower’s resistance to the missile lobby for the next three years.

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There were no more protest notes from the Soviet embassy in Washington. Had the ferrite paint succeeded in hiding the U-2 from Soviet radar? Hardly. The paint was so heavy that it had forced Cherbonneaux to sneak into Soviet airspace over the Pamirs far below the plane’s normal ceiling, at 58,000 feet. He had simply caught the Soviet radar net napping, but at least one of the other flights from Lahore that day was spotted, and a MiG was scrambled from an Andijon air defense squadron in the Fergana Valley to confirm it was an intruder. When the squadron’s commander told Moscow that Soviet central Asia was being overflown by unidentified flying objects, the head of all Soviet air defense fighter regiments, a Colonel-General Yevgeni Savitsky, flew out to interview the MiG’s pilot. Savitsky decided the pilot was seeing things and had him reassigned.

The Soviet air defense forces were divided into radar and fighter regiments and rocketeers, and the rocketeers were probably the most attuned to the U-2 menace, because Khrushchev had personally insisted that they shoot it down. To this end a promising guided missile designed by Pavel Grushin for the defense of Leningrad, the S-75, was rushed into mass production for the defense of the whole motherland.

Like Sergey Korolyov (who served eight years in the Gulag), Grushin was a student of the hard school of rocketry. It was a field assigned the highest priority by Stalin and Beria, who gave the KGB direct control of hundreds of scientists and engineers working alongside their captured German counterparts in forced-labor conditions throughout the postwar period.

Grushin’s S-75 was the grandfather of all modern Soviet surface-to-air missiles. Variants would distinguish themselves from Cuba and Vietnam to Syria and Iraq over the next four decades, but the S-75 took its first bow in November 1957. General Yuri Votintsev, the great-grandson of a Don Cossack warrior chieftain, was deputed to guide it onto the stage at the head of a ground-shaking display of sixty-two missiles in all.

“On 7 November at 0800 hours the column took up its assigned place
on Manezhnaya Square [north of Red Square],” he recalled. “All the windows in the Metropol Hotel building were open, and long-barrelled lenses of movie and still cameras were sticking out of the windows. The column of missiles brought up the rear of the parade. When we reached Red Square, everything around us froze for an instant. Then ovations began in the grandstands. After passing over the square, the column stretched out along the embankment, and the soldiers began to cover the missiles quickly.… The first rows of spectators from the square had already appeared. People formed a solid ring around the column, crawled on the vehicles and hugged the soldiers and officers.”

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The men of Detachment B flew back to Turkey and were joined there by their wives. The idea was to make life in Adana more tolerable for the pilots. The result was an outpost of the American empire that was unique in the cold war.

The speedboat had at last arrived. Waterskiing happened on a reservoir near the base. For those who preferred bathing or sunbathing on hot, quiet days—and there were plenty—the beaches near Mersin were secluded and spectacular. One faced the ruins of a crusader castle two hundred yards out to sea, stranded there by a sea level that seemed to have risen a few feet since the twelfth century. The pilots called it the castle by the sea and formed an attachment to it, as they might have to the sands of Cocoa Beach or Mission Bay if their flying careers had turned out only slightly differently. They would drive there in big imported Buicks with whitewall tires, and they would horse around in bright Bermuda-length swimming shorts under the supervision of the ranking agency man of the moment, who tended to be paler and skinnier than they.