Bridge of Spies (22 page)

Mersin was a short drive from Adana. It was not hard to be back for the daily 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. cocktail hour. With the wives in town, dinner would usually follow at one or another of their homes, prepared by the hostess in turn or occasionally thrown together as a pot luck.

Accommodation was now mainly off base and rented rather than in the two-person Belgian bachelor trailers that had greeted the pilots in 1956. It was basic compared with married quarters on most U.S. bases around the world and downright primitive compared with diplomatic
lodgings, which may have seemed unfair considering that no embassy on earth had as much power to affect the course of world affairs as this little community of weather-recon pilots. But there were compensations that would have been worth writing home about if letters did not have to get past the Agency’s censors. Compensations like more free time than you could fill and a dedicated C-47 Gooney Bird on standby to help fill it. Lunch and shopping in West Germany? Home via Rome and Naples? These things the agency could arrange.

Barbara Powers was the trailblazer.

After she had been a stenographer for Judge Advocate Captain Reuben Jackson for six months, the Communists staged a coup in Athens. Women were being raped on the streets—so Barbara was told—and Americans were no longer welcome in the cradle of democracy. She was transferred to Wheelus Air Force Base outside Tripoli. Twenty-nine years later a phalanx of swing-wing bombers from Lakenheath in England would rend the night above Tripoli with high explosives to teach Colonel Gadhafi a lesson about sponsoring terrorism, but in the age of Eisenhower—still only fifteen years after the Allied victory in North Africa—the American military was still an honored guest in Libya.

By day Barbara took dictation from another judge advocate. She spent her nights on the base in a bunk bed, tormented by flies that the locals refused to exterminate because they fertilized the date palms.

Gary would fly in when he could in a T-33 Thunderbird, about once a month. He didn’t always phone ahead. One day he found Barbara locked in her room saying she’d be ready in a moment, sounding frightened. By her account he forced his way in and, seeing her holding a purse, rifled through it to find a letter in which Captain Jackson declared his love for her and told her he was getting a divorce. He was begging her to do the same.

Gary never wrote about the episode, though he did admit his marriage was in trouble. Barbara remembered the military police dragging him away and his turning the tables by filing a formal complaint against Jackson (who died soon afterward in an air crash).

On another visit, enraged by another fellow officer who wanted to steal his wife, Powers hurled the man over the bar in the Wheelus Officers’ Club. This time Barbara was quietly impressed.

The heart-stopping news that she would be able to live with her husband at his mysterious place of work came through in the late fall of 1957, as
Sputnik
was circling the Earth and Burt and Helen Silverman were finishing their European tour after being rudely interrupted by the trial of Rudolf Abel. Barbara was not stupid. She could read a map and had begun to suspect that Gary’s base was in Turkey. The idea of living there enthralled her—yet the reality, she wrote, began with Gary removing a pile of excrement from the front room of their new home.

Everyone associated with Richard Bissell’s air force was expected to show a high degree of self-reliance as well as discretion, and Barbara and Gary Powers could certainly look after themselves. Gary bought himself a shotgun for hunting (duck, goose, quail, boar). He also bought a gray Mercedes 220SE convertible with red leather seats and a retired German police dog called Eck von Heinerberg. Barbara bought rugs for their home. They started taking drives into the Anatolian hinterland with the wind in their hair and a gun and a dog in their red backseat. It was a life that a reporter could have made to seem extremely glamorous if a reporter had been allowed within a hundred miles of Adana. But it was a life lived in an agency bubble, freedom being a complex thing. Its defenders could not always practice what they preached.

Soon after their arrival the wives were at last given a look at the aircraft in which their husbands were paid so much to study the weather. “She’s a real doll,” Gary told Barbara in advance. “She gets four miles to the gallon and travels ten times the speed of a truck. Now that ain’t bad!” Barbara was less than awestruck. She told him she thought it looked “like a giant black crow.” But the plane did not loom as large in their life together as it did in history. He almost never talked about it with her and did not seem to fly it often, either.

In September 1958 all the detachment’s pilots disappeared from Turkey for two months. The wives were not told where and would have been unlikely to guess northern Norway. The point of the decampment was to photograph a swath of Russia not far below the Arctic Circle where the Soviets were rumored to be building ICBM silos close enough to the United States to hit it with a straight shot over the North Pole. The pilots ate sumptuously and took pictures of one another in sharp suits with sharp, dark mountains in the background. But they took none of the alleged new missile site; the cloud cover was unrelenting.

Back at Adana the communications hut stayed quiet. For months on end no go codes came from Washington; none for the kind of missions that the pilots might want to tell their grandchildren about, at any rate. A new type of trailer came instead. Barbara called it the superhouse trailer (also known as a double-wide). It was fifty-five feet long and had three bedrooms, and there was one for each married officer. Drawn up in two neat rows, the superhouse trailers brought everyone back inside the base. No one had to drive anywhere at night and Detachment B’s partying took on a new intensity.

“Enjoying liquor, I did my share,” Powers admitted.

“There was a lot of drinking,” says Joe Murphy, by this time on his second Turkish tour, “but I never thought it was out of control.”

Major (later General) Harry Cordes, an air force U-2 pilot who didn’t think much of Bissell’s people management, said later: “I saw the potential for international incidents with automobiles and wives [and] tried to caution [Bissell] about the danger of project compromise.”

The new trailers were a response to such warnings, and they did cut the risk of a U-2 pilot spending time in a Turkish jail for drunk driving. But they did not stop one officer—“a handsome man built like a football player”—from throwing too much of his strength into a dance with the beautiful Barbara one rowdy night in the spring of 1960. She fell and broke her leg and was told to say it had been a waterskiing accident if anybody asked.

Barbara complained that Gary wasn’t bothered about her leg. But like Cordes, he
was
bothered about project compromise. “How much did the Russians actually know about our outfit?” he mused later. “Talking it over with the intelligence officer we concluded that they probably knew a great deal. It was an unusual unit, set off by itself, flying an easily identified aircraft. Spying was an ancient profession in Turkey. If Russian intelligence was as good as our intelligence repeatedly told us it was, it seemed likely they not only knew how many planes we had but how many pilots, plus our names.”

They would know his name soon enough.

*  *  *

What were the wives doing there? Why double the number of people who had seen the “giant black crow” close up? Why treble (at least) the
amount of gossip about the Adana party set that wasn’t even part of the air force? The answer went back to Cape Canaveral and a chilly December morning in 1957.

This time Willie Fisher could not be present. He was detained at the West Street federal prison in New York pending his appeal. But the next stage in America’s journey to the stars would not go unwitnessed. Several hundred reporters and photographers were crammed onto a dune on Cocoa Beach. The networks had cleared time for live broadcasts. The object of their attention was a tall, thin Vanguard rocket on launchpad 18A that contained the free world’s first satellite. It was meant to have blasted off two days earlier. The weather had been dreadful. A liquid oxygen valve had frozen shut and the countdown had been scrubbed. But the sixth was calm. The hour had come.
Sputnik
would be avenged.

The Associated Press put out an advance story for use by subscribers in the event of a successful launch. It began:

The Vanguard was a Citroën among rockets : clever but fragile. It was also a navy machine, and few in the army would have hesitated to call it effete. As a concept it was hugely ambitious, with all-new guidance and propulsion systems, solar cells to provide some of its electrical power, and printed circuits to shrink its innards. Its engines generated barely one fortieth of the thrust of Korolyov’s R7–27,000 pounds to 1.1 million, which may strike the Hummer generation as downright un-American. But if the package worked it could, with a little spin, more than compensate for the humiliation of
Sputnik
by dint of its sheer sophistication.

Would it work? Now there was a question. The previous Vanguard launch had been aborted five times because of technical hitches. This one was untested on the most fundamental level: its second- and third-stage boosters had never been fired in a real flight before. Wernher von Braun, who had nothing to do with its development but knew a thing or two about rockets, said it didn’t stand a chance. An engineer at the
launchpad told a
Time
reporter: “We’ll be pleased if it does go into orbit. We will not be despondent if it does not.” The
Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph
was more optimistic. “MOON—MINUTES TO GO,” its morning headline screamed, referring to the minimoon, the size of a grapefruit, that the president’s press secretary had promised would be placed in orbit.

At 11:44 the last hose connecting the rocket to its support crane fell away and the first flames spurted from its engines. By 11:45 it was all over. As the official countdown tape put it: “…  two … one … zero … fire … first ignition … EXPLOSION!”

The fireball was as fat and ugly as the rocket was slender and beautiful, but it still failed to spare the Vanguard’s blushes. Before smoke and flame enveloped the whole launch complex, television viewers saw the rocket simply stop in midair a few feet off the ground and fall back as if deciding orbit wasn’t worth the effort. As it did so, the nose cone fell off like an ill-fitting witch’s hat.

With a little tolerance for excuses, it was all completely understandable. Project Vanguard had been meticulously denied military funding and von Braun’s expertise in order to keep space exploration civilian and honor the spirit of the International Geophysical Year. It was overseen by an astronomer, not a general. There was no strategic imperative to succeed, no relentless pressure from government, no threat of exile to a labor camp in the event of failure, and no privacy in which to make the inevitable early mistakes that dogged any new rocket program. According to acting Defense Secretary Donald Quarles, the explosion was merely “an incident in the perfection of the Vanguard satellite system.”

But America was in no mood for excuses. For two months Democrats and the media had withheld final judgment on the technological Pearl Harbor that was
Sputnik
on the basis that the Pentagon (or whoever was running the U.S. missile program—it wasn’t at all clear) had a right of reply. In those two months the Soviets had put up a second satellite, this time with a dog in it. Khrushchev had boasted that he could put up twenty more “tomorrow” and was churning out missiles “like sausages.” Eisenhower’s poll ratings had plunged twenty-two points. Now this. Flopnik. The president’s numbers sank another eight points. There were calls for him to go, and he seriously considered doing so. In the post-
Sputnik
stress he had suffered a minor stroke. In the post-Vanguard
recriminations there was a salutary national backlash against consumerist excess, which seemed to have been achieved at the expense of national security. But there was also a wholesale reevaluation of the Soviet threat—technologically supreme and now being wielded from the moral high ground, since the
Sputnik
s were IGY experiments, not warheads. For the first time in his career Eisenhower doubted whether he was equal to the fight.

One thing he did not doubt was that Khrushchev, yet again, was bluffing. The U-2 flights of August 1957 had yielded an intelligence bonanza, most of it reassuring. Detailed analysis of the Tyuratam launch facility suggested that while the R7 was a mighty space rocket it was a highly impractical missile that took days to fuel and was impossible to hide. Overflights of the closed nuclear cities along the Trans-Siberian railway revealed intensive fuel enrichment activity but not the mass production of thermonuclear warheads, which was a much more challenging proposition.

For the time being the world could live with Mr. Khrushchev’s sausages. If you were privy to the dazzling fruits of the U-2’s twenty-twenty overhead vision, this much was clear. But if you weren’t, it wasn’t, and almost no one was. Senators Symington and Johnson were not, which is why they felt so free to flagellate themselves and the administration with the looming so-called missile gap. Joe Alsop was not, which is why he started using the lethal “F” word—flaccid—with such confidence in his influential columns in 1958. Even the authors of the Gaither Report, a supposedly authoritative survey of U.S. defense capabilities commissioned by Eisenhower and published in late 1957, knew nothing about the U-2 when their findings were leaked to the
Washington Post
. The report called for a crash missile-building program, a nationwide network of nuclear bomb shelters, and a thirteen-billion-dollar boost to the annual defense budget. It concluded that the country was in “the gravest danger in its history.”

These were the six words of the report that the
Post
chose to quote most prominently when it obtained a copy. It was a great scoop, and it elevated the missile gap to the status of received wisdom when in fact it was little more than a paranoid delusion. Such was the political context of the Vanguard mess—though you did not have to be delusional to infer from the wreckage at Cape Canaveral that the U.S. missile program was at least in trouble.