Bridge of Spies (26 page)

The most excruciating snafu was caused by the very nuclear security that Ericson was violating. The challenge was to get new Sukhoi Su-9 fighters into the air near the U-2, since they could zoom much higher than more readily available MiG-19s. Ericson seemed to dawdle forever over the Semipalatinsk site, but the nearest Sukhois were a thousand miles away in Perm and would need refueling before heading for the stratosphere.

Years later, Sergei Khrushchev pieced it all together:

As Ericson finally headed south from Tyuratam, a seething Biryuzov broke his silence to order two MiG-17s to chase him into Iran if necessary. The planes were scrambled from Merv in southern Turkmenistan, the site of an especially horrific massacre by Genghis Khan in 1221. No one died there on April 9. One of the Soviet pilots spotted the U-2 as it sailed over the border and gave chase. But he ran low on fuel and turned back before Ericson started his descent.

Both Khrushchevs were in the Crimea for a spring break. Why not send a protest note this time? Sergei asked his father. “Why give our enemies the satisfaction?” was the reply. The Soviet premier then retired from public view for eleven days to nurse his rage.

*  *  *

Three weeks later the Americans did it again. Authorization for the mission came from the very top and was given with extreme reluctance on account of the looming Great Power summit in Paris and Eisenhower’s hopes for it:

The first person outside the White House to know about Mission 4154, apart from U-2 program director Richard Bissell, was Stan Beerli, the former Detachment B commander since reassigned to Washington. On April 26 he was told to pack for Norway. On the twenty-seventh he put on his usual dark suit and caught a flight from Dulles to Oslo. “I went commercial,” he remembers, “via Copenhagen.” He arrived on the twenty-eighth, checked into a hotel, and waited.

Barbara Powers knew something was up almost as soon as Beerli. On the twenty-seventh, a Wednesday, Gary asked her for a good-sized pack lunch, and that was something she could provide with or without a broken leg. She filled one thermos with hot potato soup and another with coffee. She made him six sandwiches filled variously with tuna, Spam, and pimiento cheese. She packed them all into a red plaid carrying case and filled the gaps with olives, cookies, and sweet pickles, because high-altitude weather recon could be a hungry-making business.

Her husband took off in a Hercules that morning, confident he’d be back by Sunday evening. The communications chief was going home, and “an appropriate sendoff had been planned.”

Barbara was left with the one companion she knew loved her unconditionally—Eck, the German shepherd.

*  *  *

In Moscow, Marshal Biryuzov was still smarting. Comrade Khrushchev had chewed him out over the phone from the Crimea as only Comrade Khrushchev knew how. What did it say for the country’s defenses against nuclear bombers if they could not bring down an unarmed spy plane? Where had all the billions for surface-to-air missiles gone? Was half the Soviet military asleep? Biryuzov passed the kicking down the chain of command.

“It was a terribly nervous time,” said Colonel Alexander Orlov, namesake of the great illegal, who had spent the early hours of April 9 with Biryuzov in the air defense headquarters on Frunze Embankment. Orlov found out that a Soviet listening post in the Caucasus had picked up encrypted American radio chatter about the Ericson flight “several days before it happened” but had failed to pass it on.

Heads rolled at the listening post. Votintsev was reprimanded by the defense minister. In Kosulino, Voronov received orders to start sending his soldiers on live-fire exercises with the Dvina.

In Washington, the president had given permission for a second overflight and was not consulted again. It was up to Richard Bissell to choose between two spectacularly high-risk flight plans. One started in western Greenland and flew halfway around the Arctic Ocean before loitering for three hours over northern Russia and landing in Norway. The mission planners called it Operation Time Step. The other started from Peshawar and crossed the entire Soviet landmass, also ending in Norway. This was Operation Grand Slam. Both had one main target: Plesetsk, which still had not been photographed and still nourished air force fantasies of a massive Soviet ICBM strike force to be countered with an even more massive American one.

Bissell chose the Grand Slam route and left town for the weekend.

*  *  *

“We were trying something new,” Powers wrote later.

It was a small thing; a variation on Quickmove devised by Colonel Shelton and General Bill Burke, another air force man who was serving as Bissell’s deputy in Washington. If the weather was bad over Russia and the mission delayed, the U-2 would be flown back to Adana rather than hidden in a hangar in Peshawar.

This was not how Beerli would have done it. Beerli was a hide-everything-and-everyone-in-the-hangar man—but he was no longer in charge. He was in Oslo, waiting.

Soon after midnight on Thursday, April 28, the U-2 for Operation Grand Slam dropped out of the blackness and coasted to a halt on the concrete at Peshawar. It was the plane known as Article 358, the most reliable in the detachment’s inventory. Powers had arrived the previous afternoon in the C-130. He’d eaten some of Barbara’s soup and turned in early—not that there was much chance of real sleep on a camp bed in a corner of the hangar. “It was hot and noisy,” he wrote. “As usual, I tossed and turned, sleeping only sporadically.”

He was woken at 2:00 a.m. to eat, suit up, and start prebreathing for a 6:00 a.m. takeoff. There was no steak in Peshawar, but there were eggs, bacon, and toast. If it took an effort of will to hold down such Anglo-Saxon staples while wrestling with preflight nerves, no U-2 pilot admitted it. Powers just called it “a good, substantial breakfast,” as if bacon and eggs at two in the morning at the foot of the Khyber Pass were the most natural thing in the world.

About 3:00 a.m.—the middle of the evening rush hour on the East Coast—the CIA’s weather analysts in Washington postponed the mission by a day. The message was encrypted, sent to Germany, bounced from there to Turkey, and bounced again over the Hindu Kush to Pakistan. Powers came off the hose and Shelton had the U-2 ferried back to Turkey.

The same thing happened on Friday and Saturday. It was too cloudy over Russia to use the precious presidential permission slip for a mission that might yield nothing. Each day the U-2 commuted to Adana and back—except that by Friday night, Article 358 had flown two hundred hours since its last major inspection and was due for another. On Saturday, Article 360 was flown in instead. No one in the detachment liked Article 360. Powers called it “a dog.”

*  *  *

By 6:00 a.m. on May 1 it was already “scorching hot” on the Peshawar flight line, and there were plenty of good reasons to cancel Mission 4154.

The mission’s cover was almost certainly blown. There had been
seven U-2 ferry runs in three days between Turkey and Pakistan. To make them possible, Shelton had been forced to fly in extra fuel from Adana, and for no obvious reason he had broken Beerli’s rule of only using C-130s, loading the fifty-five-gallon drums into a conspicuous double-decker C-124 instead. Quickmove was a distant memory. The airport watchers who the CIA assumed were retained by Moscow to monitor U-2 movements in Peshawar and Adana can seldom have been busier. The same was surely true of the Soviet listening post in the Caucasus, caught napping by Orlov earlier in the month. “Can you think of any better way to telegraph to the Russians that we were coming?” Beerli would ask.

Article 360 was, moreover, a lemon. It had run out of fuel over Japan the previous year, leading to a belly landing and extensive repairs back in California. But one set of wing tanks was still not always feeding fuel to the engine properly. As Powers put it, “something was always going wrong,” and his good friend Bob Ericson agreed. Ericson was in the hangar as Powers’s backup and did not believe the plane would get to Norway.

Even in a perfect plane, the odds against success would have been daunting. Grand Slam was the first mission to try to cross the Soviet Union from one side to the other, which would mean flying in a straight line for hours at a time. Ericson had shown on April 9 that continuous changes in direction helped to throw off pursuers; Powers would not have that luxury.

The Soviet air defense forces were now on near-permanent alert. Despite its zigzags, the April 9 mission had been tracked by Soviet radar and followed by Soviet fighters for eight and a half of its nine hours. The National Security Agency may not have been able to eavesdrop on Khrushchev’s furious reaction, but it was reasonable to assume that Marshal Biryuzov and his men would do their utmost not to let another U-2 get away. Furthermore, the CIA knew the Russians had plugged its radar gaps in the Pamirs.
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It had also come to believe the Russians were
close to solving the guidance problems that made surface-to-air missiles so unreliable at very high altitudes, and it knew that S-75 Dvina missiles had been installed around Sverdlovsk. Officially the pilots were not privy to this intelligence, but they had collected much of it and knew full well that the window of opportunity for overflying Russia was probably closing.

They did not know in any detail what they were supposed to be looking for, but Allen Dulles did, and as director of central intelligence he had admitted to Eisenhower in January 1960 that if the Soviets really had a crash ICBM program of the kind the U-2 was seeking, it would have been found already. Nonetheless, final planning continued for a May 1 overflight, even though it was a major Soviet holiday. Most military and civilian air traffic would be grounded for the festivities. An intruder, especially at seventy thousand feet, would stick out like a UFO.

If Powers crashed or was brought down, Eisenhower’s hopes for a resolution to the Berlin crisis at the Paris summit—not to mention his shared vision with Khrushchev of large-scale nuclear disarmament—would almost certainly crash with him. Ike had thought this through in clairvoyant detail. “The President said that he has one tremendous asset in a summit meeting,” General Goodpaster wrote in another memorandum for the record on February 8. “That is his reputation for honesty. If one of these aircraft were lost when we are engaged in apparently sincere deliberations, it could be put on display in Moscow and ruin the President’s effectiveness.”

But the truth was no one in Washington was listening to the arguments against overflights anymore. By the end of April even Eisenhower had given up. He considered himself a good judge of character but had completely misinterpreted Khrushchev’s silence on the subject of the U-2 at Camp David and the absence of protest notes since. His science adviser, George Kistiakowsky, thought the Russians were “practically inviting us” to continue with the overflights, and the president was coming around to the same view.

The U-2 mission planners, now just two blocks from the White House on H Street, were still trying to prove a negative—the absence of a giant missile factory. This was not easy in a country the size of the USSR, and they still hadn’t photographed Plesetsk, the suspected ICBM site north of the Arctic Circle. They knew about the heightened
risk now posed by surface-to-air missiles, but they used it as an argument for risk, not restraint; for cramming in as many missions as possible before overflights really did become suicide runs. At the latest meeting of the president’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, in February, General James “Jimmy” Doolittle had gotten in on the act. The hero of the Doolittle raid was now secretary of the air force and hardwired, like his predecessors, to press relentlessly for action. Toward the end of the meeting the sober Goodpaster, who knew his master’s mind more intimately than anyone else in the room, reminded those present of a brand-new spy plane in the Skunk Works pipeline that would be available soon and would fly higher and much faster than the U-2, making it almost impossible to intercept. Doolittle pounced. “The reliability of the new airplane is bound to be much lower,” he pointed out. “This is a special factor in this connection, since the embarrassment to us will be so great if one crashes.” The logic was contorted, but it had ground Ike down. He had given permission for a flight and they were going to use it.

*  *  *

Powers had spent Friday night playing poker. By Saturday night the waiting was getting to him, and so was the knowledge that he would be flying a less-than-perfect plane if the go code ever came through. But he was at least drowsy enough to get some sleep.