Bridge of Spies (35 page)

The ill feeling between the two Powers camps was intense throughout.
Barbara and Oliver were each determined to be seen as Gary’s true protector, which meant constant efforts to upstage each other in the press and an undeclared race to get to Moscow.

McAfee was first out of the blocks. Delayed by the task of securing visas for his wife and her doctor, Oliver Powers sent his lawyer on ahead to try to make contact with Gary. McAfee was willing and not easily intimidated, but he was new to the jet set. Apart from his travels in the navy, he had never left the country. At thirty, he had never even been to New York City until he changed planes there to catch a night flight with SAS to Copenhagen.

It was delayed.

“I got into Copenhagen late,” he says “Missed the flight from there to Moscow and pleaded with those people telling them I had to be in Moscow the following day. They sent my ass up to Helsinki.”

The boy lawyer cooled his heels in Finland for an afternoon and reached Moscow at four the next morning. He had been expected the previous afternoon. No one was there to meet him, and as a result there were now two bewildered young men from Virginia in the Soviet capital. As Powers fretted in prison, McAfee fretted at the airport until Intourist could be alerted. Forty-eight sleepless hours after leaving Norton, he was swept into town in a Zil limousine and installed in the Sovetskaya’s Lenin suite.

The rest of the Virginia contingent arrived in waves. Barbara’s team flew Sabena via Brussels, reaching Moscow on August 13. She and her mother were assigned a suite occupied by Vice President Nixon the previous summer. An uneasy Sam Jaffe was billeted on the same luxury floor. Oliver and Ida Powers and the family doctor came on a separate plane, which upset Gary when he heard about it but was the only arrangement his father would consider.

Four days later, having consulted her older sisters and bought her own ticket, Jessica Powers-Hileman emerged alone and unexpected from passport control at Moscow’s miserable Sheremetyevo Airport. She hoped to be taken to her ailing mother, and eventually she was. “I’d given a telegram to someone I thought was a reporter in Stockholm,” she remembers. It had not been delivered. “It was my first time outside the United States. It was dark, it was midnight, and no one knew what to do with me. We thought the Russians had two heads and forked tails
and all that, and I thought, ‘Gee, I’ll never be seen again.’ ” In desperation she showed a taxi driver her passport and pronounced her name. He understood—“Who didn’t know that name?”—and took her to the Sovetskaya. Looking back, she reckons she grew up quite a bit that day.

*  *  *

Why had they all come? For Barbara it was complicated. There was not much love left in her marriage, but she still had a husband to support, at least in public, and a father-in-law to stand up to. And she had little to do in Milledgeville besides drink and mope. For Ida there was a son to be prayed for and a daughter-in-law to be outnumbered. For Oliver the point was simple—to bring Gary home.

At Oliver’s instruction, McAfee had assembled a fat dossier of affidavits testifying to Gary’s good character. He had also collected photographs illustrating Gary’s humble upbringing. He had even buried his nose in textbooks on international law and developed a theory that the Soviet Union had no jurisdiction thirteen miles up, having already conceded that it had no jurisdiction thirteen miles out to sea. McAfee and his client were going for broke. If the CIA wouldn’t let them arrange a swap of Gary for Rudolf Abel, they would try their luck with the KGB, asking for an acquittal on the basis of no case to answer.

It was bold, imaginative, and doomed. McAfee was not allowed to visit Gary, but he did meet Gary’s Soviet defense lawyer, Mikhail Grinev, who accepted the affidavits and the photographs of blue-collar America but did not give the “no jurisdiction” theory a second look.

Like Roman Rudenko, the prosecutor general, Grinev was a veteran of the Nuremberg trials. He was also a picture of gloom and a professional loser. A heavy mustache seemed to press his mouth into a perpetual grimace. If an unscripted thought ever sprang to life behind his hooded eyes, he did not let it out. His appointment to the case as Rudenko’s notional adversary was part of a general effort to remind the world of Nuremberg, where it was generally accepted that Soviet lawyers and due process had managed to coexist. But this did not give Powers much cause for hope. As
Life
magazine’s Moscow correspondent pointed out to McAfee, every German whom Grinev represented at Nuremberg was executed.

On the stage of the Hall of Columns, fully six feet above the stalls,
Grinev was to sit at a desk facing Rudenko. Powers’s place would be behind him in a dock that the
New York Times
said looked like a playpen. Between the lawyers and above them, behind a long table draped in red cloth, three senior generals would make up the Military Collegium.

The hall started to fill up early on the morning of the seventeenth. It was gray outside and drizzling, but crowds gathered anyway. The press had reserved seats in a raised tier round three sides of the hall, and both groups of Powers supporters were driven to the hall from their hotel in plenty of time to talk to them. Oliver said the court would find out that his son was a good old boy and always had been. Barbara, in a black silk dress and black cloche hat, said he was the most wonderful person she had ever met. Most American reporters wrote generously that her eyes were red from weeping. Sam Jaffe noted later that a night of almost unremitting booze had played its part. (The drinking had been interrupted by a 3:00 a.m. taxi ride to the Lyubianka and back. Barbara had intended to find a door and bang on it until they let her in to see her man, but at Jaffe’s suggestion she made do with a sniffle and a prayer in the backseat of the cab. Debriefed after the trip by the FBI, he said that on their return to the hotel she grabbed him and kissed him and that on this, as on many other occasions, he could have “been intimate” with her but wasn’t.)

A few minutes before 10:00 a.m. a bell rang in the hall. Forty-four chandeliers blazed down on a crowd of two thousand. Interpreters took their seats in soundproof booths to provide simultaneous translation via headsets in English, French, German, and Spanish. The Powers family and entourage were ushered into a box behind the press gallery. In the sea of heads in front them were those of Khrushchev’s daughter Yelena (her father was watching on television in the Crimea) and many of his ministers. Guy Burgess, the exfiltrated British spy, was there. So were senior diplomats from most of the embassies. It was, McAfee says, “like going to the Super Bowl.”

At ten o’clock the generals took their seats behind the long red table and Powers entered, stage left, in a too-big double-breasted blue serge suit. Barbara started sobbing at once. The audience, which had risen for the entrance, now sat down. Powers sat too. The presiding judge ordered him to stand and stay standing for the reading of the indictment, which covered seventeen pages and took nearly an hour.

Grinev had given him no warning about the setting. Powers wrote later that he felt as if he were being tried in Carnegie Hall and was extremely nervous. He hid it as best he could behind a mournful look that stared out from a thousand front pages the next day.

There might have been aerial gunnery graduates of Turner Air Force Base who would have relished this strange moment in the glare of Soviet klieg lights, who would have deflected Roman Rudenko’s propaganda with a firm jaw and the glint of a fighter jock’s eye. Powers wasn’t one of them. He was the pilot who had suffered stage fright as a schoolboy but felt a preternatural calm in the cockpit. Even in rare group pictures of the Detachment B pilots in their pressure suits, helmets clutched like trophies under their right arms, he is the one who looks somehow uncomfortable. In the Hall of Columns he was miserable.

Along with Powers, the indictment named Dulles, Nixon, and Christian Herter (the new secretary of state). They were its real targets—the instigators of the “gangster flight” dispatched expressly to wreck the Paris summit. In case anyone missed the point watching the trial, that day’s
Izvestia
carried a cartoon of Nixon, Herter, Eisenhower, and a generic uniformed villain from the Pentagon sitting in the dock next to Powers in his suit and helmet.

He had read the indictment in his cell. Nearly half of it was an attack on the United States, not him. As he listened to it being read out by Rudenko, he looked “painfully ashamed,” one Soviet commentator said. Painfully alone would have been closer to the truth. When Rudenko finished, he pleaded guilty. A recess was announced. As he was being led out, he spotted Barbara waving from her seat and choked up.

What he failed to understand was that almost nothing he could say at his trial would change its outcome, because nothing about it, or contemporaneous with it, had been left to chance. By way of countdown to that morning’s proceedings, a series of other American “spies” had been unmasked and expelled. Edwin Morrell, a student, had been thrown out in July. Colonel Edwin Kirton, air attaché at the embassy, had gone the previous Wednesday. The next day it had been the turn of Robert Christner, a tourist, and the next James Shultz, another student.

America was incorrigible, shameless, obsessive in its meddling.

And Russia?

Fast-forward to day three of the trial. The verdict is near. The world waits to know Powers’s fate. The press room is full of newsmen banging out backgrounders. Some who have already filed are filling their bourgeois bellies with kielbasa and caviar in the refreshment room. Suddenly (according to Radio Moscow’s live commentary) “somebody brings joyous news.… I hear a correspondent dictating an account of the court proceedings on the telephone who interrupts his dispatch and almost shouts into the mouthpiece: ‘Stop. I have a flash. A new Soviet spaceship.’ ”

The wizard of Baikonur has done it again. Sergey Korolyov has put into orbit a five-ton space capsule carrying not one but two live dogs and has brought them safely back to Earth. Never mind that five tons is the weight of an exceptionally large H-bomb complete with guidance system and heat-resistant nose cone. The man from Radio Moscow calls it “yet another peaceful star” and commiserates with Powers for sitting in the dock when he could be in training for space. Russia is irrepressible.

Powers spent nearly seven hours on the stand. He fought rearguard skirmishes with Rudenko about his altitude when shot down—he stuck with 68,000 feet to remind the CIA that he was keeping the secrets that really mattered—and about the amount of advance warning he had been given before his mission (he said he had none). He impressed some of the American diplomats in the audience with his outward calm, even though by the end of his first four-hour session on his feet he was, he said later, quite ready to scream at the judges that they should “sentence me to death and end this farce.”

He made two other claims in his memoir ten years later that hint at the pressure he felt to inject some heroism into the role history had given him. He wrote that in a break on the trial’s first day he saw a chance to escape when taken into a yard with an unguarded exit to the street, and that he nearly took it—“I tensed my legs, leaned forward slightly”—only to be foiled by a heavy hand on his shoulder. He wrote that in his cell before the trial he had visions of himself refusing to testify and of going down in history with Nathan Hale. He rejected these as “the heroic fantasies of a young boy,” convinced they would have cost him his life.

Would they? Maybe not. With the luxury of half a century’s hindsight
it seems likely that Powers could have “pulled a Milt,” like Willie Fisher in Brooklyn three years earlier. He could probably have said nothing, put his trust in geopolitics, and returned eventually to the United States not as the spy who spilled his guts but as the stoic son of Virginia who kept his mouth shut. It would have saved him a great deal of trouble.

The purpose of his testimony was not to reveal anything the KGB did not already know. It was to provide a prelude to Rudenko’s closing harangue, which was in turn designed to shift the blame for the wrecked summit from Khrushchev back to the Americans. It wasn’t subtle. Rudenko was a fat-faced ideological yes-man who had reached the top of the ziggurat of Soviet justice by floating there on the shifting winds of change. As the
New York Times
put it: “He has purged and he has purged the purgers. He had helped to concoct false confessions and fantastic indictments, and he has dealt affably and studiously [at Nuremberg] before a tribunal run in the Anglo-Saxon manner.”

Rudenko now reverted, on the morning of Friday, August 19, to a full-blown Marxist-Leninist critique of American militarism. This trial, he told his comrade judges and a vast live television audience, exposed not only the crimes of spy-pilot Powers, but also “the criminal aggressive actions of United States ruling circles, the actual inspirers and organizers of monstrous crimes directed against the peace and security of all peoples.” He let rip at the “bestial, misanthropic morality of Mr. Dulles” (for expecting Powers to jab himself with the curare pin); at Eisenhower for promising to end overflights of Soviet territory and then allowing another one by a stripped-down Boeing RB-47 on July 1; and, most forcefully, at the unnamed masters of the American military-industrial complex who had reared and bred Powers and his fellow Powerses “in conditions of the so-called free world” to do their murderous bidding and ask questions later.

“It is precisely these Powerses,” he proclaimed, “who would have been ready to be the first to drop atom and hydrogen bombs on the peaceful earth, as similar Powerses did when they threw the first atom bombs on the peaceful citizens of the defenseless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

It was preposterous, of course, and it made Powers “sick at heart” to listen to. But it was not much more preposterous than William Tompkins’s
undisputed claim at Willie Fisher’s trial that Fisher’s offenses posed a threat to “the free world and civilization itself.” Nor was it outlandish to suggest that Powers would have dropped a nuclear bomb if ordered to. He had been trained to do just that at Sandia Air Force Base in New Mexico in 1953 as a successful participant in “Delivery Course DD50.” Nor were Powers’s “masters” entirely innocent of contemplating a preemptive nuclear war. It was General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command who became famous for totting up potential casualties in the tens of millions and judging them tolerable. In fact Rudenko’s attack on the American military-industrial complex was strikingly similar to the more famous one by Eisenhower himself, but that was still five months in the future.