Bridge of Spies (36 page)

In the case of pilot Powers, Rudenko asked for fifteen years’ imprisonment, but not death. Powers felt suddenly that he could breathe again. “I wasn’t going to be shot!”

His father, in a dark suit and bow tie, stood up at the back of the hall and shouted, “Give me fifteen years here, I’d rather get death!”

Barbara Powers wished afterward that she had told him to sit down and shut up but was “almost doubled up in our box, crying convulsively.” She was also heavily sedated.

After a recess, Grinev wound up for the “defense.” To that point he had not challenged a single assertion by the prosecution or any of its expert witnesses (among them the KGB vet who had administered Powers’s poison pin to a dog and then, it turned out, to a mouse, which also died). Grinev was not about to change his tactics now. He merely requested sympathy for his client, noting his working-class origins, his upbringing in the shadow of “mass unemployment,” his seduction by the dollar, and his penitent cooperation as a prisoner. He asked for seven years.

Powers had the last word. Grinev had told him again and again that his life depended on the sincerity of his expressions of regret, and in the end he stuck to a script the two of them had agreed, even though he knew he no longer faced execution. He started by saying he knew he had committed a grave crime and must be punished for it. He finished by asking to be judged “as a human being who is not a personal enemy of the Russian people … and who is deeply repentant and profoundly sorry for what he has done.”

Carl McAfee spoke for everyone who had made the journey from Pound when he said later: “I think Gary should have said whatever it took to save his hide.”

Ed Stevens of
Life
magazine spoke for most Americans when he leaned over and muttered in McAfee’s ear: “That remark is going to cost him.”

The court took another recess. It reconvened at 5:30 p.m., past midnight for viewers of continuing live coverage in the Soviet Far East but well within deadline for reporters from New York and London. Lieutenant General Viktor Borisoglebsky, the presiding judge, delivered a final tirade against reactionary Americans leading the world to war, then, as a gesture of socialist humaneness, sentenced Powers to ten years’ confinement. On cue, most of the two thousand people in the hall stood and applauded.

Powers managed not to flinch. He and Barbara could not see each other for photographers. She tried to take in what the sentence meant—only the first three years were to be served in prison, and only the locals understood that this meant the next seven would be in a labor camp. Gary was led offstage. Moments later, the family were taken to join him in one of the judges’ anterooms, where Gary finally broke down and sobbed in his parents’ arms.

A posse of Russian photographers was on hand to record the reunion, ensuring that the tables of hors d’oeuvres provided by the Military Collegium remained in focus in the background. (“That was my first taste of caviar,” says Jessica Powers-Hileman. “I never did like it.”) The pictures were distributed by Tass that night, as were the musings of an obliging Danish Supreme Court justice, Christian Wilhelm Hargens. He called Grinev “outstanding” and the conduct of the trial as a whole “unimpeachable.” Above all, he said, “I am impelled to compare it with the Rosenberg case,” in which two people were sentenced to death on the strength of an indictment “the strength of which does not bear any comparison with the lawful character of the charge against Powers.”

In London, the
Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
were predictably scornful of the Soviet parody of due process, but the
News Chronicle
called it “a coherent and cogent indictment of US aggression.” In New York, reporters went onto the streets and asked people what they thought of the verdict. One woman said that considering what he’d been paid, Powers
had been lucky to receive such a light sentence. “You don’t get that kind of money for parting your hair.” On balance—and especially considering the timely return of canines Belka and Strelka from outer space to Kazakhstan—it was a banner day for Soviet propaganda.

*  *  *

Returning to his cell after an hour with his family, Powers realized he had brainwashed himself into expecting the death penalty. He also realized that having been spared it, the prospect of ten years in a Russian jail was, if anything, worse. But he had not reckoned with the depth of socialist humanitarianism, nor with the tenacity of his father and his father’s lawyer.

His captors showed their true empathy a week after the trial. Barbara had stayed on in Moscow for a few days to shop in the GUM department store on the east side of Red Square and to petition Khrushchev for leniency on the west. She was not allowed to see the general secretary, but she was allowed to see her husband one last time, “without guards.”

The conjugal visit has a long-established place in Russian penal policy, but it can seldom have been granted to two more surprised or grateful spouses than the Powerses. Gary was conspicuously coy in his description: “We were left alone three hours.”

Barbara threw modesty to the wind. Left alone with him in a new cell with a couch, sheets, blankets, and an easy chair, she first kissed him and held him close, she wrote, tracing with a pin on the palms of his hands some messages from the CIA that Messrs. Parker and Rogers had asked her to pass on without being eavesdropped. She did not say what they were or whether Gary understood them, but they made for exquisite foreplay:

Sated for the time being, she left for New York via Paris the next day.

Carl McAfee, the young lawyer from Virginia, had less fun but more luck in pressing Powers’s case for leniency. Ed Stevens had advised him that the man to approach was not Khrushchev but the president of the Presidium, Leonid Ilych Brezhnev. A meeting was arranged, and the boy lawyer swept through the Kremlin’s northwest gate to attend it in the by-now-familiar Zil. Brezhnev received him in “the rinky dinkest office that I have ever seen,” McAfee remembers.

The beetle-browed president, who would later ruin the Soviet Union in the arms race that Khrushchev was so anxious to avoid, listened graciously as the young Virginian pleaded through an interpreter for a shorter sentence for his client’s son. Looking back, McAfee does not recall Brezhnev offering much hope—“and if he did it was in Russian and I don’t know what the hell he said.” But the visit was probably not pointless and was certainly unique in the annals of freelance diplomacy.

The same was true of Oliver Powers’s efforts to arrange an exchange. He had not told his son about his letter to “Abel” in Atlanta, because the reply had been discouraging. What he did not know was that on the day Fisher sent it he also wrote a letter to his lawyer that was “electric with excitement.”

When the Berlin wall went up, it cut the world capital of spying in half, but it still caught the West napping.

On March 16, 1961, an American reporter named George Bailey predicted in a Washington political magazine that Khrushchev would soon “ring down the Iron Curtain in front of East Berlin—with searchlights and machine gun towers, barbed wire and police dog patrols.” Why? Because for sixteen years the young, the energetic, and the qualified had been voting with their feet and their suitcases, moving west in such large numbers that in the country they left behind “the mass of the population is either retired or approaching retirement.” East Germany was scarcely viable, let alone the socialist economic powerhouse that Khrushchev had been assured would overtake the West German economic miracle. Nothing tried so far had slowed the outflow. Something new and drastic had to be done. President Kennedy read Bailey’s article but did not act on it.

On June 4 Kennedy received a new Berlin ultimatum from Khrushchev at their first meeting in Vienna. The Soviet Union would sign a peace treaty with East Germany in six months that would cut off NATO’s special access routes to West Berlin.

On June 15 President Walter Ulbricht of East Germany issued an unsolicited denial to the press that he would “mobilize the construction workers of the capital … for the purpose of building a wall.” Many of his top advisers knew then that this was precisely what he planned to do, but no Western reporter took the hint.

On June 21 the commander of Soviet forces in East Berlin approved a plan to establish physical control of the borders of “Greater Berlin.” Stockpiling of barbed wire began in Soviet army warehouses close to the city.

On June 25 Kennedy issued his response to the new ultimatum. He told the world from the Oval Office that West Berlin had become “the great testing place of Western courage and will,” where American commitments and Soviet ambition “now meet in basic confrontation.” But was it militarily tenable? “Any dangerous spot is tenable if men—brave men—will make it so.”

On June 26 Khrushchev cabled his ambassador in East Berlin to tell Ulbricht it was time to lay “an iron ring” around the city. “If this drags us into war,” he said, “there will be war.”

On August 1 Khrushchev met Ulbricht in Moscow and gave him two weeks to make the iron ring a reality.

On August 3 the leaders of every Warsaw Pact country were summoned to join Ulbricht in Moscow and told of the plan.

On August 11, Erich Mielke, the East German minister for state security, briefed senior Stasi officials on the details of “Operation Rose,” the delicate euphemism chosen for the building of the wall.

On August 12, shortly before midnight, Ulbricht let his own cabinet in on the secret at a meeting at his country house in Wandlitz. Until then, fewer than two dozen people in East Germany had known what was about to happen.

On August 13, a Sunday, Soviet tanks mobilized at one minute past midnight thundered toward the city as East German soldiers began digging trenches and unrolling barbed wire along the ninety-six-mile border of West Berlin. Fred Pryor was on holiday in Denmark. He would hear about the closure on his car radio on his way home later that day. He was as surprised as President Kennedy, who was called to the shore of Cape Cod and handed a one-paragraph telex as he stepped off the family motor launch at Hyannis Port seventeen hours after Operation Rose began. Much earlier, George Bailey, in Berlin for
ABC News
, had
seen his forecast come true in the person of an East German police captain with a jackhammer, tearing up the pavement in Potsdamer Platz at four in the morning. At about the same time, an East Berlin lawyer, not widely known but with a persuasive charm and a long list of friends and associates in the West, approached the Brandenburg Gate in his car. His wife was in the passenger seat. They were on their way home after a late dinner with friends in West Berlin. West German police advised them to turn back; ahead of the Vogels the border was now a tangle of coiled wire, and behind that, East German
Volkspolizei
armed with machine guns were silhouetted by searchlights. The lawyer thought for a long moment, then drove on through a gap in the wire into a city being turned, as it slept, into a prison. His name was Wolfgang Vogel.

“I belong here,” Vogel told one of many Western interviewers who later beat a path to his door on the eastern side of the wall. Hundreds of victims of the Stasi would be grateful for the choice he made that night, but the first of them was Frederic Pryor.

The wall did not appear at once. On day one and day two of the new era of hermetic ideological segregation, there was no hint of concrete; only wire and police and, a block or two back from the border, the Soviet tanks. Ulbricht and Khrushchev were waiting to gauge Kennedy’s reaction, which was one of anger—but his anger was directed more at the CIA and State Department for failing to warn him than at the Communists. The operation was a shock, and it was devastating for the families it split in half, but in truth it was easier for Washington to cope with than a unilateral peace treaty between the Soviet Union and East Germany. Kennedy told Vice President Lyndon Johnson and General Lucius Clay to be ready to fly in to sustain morale. He denied a request from U.S. commanders in Berlin for permission to bulldoze the wire.