The paper didn’t say. Just told him to report to wing command headquarters at 8:00 the next morning.
Powers did as told. At least he wasn’t alone; a few other young pilots showed up too, equally perplexed. A major called them into his office.
He told the men: You’ve been selected for your outstanding pilot ratings, your experience in single-pilot jets, and your top-secret clearances. Some men would like to meet you, talk to you about an opportunity. Interested? Go, one at a time, to the Radium Springs Inn. Knock on the door of cottage 1. Ask for Mr. William Collins.
Powers left the meeting with more questions than answers.
Intrigued, he drove to the motel that evening. He walked to the end of a row of tiny buildings, feeling like a character in one of those new James Bond spy novels everyone was reading. Only he wasn’t a spy, and he didn’t know how this story was supposed to go.
He knocked. The door opened. A man in a business suit stood there, waiting for the visitor to speak.
Powers said, “I was told to ask for a Mr. William Collins.”
“I’m Bill Collins. You must be…?”
“Lieutenant Powers.”
The man gestured for Powers to come inside. Two more civilians in suits stood in the main room. Everyone shook hands. They sat down.
Collins said, “I suppose you’re wondering what this is all about?”
SECRET WORLD
FRANCIS GARY POWERS—FRANK TO HIS friends—drove home to talk with his wife.
They’d met at the air base three years earlier. He was at a cafeteria counter late one night, sipping coffee and glancing over at a young woman sitting at a table with a book. He couldn’t know that she’d driven farm trucks since the age of twelve, that she’d skipped two grades and graduated high school at fifteen. But he sort of could. She had that kind of energy.
“Golly, I’d sure like to meet that girl over there,” Powers confided to the cashier.
The cashier smiled. “That shouldn’t be very difficult. That’s my oldest daughter.”
Powers felt his face burn a deep shade of red.
The cashier introduced her daughter, Barbara Moore. Frank and Barbara soon began dating, bonding over a shared love of adventure and action.
Now, at home, Powers told his wife about the mysterious meeting in cottage 1. Mr. Collins had informed Powers he’d been chosen for a “special mission.” He’d said the job would include a certain level of risk and would be “important for your country.” The only thing he’d been clear about was that the work would require a long overseas deployment. No family allowed.
Frank and Barbara had been married just nine months. Frank’s first thought was that the no-family rule was a deal-breaker, but Barbara encouraged him to grab the opportunity. She could live with her mother and keep her job as a secretary at the nearby Marine base. They could save up a lot of money. Besides, she could see that he really wanted to do it.
Powers called a phone number Mr. Collins had given him. He was told to return to the motel the next evening.
When they met again, Collins explained to Powers that he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, a government agency tasked with gathering and interpreting secret information from around the world and running covert operations against enemies of the United States. Should Powers accept this new assignment, he’d leave the Air Force and work directly for the CIA. He’d be trained to fly a new kind of airplane, a top-secret design. The pay would be high, about what a commercial airline pilot would earn.
If it sounded dangerous, that’s because it was. His mission would be to fly over the Soviet Union.
“How do you feel about it now?” Collins asked.
Flying had always been Frank Powers’s dream—yet he still felt restless, unsatisfied. He’d been too young to serve in World War II. He’d been hit with appendicitis just as he was about to ship out to the Korean War. Here was a chance to do his part in the Cold War.
“I’m in,” he told Collins.
“Take another night to think it over.”
“That’s not necessary,” Powers said. “I’ve decided.”
* * *
Frank Powers slipped into a secret world, a hidden layer beneath the surface of everyday life.
Like anyone new to tradecraft, he learned by trial and error. Here’s a tip: while checking into a hotel under a fake identity, be sure to memorize your false address ahead of time, so you’re not in the ridiculous position of standing at the registration desk with a pen in your hand, trying to remember where you live.
And when you’re meeting with an agent, if the agent turns a radio up loud while you talk, leave the dial alone. Soon after signing up, Powers and a small group of other pilots met with Mr. Collins in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. Music blared on the radio as Collins showed the pilots a photo of the new plane they’d been recruited to fly.
“What do you call it?” asked one of the fliers.
“No one calls it anything publicly yet,” Collins said. “But for your information, it’s been dubbed the Utility-2.”
It was the most boring name they could think of and would hopefully deflect unwanted attention.
Powers could barely hear over the music. He turned it off.
Collins stopped talking and glared.
Powers suddenly got it. The music was meant to cover their conversation, in case the room was bugged by Soviet spies. He flicked the radio back on, and the briefing continued.
The pilots were flown to a remote base in the Nevada desert. It wasn’t much—a control tower and a six-thousand-foot runway, mobile homes, and a mess hall. The base was so secret that it didn’t have an official name. On confidential government maps, it was labeled only as “Area 51.”
There, finally, Powers got a close-up look at the Utility-2—or, as they’d started calling it, the U-2.
The thing looked like a glider with a jet engine, its wings twice as long as its body, so long they drooped when the plane was at rest. To achieve minimum weight, the designers had built the plane’s sleek frame of aluminum just 0.02 inches thick. The tail was held on with three small bolts. It carried no weapons, no defense. The U-2’s superpower was altitude. It would fly so high, it simply could not be hit.
That was the theory, anyway.
* * *
Nothing about flying this plane was easy. Before every takeoff, pilots did two hours of “pre-breathing”—breathing in pure oxygen to eliminate nitrogen from the blood. At high altitude, if there was a sudden loss of air pressure in the cockpit, nitrogen in the pilot’s blood would expand into bubbles, causing the excruciating and often deadly condition known to scuba divers as the bends. As an extra layer of protection, pilots wore tight helmets and full-body pressure suits so stiff they left bruises.
There was no way to eat during flight. No way to drink or use the bathroom. There was never a moment to relax, because the maximum and minimum speeds at which the U-2 could stay aloft were nearly the same. Fly any faster, and the flimsy craft would literally break apart under the strain. Fly any slower, and the airflow over the wings would be insufficient to keep the plane in the sky. The plane would drop into a dive, gain speed—and break apart under the strain.
All that said, Powers loved the U-2, the thrill and the challenge of it. Alone at 70,000 feet, above the clouds and weather, he felt no sense of speed. The earth below curved away like the surface of a globe, and the sky above shaded to a spacy blue-black.
As the pilots trained at Area 51, people all over the American West started seeing oddly shaped ships soaring far higher than any plane they knew of. There was a sharp rise in reported UFO sightings.
Even Barbara Powers was kept guessing. Frank knew he was going to be sent to an American air base in Turkey but could not tell his wife where he was going or what he was doing. He handed her a CIA-prepared sheet of paper with a California address to which she could write. From there her letters would be forwarded to her husband. There was a phone number with a Virginia area code
that she could call—but only in the case of dire emergency.
Before leaving the country, Frank Powers visited his parents in the small town of Pound, in southwestern Virginia. He told them he was heading overseas to do weather research for the government.
His sister Jan didn’t buy it. “Why do you have to go all the way over there to study the weather? We have weather here.”
* * *
In the summer of 1956, American pilots began flying U-2s over the Soviet Union. Using cutting-edge cameras in the bellies of the planes, the pilots photographed Soviet factories, military bases, rocket launch sites. The film was rushed back to the United States and analyzed by expert photo interpreters in Washington. Magnified prints were sent to President Dwight Eisenhower at the White House.
Eisenhower was impressed. A career military man, commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II, he’d seen plenty of aerial reconnaissance photos. But never anything like these U-2 images. The views were so sharp you could identify Soviet planes on the ground, count the tanks and missiles.
The president worried, though. Imagine if the Soviets sent similar planes into American airspace. Eisenhower would consider that nothing less than an act of war.
On this point, he and Nikita Khrushchev were in complete agreement.
Soviet radar picked up the American planes the moment they neared the border. After the first U-2 flights over Soviet territory, Khrushchev had delivered a formal protest to the U.S. government.
The White House denied sending Air Force planes over the Soviet Union. This was technically true. The planes belonged to the CIA.
The overflights continued, with no further protest from Moscow.
Khrushchev’s son Sergei, who was training to be a rocket scientist, asked his father why he didn’t roar to the world about the offensive and illegal American flights.
Nikita told his son: “The weak complain against the strong.”
The Soviet premier had quotes and proverbs for every occasion:
“They do not see with their eyes but with their asses—all they can see is what’s behind them.”
“Any fool can start a war.”
“Fear has big eyes.”
Another favorite, one he very much hoped to apply by shooting down an American U-2:
“The way to teach a smart aleck a lesson is with a fist.”
WE WILL BURY YOU
“MOST OF THESE ARE STILL in progress, but this one is finished.”
Rudolf Abel gestured to his newest painting. A young painter from a studio down the hall, Burt Silverman, studied the canvas, an image of homeless men on the street in New York.
“It has some strong qualities,” Silverman said.
Except the drawing was quite poor, he pointed out. The composition was awkward. The color choices were dull.
“Well,” Abel said, “this is one of the first things I did.”
The spy took the criticism to heart. When he wasn’t busy trying to recruit new agents or receiving coded radio messages from Moscow, Abel worked on improving as a painter. Other artists gathered in his space, drinking coffee, talking art and love and current events. His new friends often criticized the American government, especially the country’s economic inequality and its shameful record of racism.
Abel just listened, as if he didn’t care much about politics. It was a smart move.
The decade of the 1950s was the time of the Red Scare. American leaders whipped up fear of communists, warning there were enemy agents lurking everywhere—in schools, government offices, movie studios—secretly paving the way to Soviet world domination. Anyone who showed any interest in communism, or even in its goal of a fair distribution of wealth, risked being branded as disloyal, an enemy to America.
In a way, it made no sense. There’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution that limits what sorts of political beliefs a citizen can have. Americans were so proud of their freedom—yet here they were, turning on each other for having different ideas. But in another way, it was perfectly understandable. Communism may have been inspired by noble goals, but Americans could see what real-world communist countries looked like. What if that kind of government grabbed control in America?
Rudolf Abel knew this was pretty unlikely. Sure, there were a few Soviet agents at work in the United States. But, sadly for Abel, not nearly as many as frightened Americans seemed to think. That’s how it is when you’re scared—you start to see your enemy everywhere.
As they say, fear has big eyes.
* * *
The level of fear rose higher when Americans saw how Nikita Khrushchev responded to a freedom movement in Hungary, one of the Eastern European countries controlled by the Soviet Union.
Hungarians marched in the streets in the fall of 1956, calling for free elections. Khrushchev sent Soviet troops and tanks into Budapest, the Hungarian capital, killing at least twenty-five hundred civilians. Khrushchev was no Stalin—he did not murder millions of his own citizens—but this action showed how ruthless he could be when faced with a threat to Soviet power.
In the face of protest from around the world, Khrushchev was defiant.
“Whether you like it or not, history is on our side,” he lectured Western diplomats in Moscow. “We will bury you.”
This would become Nikita Khrushchev’s most famous line. Almost his slogan.
“We will bury you.”
He claimed over and over that he did not mean it literally. He meant the communist system would, over time, prove itself superior to American-style capitalism and democracy.
* * *
Either way, Rudolf Abel would have liked to help with the burial.
But how was he supposed to get anything done with an assistant like Reino Hayhanen?
Hayhanen had been a brave and skillful agent during World War II but had gone soft in the years since. When Abel ordered him to open a photography shop in New Jersey as cover for planned operations, he never got around to it. When Abel provided Hayhanen with living expenses, Hayhanen blew it all on booze. When the two spies buried $5,000 in Bear Mountain State Park, north of the city, stashing it away for the wife of a Soviet spy who was doing time in Alcatraz, Hayhanen returned to the park, dug up the cash, and spent it.
Abel was out of patience. He informed his KGB bosses in Moscow. In early 1957, the Soviet intelligence agency ordered Hayhanen to return home for a vacation.
Hayhanen had been in the KGB long enough to know that such “vacations” usually included long stays in Siberian prison camps. He got as far as France before deciding to travel no farther east. After downing a few drinks, he stumbled into the American embassy in Paris.
“I’m an officer in the Soviet intelligence service,” he blurted. “For the past five years, I have been operating in the United States. Now I need your help!”
It was hard for the American officials to know whether they should take this guy seriously. He was rambling. He stank of alcohol. But then he pulled out a coin, a Finnish five-mark coin, popped it open with a pin, and dumped out a tiny piece of microfilm.
The Americans flew Hayhanen back to the States, where FBI agents locked him in a hotel room and grilled him for seven days straight.
* * *
When Hayhanen disappeared, Abel sensed trouble. He checked into a seedy Manhattan hotel under yet another false name. The FBI tracked him down, knocking on the door early on the morning of June 21, 1957.
The door opened an inch. The FBI men shoved their way in. The top Soviet spy in America returned to the bed and sat naked on the edge of the sagging mattress.
“Colonel,” began one of the agents, “we have received information concerning your involvement in espionage.”
Abel’s face flashed a hint of dread. The use of “colonel” was bad. That meant they’d gotten to Hayhanen. No one else in America could have told them his rank in the KGB.
Regaining his composure, Abel assured his visitors he knew nothing about spying.
The agents told him to p
ut on some underwear.
They’d barely begun to search when they spotted a shortwave radio, with a wire snaking into the bathroom and dangling out the window.
“Colonel, you have lots of trouble.”
“I can see that,” he said.
When the FBI raided Abel’s Brooklyn studio, the haul of evidence included stacks of American cash, spy gadgets Abel had crafted over the years, and Abel’s KGB codebook and one-time pads. Now, finally, the FBI was able to decipher the hollow nickel message that had baffled them for four years.
WE CONGRATULATE YOU ON A SAFE ARRIVAL.… THE PACKAGES WERE DELIVERED TO YOUR WIFE PERSONALLY. EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT WITH THE FAMILY. WE WISH YOU SUCCESS. GREETINGS FROM THE COMRADES.
* * *
After all that drama and mystery, it was just a routine welcome message.
BROOKLYN ARTIST ARRESTED AS RED SPY TOP RUSSIAN SPY CAUGHT U.S. UNMASKS MASTER SPY
The headlines varied from town to town, but the facts were the same—a top Soviet agent had been at work right here, under Americans’ noses, for nine years. That menacing message was soon followed by an even more frightening development.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are bringing to you the most important story of this century.”
With those words, on the evening of October 4, 1957, NBC radio announced the start of the Space Age. Soviet rocket scientists had just launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, a 184-pound aluminum sphere that was orbiting Earth every ninety-six minutes at 18,000 miles per hour.
Americans dashed onto streets and lawns and farm fields and gazed up. And those who looked in just the right spot at just the right time saw it, a tiny dot reflecting the sun’s light back to Earth as it sped across the night sky. Curiosity. Wonder. Shock. Fear. Here was another turning point in human history—and an undeniable triumph for the Soviet Union.
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