Nikita Khrushchev and other top officials watched from atop the red granite mausoleum holding the bodies of the former Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. The sun was shining. The views of the grand buildings around the square, including the colorful onion-shaped domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral, were impressive. But what caught Khrushchev’s eye was the sight of Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, commander of Soviet air defense, pushing his way through the VIP seats on the mausoleum.
Everyone in the grandstand noticed. They watched Biryuzov work his way to Khrushchev’s seat, lean down, and whisper in his ear.
ZUGZWANG
ALL THE MAN WANTED TO do was play golf and save humanity from nuclear annihilation. Now it looked like he wouldn’t get to do either.
On the morning of May 1, at Camp David, President Dwight Eisenhower stood on a porch looking out at a cold, steady drizzle. There’d be no round of golf today. He took Mary Jean, his four-year-old granddaughter, to Camp David’s two-lane bowling alley. He ate lunch with his wife, Mamie. Between downpours, he did a little skeet shooting at the rifle range.
Then the phone call came. It was General Andrew Goodpaster, one of the president’s top military advisers, calling from Washington.
“One of our reconnaissance planes on a scheduled flight is overdue,” Goodpaster said, “and possibly lost.”
Climbing into a helicopter for the short flight back to Washington, Eisenhower braced himself for what could be a difficult few days. What if the Soviets had managed to shoot down the U-2? That would be bad. But the president had one valuable asset: deniability. Khrushchev could never prove to the world that the United States had sent a spy plane over Soviet territory. The Central Intelligence Agency had assured Eisenhower of this again and again. The U-2 was simply too fragile. If it were ever hit in the sky it would be blown to bits. And there would be absolutely no chance to question the pilot.
“It would be impossible, if things should go wrong, for the Soviets to come in possession of the equipment intact,” CIA Director Allen Dulles had promised the president. “Or, unfortunately, a live pilot.”
* * *
Back home that evening, Nikita Khrushchev lowered himself into his favorite chair, a wooden rocker in the living room. Books, mostly about Lenin and Stalin and communist political philosophy, lined the walls of the cozy room. There was a large photo of Grand Kremlin Palace. It was a nice place to sit after work. A nice place to think.
Nina padded up in her slippers, bringing rolls and glasses of tea with lemon. She sat with her husband. It had been a good day. Soviet pride had been avenged.
The Cold War was like a chess match played on a global board. Chess was practically the Russian national sport, and Khrushchev relished the chess-like aspects of his job, the cunning calculation of moves and countermoves. The United States was richer. They had more bombs. So he would have to be the smarter player.
Nikita sipped his tea and considered his next move.
* * *
At the White House the next morning, General Goodpaster walked into the Oval Office. Bad news. President Eisenhower could see it on his aide’s face.
“Mr. President, I have received word from the CIA that the U-2 reconnaissance plane I mentioned yesterday is still missing,” Goodpaster said. “With the amount of fuel he had on board, there is not a chance of his being aloft.”
Goodpaster showed Eisenhower the cover story the CIA had prepared in partnership with NASA, the U.S. space agency. Eisenhower read it over. He nodded his agreement. The story was a lie, of course, but it should do the job. The important thing, with the big Paris summit coming up, was to prevent a crisis with the Soviet Union.
* * *
The Soviet chess champion David Bronstein once said, “The most powerful weapon in chess is to have the next move.”
It’s true—except when it isn’t.
The game is so complex, with more possible combinations of moves than there are atoms in the known universe, there’s an exception to every rule. Sometimes, in rare cases, it’s a disadvantage to have the next move. There’s even a term for it, a German word, zugzwang, meaning “compulsion to move.” A player in zugzwang has no good moves. You have to move—but any move will weaken your position.
Eisenhower was about to be in zugzwang, and he didn’t even know it.
Khrushchev saw this. All he had to do was make what chess players call a waiting move, an insignificant move that changes nothing important on the board and gives your opponent the next turn.
May 3 was a rainy day in Moscow. Khrushchev stopped by a trade fair in a city park. He chatted with reporters and admired displays of goods manufactured in communist countries. No mention of Cold War tensions or the upcoming summit in Paris. Not a word about spy planes or missing pilots. A waiting move.
There was a shooting gallery at the fair, and Khrushchev took the opportunity to show off his marksmanship. As a crowd gathered to watch, he lifted his rifle and fired a bull’s-eye, setting off a loud clanging of bells.
* * *
That same day, at 2:15 p.m., sirens wailed on the streets of New York City.
The signal for an incoming Soviet attack.
Cabs and buses pulled to the side of the street. People raced into buildings or down the steps of the nearest subway station. Children in schools ducked under desks and covered their heads. A zookeeper at the Bronx Zoo shoved an elephant, trying to move the animal inside. At Yankee Stadium, where the Yankees were hosting the Detroit Tigers, the players ran off the field.
This was Operation Alert, an annual drill held by the government since 1954. The goal was to prepare Americans for the outbreak of World War III. Planners wrote out realistic scenarios for the alerts—in this case, one twenty-megaton bomb detonated above LaGuardia Airport. Another hit the Naval Yard in Brooklyn, and a third was aimed at the Queensboro Bridge.
That level of firepower—the destructive energy of three thousand Hiroshima bombs exploding all at once—would flatten every building in the city. Of New York City’s eight million residents, the government estimated, four million would be killed instantly. Most of the rest would die of injuries and radiation poisoning.
This time it was only a drill. At 2:30 p.m., right on schedule, the city came back to life.
* * *
President Eisenhower’s phony cover story hit newspapers the next morning, May 4.
“AF Searching for Lost Plane,” read one typical headline.
“U.S. Air Force planes circled over the mountainous wilds of southeastern Turkey today searching for an experimental jet plane that vanished with its pilot three days ago,” the article began. “The plane belonged to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Name of the pilot was withheld.”
Eisenhower had made his move. Now it was Khrushchev’s turn.
ALIVE AND KICKING
THE NEXT MORNING, IN MOSCOW, U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson walked into the grand auditorium of Kremlin Palace. The place was packed with thirteen hundred Soviet officials, gathered to hear an address from their leader. Thompson figured he’d sit with the other diplomats, as always, but was ushered instead to the front row.
Why? He’d have to wait and see.
The Soviet premier strode onto the stage. He spoke of economic plans and labor policy, then moved on to international affairs.
“Comrade Deputies,” he said, his voice rising in volume. “I must report to you on aggressive actions against the Soviet Union in the past few weeks by the United States of America. The United States has been sending aircraft that have been crossing our state frontiers.”
He described the most recent overflight and his orders to destroy the invader.
“This assignment was fulfilled. The plane was shot down.”
“Correct! Correct!” someone shouted.
“Shame to the aggressor!”
“Outright banditry!”
“Just imagine,” Khrushchev continued, savoring the moment, “what would have happened had a Sov
iet aircraft appeared over New York, Chicago or Detroit! How would the United States have reacted?”
He glared directly at the American ambassador in the front row. “What was that? A May Day greeting?”
Soviet officials roared and stamped their feet.
* * *
Someone was pounding on the door of the trailer. Eck von Heinerberg, the giant German shepherd, was snarling and barking, eager to attack.
Barbara Powers opened the trailer door. Two stern-faced men identified themselves as agents of the Central Intelligence Agency. They told her to pack a few things. Her other belongings would be shipped home. She was leaving Turkey. Right now.
“Where’s my husband?” she demanded, fighting back panic.
“Everything is going to be all right, Mrs. Powers,” said one of the men. “Now please, just do as we say.”
“What about my dog? I can’t just leave him here.”
“You can bring him right along with us on the plane, Mrs. Powers.”
Thirty minutes later she was in the air, flying back to the United States. She kept asking for information about Frank. And whatever was going on, what did it have to do with the CIA?
The men would tell her nothing. They just kept pouring her drinks.
* * *
Eisenhower stood on the White House lawn smiling for the cameras, but without joy, like a kid forced to pose for a family photo. He climbed aboard a helicopter and headed west out of the city, toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.
This was the government’s version of Operation Alert, a day for top officials to rehearse evacuating Washington. In his eighth year as president, Ike had long since lost any enthusiasm for these drills.
“I am not sure whether I would really want to be living,” he said privately, “if this country of ours should ever be subjected to a nuclear bath.”
With the rise of the Super, the U.S. government had begun spending billions of dollars trying to figure out how the country could emerge from the ashes of World War III. The best solution, leaders decided: move underground. At Mount Weather in Virginia, the government expanded an abandoned mine, constructing a small city inside the mountain: reservoir, power plants, sewage plants, cafeterias, a hospital, a crematorium. There was enough food and space for three thousand people to live for a month. Only the president, cabinet members, and the justices of the Supreme Court got private rooms.
No one could bring their families.
In the bunker war room, red bulbs dotted an enormous map of the United States—one bulb would glow to mark each nuclear blast. In a TV studio with a large photo of the Capitol building as a backdrop, the president could broadcast messages to whatever was left of the American population.
Officially, Mount Weather did not exist. Though local residents did notice that the road up the hill was always plowed quickly after snowstorms.
It took the helicopter just twenty minutes to reach the bunker. Eisenhower walked through the five-foot-thick steel blast gate, past the decontamination chamber, and met in the war room with cabinet officials who were also participating in the drill. They’d heard nothing from Moscow about the missing U-2. It looked like the cover story was holding.
Until CIA Director Allen Dulles was handed a note just in from Moscow. Khrushchev had given a speech. He’d said something about shooting down an American plane. Nothing about a pilot. More details to follow.
Eisenhower decided to stick with his “weather research gone wrong” story. Without the pilot, the Soviets couldn’t prove otherwise.
* * *
At a press conference that afternoon, U.S. State Department spokesman Lincoln White repeated the fiction. “It is entirely possible,” he told the press, “that having a failure in the oxygen equipment, which could result in the pilot losing consciousness, the plane continued on automatic pilot a considerable distance and accidentally violated Soviet airspace.”
No one had told White the cover story was a lie.
* * *
“Comrades, I must let you in on a secret.”
Nikita Khrushchev was back on stage at the Kremlin, again playing to a crowded house, loving every minute of the building tension.
“When I made my report two days ago, I deliberately refrained from mentioning that we have the remnants of the plane.”
Dramatic pause …
“And,” he continued with obvious delight, “we also have the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking!”
The hall erupted in thunderous applause.
“Now, when they learn that the pilot is alive, they will have to think up something else,” Khrushchev said. “And they will!”
Khrushchev insisted that he still wanted peace—but how could one deal with a government that told such stupid lies? The plane was studying weather! The oxygen equipment failed! The poor pilot got dizzy!
“Such a pirate, prone to dizziness, may in fact drop a hydrogen bomb on foreign soil. And this means that the peoples of the land where this pirate was born will unavoidably and immediately get a more destructive hydrogen bomb in return!”
Thirteen hundred Soviet officials jumped to their feet and pounded the backs of benches with their fists.
CENTER STAGE
“UNBELIEVABLE,” EISENHOWER GROANED ON HEARING of Khrushchev’s latest performance.
The Soviet premier had worked him like a puppet, leaving him with two awful options. He could deny knowledge of the U-2 flights—but that would make it look like he didn’t know what his own government was doing. He could take responsibility—but no American president had ever admitted to spying on other nations.
Until now. Ike directed the White House to release a statement acknowledging that an American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had been shot down on a reconnaissance flight over Russia and that President Eisenhower had personally approved the flight.
It was humiliating to have fallen so deeply into Khrushchev’s trap. But Eisenhower was willing to take the heat, as long as there was still a chance for his meeting with the Soviet leader to succeed.
* * *
“Why should I bother answering your questions?” Frank Powers asked his interrogators. “As soon as you have everything you want, you’re going to take me out and shoot me.”
A group of military officers and men in business suits sat with the American prisoner at a long table in the KGB’s Lubyanka prison. An interpreter translated. A stenographer took notes.
“There may be a way,” a Soviet officer suggested.
Powers said he couldn’t see it.
“There may be a way.”
“Then tell me what it is.”
“Think about it,” the officer said. “You go back to your cell and think about it.”
It didn’t take much thinking. They wanted Powers to flip. Switch sides and return to America as a Russian asset, a double agent. That wasn’t going to happen. But the alternatives were not particularly attractive.
Powers had tossed aside the hollow silver dollar while drifting down to Soviet soil—he was going to survive this ordeal, if possible. He’d been immediately captured, flown to Moscow, and locked in prison. Between interrogation sessions, he lay in a tiny cell. A bright bulb above the door never went out. When he put his eye to a peephole in the cell door, the eye of a guard stared back at him.
Over and over, the examiners made Powers repeat his story. He told some of the truth about his mission, as much as he figured they already knew. They demanded technical information about the U-2. He denied having any, portraying himself as a glorified bus driver. They didn’t buy it. And around and around they went.
At the start of each day, Powers was ordered to initial a transcript of the previous day’s interrogation.
“But they’re in Russian,” he said. “I can’t read Russian.”
“That doesn’t matter. It is required.”
* * *
Nikita Khrushchev spent the morning of May 16 strolling the streets of Paris. He joked around with people on their way to work. When
a young student walked by, he asked if she’d passed her latest school exams.
“I did,” she said.
Khrushchev patted her on the head. “Good girl!”
That afternoon the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union walked into a large room in Élysée Palace. Light poured in from the garden, but the air inside was cold with tension.
“We are gathered here for the Summit Conference,” began French President Charles de Gaulle. “Does anyone wish to say anything?”
Khrushchev stood. Had he come to Paris to speak of serious issues, or to score more points against the Americans? That was not clear—until he opened his mouth.
“President de Gaulle,” he began. “Prime Minister Macmillan. President Eisenhower. Permit me to address you with the following statement: A provocative act is known to have been committed recently with regard to the Soviet Union by the American Air Force.”
This was nothing less than an invasion, Khrushchev charged, an act of war. The American president had confessed to the crime—but offered no apology, no promise to punish those behind the U-2 program. Under such conditions, it was impossible to hold useful talks. The Paris summit, in spite of the world’s hopes for peace, must fail.
“Let the disgrace and responsibility for this,” he said, “rest with those who have proclaimed a bandit policy toward the Soviet Union.”
Also, Eisenhower was no longer invited to Russia.
* * *
Fallout Page 6