Someone must have informed on the escapers, because the police found the tunnel four days later. By then Harry Seidel was back to delivering newspapers, like nothing had ever happened.
* * *
When Francis Gary Powers walked back from the bathroom on the evening of February 7, 1962, he was surprised to see a KGB colonel at the door of his prison cell.
“How would you like to go to Moscow tomorrow?” asked the colonel.
“Why? What’s happening?”
The man walked away without offering an explanation.
Frank’s cellmate Zigurd thought it was good news. They were going to send him home! Powers was not so sure. But then a guard opened the door and dropped a suitcase on the floor. He told Powers to start packing.
Early the next morning, guards led Powers out of the prison. He looked back at the tiny window of his cell. Zigurd, in blatant violation of prison rules, was standing on a cabinet, looking down. The two had spent every day together for a year and a half. They had become close friends. They knew they would never see each other again.
The KGB colonel got into a car with Powers. A driver took them to the station, and they boarded a train. Powers tried asking questions about what was happening, but the colonel would say nothing. They reached Moscow by afternoon. A car was waiting, and Powers allowed himself to believe he was about to be driven to the American embassy and set free.
The car drove directly to the Lubyanka prison. Powers was marched to a familiar hallway and locked in a cell two doors down from where he’d been held while awaiting trial. The mattress was a little softer. Could that be interpreted as a good sign?
The next morning, he and the colonel drove to the airport. They got on a small plane with no other passengers. A fantasy flashed through Powers’s mind—he could knock out the colonel, punch out both pilots, grab the controls …
The plane took off and flew west. A good sign, definitely.
* * *
In an underground cell at the U.S. military base in West Berlin, James Donovan had one last meeting with his client, Rudolf Abel.
In a Brooklyn courtroom three and a half years before, Donovan had argued that Abel should not be executed for spying. One day, suggested Donovan, American authorities might wish to trade the Soviet spy for someone in Soviet custody.
That day had come. John Kennedy had personally approved the trade of Rudolf Abel for Francis Gary Powers. Bringing Powers back home would not exactly change the course of the Cold War, but it would be a feel-good story for Americans. One small victory, at least.
Donovan entered Abel’s cell, and they shook hands. Donovan asked whether Abel was worried about going home—the KGB would wonder if their spy had talked while in enemy custody.
“Of course not,” Abel said. “I’ve done nothing dishonorable.”
* * *
On the other side of Berlin, Frank Powers looked out the window of a moving car at a gray winter morning. He was cold, even in his overcoat and Russian fur cap. The car stopped, and a Soviet official in a well-cut suit got into the back seat.
They were going to drive to Glienicke Bridge, the man explained in perfect English. On the far side of the bridge was West Berlin. The Americans would bring their prisoner. Both groups would walk toward the middle of the bridge, where a white line marked the border between East and West. If all was in order, the exchange would be made.
“However,” the Soviet official cautioned, “if anything goes wrong on the bridge, you are to return with us. Do you understand that?”
Powers nodded. It was a lie. He’d make a run for it if he had to. They’d shoot him, he knew. One way or another, he wasn’t going back to prison.
They stopped at one end of the bridge. To Powers, the green steel span was a thing of beauty. Guardrails closed the road to traffic from both sides.
Soviet soldiers watched from the woods along the eastern shore.
American soldiers, dressed like fishermen in a clothing catalog, floated below in rowboats.
Flanked by Soviet officials, Powers carried his suitcase onto the bridge. Rudolf Abel, with a small American entourage, approached from the other side. Both groups stopped a few feet from the line.
A KGB man stepped over the line. He looked at Rudolf Abel. He told Abel to remove his glasses. He turned and nodded—yes, this was the right man.
At the same time, a CIA agent named Joe Murphy walked over the line to confirm the American’s identity.
Powers nearly blew it, calling out, “Oh, hey, Charley!”
“Nope,” Murphy said, “Try again.”
Powers recognized the agent from the air base in Turkey. But he couldn’t come up with the name.
Murphy gave him another chance. “What was the name of your high-school football coach?”
Powers’s mind froze.
Murphy asked the prisoner for the names of his wife, mother, and dog. He got those right.
“You’re Francis Gary Powers.”
Both sides were satisfied. Powers and Abel avoided eye contact as they crossed each other in the middle of the bridge.
* * *
News of the successful trade reached the White House a little before 3:00 a.m., local time. John Kennedy was still up, hosting guests at a late-night party and awaiting updates from Berlin.
Kennedy wanted to get the good news out as quickly as possible. His press secretary, Pierre Salinger, jumped on the phone and started waking up reporters. Come to the White House for a press conference, he told them.
The reporters were nervous—why call in the middle of the night?
Salinger had to assure them that, no, World War III had not begun.
THE DECISION
OLEG PENKOVSKY STEPPED OUT OF a Moscow apartment house and watched a brown car drive slowly past, heading the wrong way down a one-way street.
Just moments before, in the building lobby, he’d handed a package of film to Janet Chisholm. Was this car following him? Following her? Had it just made a wrong turn?
The car swung around in a U-turn. Penkovsky glanced as it passed. In the back seat were two men in dark overcoats.
Janet Chisholm continued her routine through February 1962, and into March. Penkovsky did not show up for a single meeting. In case she was being watched by the KGB, Chisholm switched up her pattern in small ways, still going to the same parks and stores, but on different days, hoping to make her Moscow life appear normal.
If she saw the spy at any point, she knew to be on her guard. When a source suddenly goes silent, you must consider the possibility that he has been caught and forced to talk. Or that he has flipped and that the next time you see him, he’ll be working for the other side.
* * *
Finally, at a cocktail party in late March, she spotted him.
About fifty people stood around in small groups in the apartment of a British diplomat, chatting and sipping drinks. Many Russian officials had been invited to drop by. Janet Chisholm, who was now pregnant with her fourth child, stood with her husband, Ruari, scanning the crowd—and there was Penkovsky, talking with a man from his office. She made brief eye contact with him. He went back to his conversation.
Ruari stepped into the next room, leaving Janet alone. Slowly, in no hurry, Penkovsky worked his way from group to group toward her. They greeted each other like casual friends. He was smiling, charming as ever. He noticed that she was pregnant.
“You must be feeling rather tired,” he said. “Why don’t you rest for a few minutes in the hostess’s bedroom?”
A clever ploy to steal a moment alone? Or a trick to set her up, catch her in the act? Her instinct was to trust him.
She found the bedroom and lay down. Through the door, she could hear Penkovsky talking loudly with the woman whose bed she was now using.
“What a lovely apartment,” he said. “Please show me around.”
The bedroom door opened. The woman led Penkovsky in. As if startled by the sight of a pregnant woman in the bed, he offered sincere regrets for the intr
usion. He turned to leave, his hands behind his back. One palm held a pack of cigarettes.
Chisholm reached out and took it. She stuffed it into her purse.
A few minutes later, apparently refreshed from her rest, she returned to the party.
The contents of the cigarette pack—several rolls of film and three letters—were sent to London. The photos on the film were of highly classified military documents. Penkovsky was still with them.
In the coded letters, he described the car he’d seen at his last meeting with Chisholm. From this point on, he suggested, they should meet only at public receptions, places they both had a reason to be. He added a personal note for Janet:
“Be careful.… They are watching you all of the time now.”
* * *
That same week, in Berlin, Harry Seidel walked into an ambush.
Seidel’s newest tunnel started in the basement of a café in West Berlin and led to the cellar of an apartment house in the East. He led a group of passengers through, then crawled back to the East. To keep the tunnel open for another day, he needed to go upstairs for a moment to make sure no one had left any evidence of the escape behind. A man named Horst, who lived in the building, spotted Seidel in the hallway. Horst recognized the famous cyclist—and escape artist. He told Seidel he wanted out. Be ready to go tomorrow, Seidel told him.
Horst informed the Stasi. They gathered upstairs.
The next night Seidel and a fellow digger, a young man named Heinz Jercha, crawled back to the apartment house to meet the next group of passengers.
“You always go upstairs first,” Jercha said. “Let me go once.”
Jercha flipped open the cellar’s trap door and climbed out.
The Stasi opened fire.
Seidel grabbed Jercha by the hand, helping him stumble down the stairs. He was bleeding from the chest. Seidel slammed the cellar door shut. Bullets pierced the wood as he and Jercha dove into the tunnel. Seidel pushed Jercha forward, urging him to keep moving. As they reached the western side, other diggers pulled Jercha out of the hole. He was barely conscious.
“Get him into the car quick,” Seidel ordered.
Jercha died on the way to the hospital.
This was a major story on both sides of the Berlin Wall. In the West, the diggers were heroes who’d risked everything to strike a blow for freedom. In the East, the official story was that Harry Seidel, a traitor and terrorist, had murdered Heinz Jercha.
Horst, the informant, was soon driving around East Berlin in his reward—a new car.
* * *
On May 31, at a crowded party at the British embassy in Moscow, Janet Chisholm met Oleg Penkovsky one last time. She slipped him a package of unexposed film. He gave her exposed film and a letter.
“I am sick and tired of all this,” the letter said. Penkovsky knew he was running out of time. “Send film and a small pistol that can be conveniently carried,” he wrote. “We will continue to work until the last opportunity.”
He was right to be worried.
The KGB had begun to suspect Penkovsky. Resorting to a favorite tactic, they arranged a special vacation for the family living in the apartment above Penkovsky. While the family was enjoying a few days by the Black Sea, agents let themselves in, drilled holes in the floor, inserted cameras, and began watching their suspect.
Janet Chisholm flew home to Britain to have her baby. Like Francis Gary Powers, she was out of the game for now.
But the action continued.
In West Berlin, Harry Seidel lay awake for several nights after his friend’s death. Then he started to plan a new tunnel.
In Hawaii, tourists gathered at night on the beach and looked to the southwest. Right on schedule, the sky above the horizon flashed white, then glowed green, pink, and red. The United States had resumed nuclear testing in the Pacific.
American kids began reading about new comic book heroes called the Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man. Both got their powers from nuclear blasts and radiation—no coincidence, given the state of the world.
At the Central Intelligence Agency, planners revived the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. One idea was to poison his scuba gear with tuberculosis. Another was to find a very large and brightly colored shell, stuff it with explosives, and place it in the water where Fidel liked to dive.
John Kennedy, an avid reader of thrillers, tore through a new novel called Seven Days in May, in which the U.S. military tries to seize control from an ineffective president. It was fiction, of course, but there was one real-sounding passage that made Kennedy wonder, a detail about the football—the briefcase with nuclear commands.
“The book says one of those men sits outside my bedroom door all night,” Kennedy said to General Chester Clifton, his top military aide. “Is that true?”
“No. He’s downstairs in the office area,” Clifton said. “He’ll be upstairs—we’ve timed it many times—he can make it even if he has to run up the stairs and not use the elevator—in a minute and a half. If he knocks at your door some night and comes in and opens the valise, pay attention.”
And in the Soviet Union, while walking along the Black Sea waterfront with his minister of defense, Nikita Khrushchev proposed an idea that would push the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Khrushchev loved to escape to his villa by the sea. Except for one infuriating thing—under President Eisenhower, the Americans had begun building a nuclear missile base across the water in Turkey. When people came to visit, he’d hand them binoculars, point to the horizon, and ask what they saw.
Water. They saw water.
“I see U.S. missiles,” he’d fume, “aimed at my dacha.”
On this spring day in 1962, Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky told the premier that the American missiles in Turkey were operational. They could deliver hydrogen bombs to Soviet territory in five minutes.
The feeling that the enemy was closing in was just one of many Cold War problems Khrushchev faced that spring. The Berlin Wall was becoming a real black eye. The United States continued to threaten Cuba; Fidel Castro was hearing rumors of new plots to bring him down. The Soviets were still behind the Americans in nuclear striking power. The Americans had bases all over Western Europe—and now there was a new one, right across the Black Sea in Turkey.
Something had to be done, Khrushchev decided. Something bold that could put the Soviet Union back on offense.
“Rodion,” he said. “What if we throw a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants?”
PART 3
EYEBALL TO EYEBALL
GRAVE ISSUES
SIXTY-SIX MILLION YEARS AGO, GIVE or take a few centuries, an asteroid about the size of Manhattan Island slammed into Earth near what we now call the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. This, scientists are pretty sure, is what wiped out the dinosaurs. The asteroid’s impact blasted debris high into the atmosphere, creating a blanket of soot that blocked sunlight and caused the planet to cool by a global average of fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. The fossil record shows that about three-quarters of Earth’s species, including all of the non-bird dinosaurs, went extinct.
In the second half of the twentieth century, scientists began to realize that human beings could do something similar to themselves.
Think of volcanic eruptions, they pointed out. Think of the blast of Mount Tambora, on an Indonesian island in 1815, the most powerful eruption in recorded human history. Tambora shot so much sunlight-blocking ash and gas into the atmosphere that snow fell in New York State in June the next year. Summer frosts damaged crops from North America to Asia, causing widespread famine, killing millions of people around the world.
A nuclear war could have the same effects—but worse.
The bombs would ignite massive fires, sending millions of tons of soot into the atmosphere. The planet would cool, likely for several years. Crops would fail. Humans, like the dinosaurs, would run out of food. The entire species could be wiped out. Scientists came up with a term for this terrifying scenario: nuclear
winter.
In 1962, most non-scientists knew nothing of the possibility of nuclear winter. But that didn’t really matter. The dinosaurs had never heard of asteroids, either.
* * *
Now in his second year as president, John Kennedy settled into a daily routine in the White House. After breakfast in bed with a stack of newspapers, he dressed in one of his hand-tailored suits and walked with his four-year-old daughter, Caroline, down the outdoor colonnade to the West Wing. Before lunch he’d swim laps in the White House pool, originally installed so Franklin D. Roosevelt could exercise muscles damaged by polio. Kennedy kept the water heated to ninety degrees to soothe his ailing back.
Of the books he read in the first half of 1962, one stood out: Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. Tuchman’s book describes how the world’s great powers, through a series of misunderstandings, stumbled into the First World War. Kennedy wanted everyone in his administration to read it, to ponder its chilling lessons. A student of history, he often quoted an exchange between German leaders from early in the war, as the horrific combat spiraled out of control.
“How did it all happen?” one of the men asked.
“Ah,” the other said, “if only one knew.”
There had to be a better answer than that.
Throughout human history, people had invented new weapons, taken sides, and fought. The weapons grew ever more deadly, but the pattern remained the same. Why? Was this inevitable? Could the pattern be broken? Just twenty-one years after World War I ended, World War II erupted, killing four times as many people. In World War III, there would be no slow mobilization, no moving troops around by ships or massing on muddy fields. It would all be over in a matter of hours.
John Kennedy’s greatest fear was that he and Nikita Khrushchev were making the same mistakes as past leaders, bumbling down the same ruinous road. Kennedy couldn’t shake the nightmare image of two people in rags, huddled in radioactive rubble, wondering how they got there.
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