The Crossing

by Ted Allbeury

  Tomkins looked down at his papers for a moment as he collected his thoughts for his final comment. He looked at the jury for several seconds before he spoke.

  “I simply say this: this is a serious case. This is a serious offence. This is an offence directed at our very existence and through us at the free world and civilisation itself, particularly in the light of the times.” He paused. “And I say this, and I don’t believe I have ever said anything with more sincerity or more seriously: I am convinced that the government has proven its case, not only beyond a reasonable doubt as required, but beyond all possible doubt.”

  Tomkins sat down with his face still turned to the jury.

  On the Friday morning Judge Byers went over again the difference between conspiracy to commit a substantive crime and the crime itself.

  At mid-day the jury and the US marshals in charge of them left for the jury room.

  It was almost five o’clock when the jury filed back to their seats in the courtroom. The clerk of the court rose, and the foreman of the jury looked back at him.

  “Members of the jury, have you agreed upon a verdict?”

  “We have.”

  “In the case of the United States of America against Rudolph Abel, how do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty on count one?”

  “Guilty.”

  “How do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty on count two?”

  “Guilty.”

  “How do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty on count three?”

  “Guilty.”

  Rudolph Abel was taken to West Street jail to wait for sentencing.

  Inevitably Donovan and his team put in a carefully considered submission to the Court of Appeals contending that there were aspects of law that had been ignored at the trial. On July 11, 1958 Judge Watkinson, in a written opinion, rejected the appeal. But not without praising Donovan and his team for “having represented the appellant with rare ability and in the highest tradition of their profession.”

  There was one last weapon in the defence’s armoury and Donovan filed a petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court. It listed six points of law which Donovan suggested had been ignored or avoided in the trial. He asked that the Supreme Court should grant a hearing for those points to be argued. In October the Supreme Court announced that it would grant a hearing on two points. Both points covered the old original problem of the search and seizure of evidence when Abel was arrested.

  In prison in Atlanta, Georgia, Abel was a model prisoner. At that time Joseph Valachi, Vito Genovese and other figures from the Mafia were also serving sentences of various lengths in the same prison. The prison Warden had no problems with Abel, who behaved like the senior officer that he was, and the Warden assumed that Abel had been trained in methods of survival in case he was captured. Both mental and physical survival.

  Meanwhile, in New York, both sides filed arguments and counter-arguments. Towards the end of February Donovan presented his case and a month later the Supreme Court handed down its decision. Everybody on the defence and Abel himself were surprised by the decision. It seemed to bode well for the prisoner in Atlanta. The court ordered a re-argument and asked each side to appear on October 12.

  More briefs were fired back and forth by both the government and the defence. What the Supreme Court wanted to hear were both sides’ arguments on those aspects of Constitutional protection that affected not only the present case but the future interpretation of the current law.

  The law gave every citizen “the right to be secure from searches for evidence to be used in criminal proceedings.” Nine eminent judges of the Supreme Court listened to the arguments from both sides.

  It was not until March 28, 1960, the following year, that the Supreme Court gave its ruling. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Rudolph Ivanovich Abel. But what surprised all concerned was that five judges had upheld the conviction but four had given dissenting opinions. And one of the four dissenters was Chief Justice Warren himself.

  After two and a half years in prison in Atlanta Abel himself had changed. People who had known him for a long time said that he had become frail and sick, consumed by tension as if he had been waiting for something that he no longer expected to happen.

  21

  The plane stood on the tarmac of the parking bay at the airfield in Peshawar, Pakistan, half concealed in its enormous hangar. With its long body, high tail and unusually wide wings its elegance was not obvious because it was painted black. On the drawing board at Lockheed it looked like a smooth, sleek flying fish, but on the ground, in its strange livery, it looked more like a killer shark. It carried no guns, but a mass of infra-red cameras and electronics.

  It could photograph a section of the earth’s surface 125 miles wide and 3,000 miles long. And photo-interpreters looking at the huge enlargements of the 40,000 paired frames could read the headlines of a newspaper taken from ten miles above the earth. It was believed to be beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated attack planes available to the Soviet Union. It was one of three identical planes used in Operation Overflight, an operation that had already been working successfully and fruitfully for almost four years.

  The only unusual feature of the flight that day—May 1, 1960—was that it was the first flight which would cross the whole of the Soviet Union. Taking off from Peshawar and landing almost 4,000 miles away at Bod in Norway, it would pass over important targets that had never been photographed before.

  Rumour had it that the flight was to ensure that when President Eisenhower met President Khrushchev shortly he would be fully up-to-date on Soviet military dispositions.

  Inevitably, USAF intelligence officers had considered what routines should apply if a pilot was shot down or force landed in Soviet territory. The plane itself was protected by a timed destruction system. The pilots were offered a cyanide tablet and a silver dollar with a small metal loop so that it could be fastened to a key chain or a chain around the wrist or neck. If the loop was unscrewed it revealed a thin needle whose minute grooves were laced with curare, an instant killer. Taking and using either or both was entirely the pilot’s option. They were merely available. Most pilots carried neither but on that particular morning the young, crew-cut pilot when asked if he wanted the silver dollar had taken it, seeing it as a useful weapon rather than a means of committing suicide.

  That morning the pilot stood at the table in the hangar with the intelligence officer as he was handed the various standard items for a flight. Shaving kit, civilian clothes, a packet of filter cigarettes, pictures of his wife, some German marks, Turkish lira, Russian roubles, gold coins, watches and rings for barter, a hundred US dollars, US postage stamps, a Defense Department ID card, a NASA certificate, instrument rating cards, US and International driving licences, a Selective Service card, a social security card, and an American flag poster that said in fourteen different languages “I am an American.”

  For the last time they traced his route on the maps. From Peshawar he would cross Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush and enter Soviet airspace near Stalinabad. Then over the Aral Sea, the Turyatam missile testing base, Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Kirov, Archangel, Kandalaksha and Murmansk on the Kola peninsula, then across the Barents Sea to the north coast of Norway and Bod. The flight would take nine hours, and for three-quarters of the time would be inside the USSR. During the nine-hour flight there would be complete radio silence.

  The only qualms the twenty-seven-year-old pilot had were about the plane itself. The plane which had previously been reserved for the flight had been grounded at the last moment for a maintenance check, and its substitute, Number 360, was what the pilots referred to as a “dog.” There was always something going wrong with it, most recently its fuel tanks had malfunctioned and wouldn’t feed fuel to the engine. It was a single-engined turbojet.

  May 1, 1960 was a Sunday and the pilot got into the plane at 5.30 a.m. for the pre-flight check. The scheduled take-off time was 6 a.m. but it came and wen
t without the signal to go.

  The cockpit was like a furnace and the pilot sat with his long underwear drenched in perspiration as he waited. A senior officer came over to apologise for the delay and to explain that they were awaiting final approval for the flight from the White House. Presidential approval normally came through well before the pilot was locked in his seat.

  It was twenty minutes later when the plane took off and when it was at flight altitude the pilot completed his flight log entries: aircraft number 360, sortie number 4154 and the time was 6.26 a.m. local time, 1.26 Greenwich Mean Time, 8.26 p.m. in Washington and 3.26 a.m. in Moscow.

  As he crossed into Soviet territory he saw several con trails of aircraft way below him but he knew they wouldn’t even be able to get near him. He guessed that Soviet radar might have picked him up on their screens and were sending up scouts. A waste of time at his altitude.

  Some thirty miles east he could see the launching pads of the Turyatam Cosmodrome where they launched the Soviet Sputniks and ICBMs. He flipped the camera switches to “on” and only switched them off when the cloud cover thickened again. Fifty miles south of Chelyabinsk the skies cleared and he got a wonderful view of the snow-capped Urals.

  It was then that the trouble started; the auto-pilot seemed to have gone berserk and the plane was pitching and yawing nose-up. He switched off the auto-pilot and drove the plane manually for twenty minutes before he switched to auto-pilot again. And again the plane was pitching nose-up. He tried it again at intervals and always with the same result. He decided to stay on manual and make long zigs and zags. He was making notes in his log of the engine and instrument behaviour when he felt a dull thud. The plane bucked forward and a blinding flash of orange light flooded the cockpit.

  He reached for the destruction switches and then decided to get into position to use the ejection seat first, but the metal canopy rail was trapping his legs. Ejecting in those conditions would slice off both his legs about three inches above the knee. The plane was already down to 30,000 feet when he released his seat-belt. The force of gravity snatched him half out of his seat, only his oxygen hoses were holding him back. He had forgotten to release them. He kicked and wrestled in panic until he was sucked out of the cockpit and found himself floating free. At the moment when he realised that he had not pulled the ripcord his body jerked as, at 15,000 feet, his parachute opened automatically. At that moment he saw his plane hurtling past him, intact, towards the earth.

  The following Thursday Nikita Khrushchev showed all the peasant cunning that had been rather admired in the West. He addressed the Supreme Soviet for over three hours during which he announced that Soviet gunners had shot down a US plane violating Soviet airspace. He went on to denounce the United States in aggressive abuse, accusing them of deliberately trying to wreck the forthcoming summit conference between the four heads of government.

  The following day, to the delight of the Kremlin, Lincoln White, the State Department’s spokesman, announced to crowds of journalists in Washington, that “There was absolutely no—N—O—no deliberate intention to violate Soviet airspace, and there never had been.” President Eisenhower confirmed the statement later the same day.

  The next day Khrushchev told the Supreme Soviet what some of them already knew—a Soviet rocket had brought down the plane from an altitude of 65,000 feet. And then the final blow for the White House, the US pilot had been taken prisoner “alive and kicking” and had made a complete confession about his spying mission.

  A few days later Khrushchev said, at a display of the U-2 wreckage, “The Russian people would say I was mad to negotiate with a man who sends spy planes over here.”

  The turmoil and embarrassment in the White House and the State Department were there for all to see. Not only had they put the summit conference at risk but had been caught out in a flagrant lie. And the President of the United States had himself lied in public.

  Nevertheless, on May 14 Khrushchev arrived in Paris. His first move was to announce that he would not participate in the summit unless the United States stopped all U-2 flights, apologised for past aggressions and punished those responsible for the flight.

  President Eisenhower said in public that the flights had been suspended and would not be resumed. But even the humbling of the President was not enough for Khrushchev. At the opening session of the conference at the Elysée Palace with President Eisenhower, President de Gaulle and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Khrushchev suggested that the conference should be postponed for six months and accused the President of the United States of “treachery” and “acts of banditry,” and announced the cancellation of the arranged visit of Eisenhower to the USSR.

  A grim-faced Eisenhower replied that the over-flights were over but that Khrushchev’s ultimatum was unacceptable to the United States. And at that point Khrushchev stormed out of the conference. Eisenhower went back into the US Embassy trembling with rage.

  Eisenhower, de Gaulle and Macmillan held an informal, broken-backed meeting the next day, and the summit was over.

  But Khrushchev’s revenge was far from over. Three thousand journalists and broadcasters attended a chaotic press conference the next day when Khrushchev denounced the United States as “piratical,” “thief-like,” and “cowardly.” He followed this diatribe by announcing that the Soviet Union would now solve the Berlin problem by signing a separate treaty with communist East Germany.

  22

  The long line of cattle-trucks stretched right across the horizon, silhouetted by the setting sun and black against the first scattering of the coming winter’s snow.

  In one of the tail-end wagons a man sat hunched up in a corner, his legs drawn up, his head resting on his knees, his dark hair lank and long, his cheeks flushed with fever. There were forty other prisoners in the wagon. Five of them frozen stiff, to be thrown out by the guards the next time they checked the prisoners.

  The train had been on its journey for two weeks already and of the 1,650 who had started the journey 60 had already died.

  Five days later the prisoners were herded onto the steamer Dzhurma for the voyage across the Sea of Okhotsk. If they were lucky they would complete the voyage before the pack-ice closed in around Wrangel Island. If the transport authorities guessed wrong and the ice closed in, that would mean that there would be no prisoner survivors from that shipment. The Gulag authorities in Moscow and Kolyma considered it a worthwhile risk. Once the pack-ice formed, the steamer would be locked-in until the spring thaw. But Gulag labour camps needed their new replacements if they were to meet their norms. Leaving it late could generally mean pushing through four extra shipments, and even with the chance of a twenty-five per cent loss that was a reasonable return.

  The man in the corner was going through the litany that had kept him alive and as near to sanity as he could hope for. Amid the stench of excreta and urine he went again and again through the Lord’s Prayer, half a dozen hymns, Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” the names of the home grounds of every first-class football club that he could remember, the instructions for clearing a blockage on a Bren gun, odd bits of the Bible and Shakespeare, Boyle’s Law on expansion of gases and the names of the girls he had slept with. Sometimes he thought of the password, but he never said it, or even let it linger in his mind. It was best forgotten, but you can’t forget just because you want to.

  He could smell the pus from the weals on his back and ribs. They’d offered him a course of antibiotics in return for what he knew about Mark Wheeler and Tony Craddock. The instructors had always said that beating-up and torture never produced useful information and that the beatings and pain only stiffened a prisoner’s resistance. He had smiled when he had heard it and hadn’t believed a word of it. A broken finger or two, a rough hand round your scrotum or even the bath treatment, and you’d be singing like a nightingale. Maybe it applied to ex-Shanghai police instructors but not to ordinary mortals. But the bastards were right. Once you’d g
ot over the shock of being caught it wasn’t the pain that counted but the fact that they were doing it to you that sat in the front of your mind. It was a fight even though you couldn’t move. You could hit back by saying nothing. Screaming maybe but not talking. Name, rank and number stuff taken to ridiculous extremes. Just hate the bastards and shout obscenities in their own language. And it wouldn’t take long before they went too far and you were out. Sailing on white cumulus clouds in a summer sky, the wolves below snapping at your gliding body until you floated past the cliff and out over the sea.

  There was a week in the transit camp at Vladivostok before the sea voyage to the horror camp at Kolyma, where tens of thousands laboured in the gold mines. Men, women and children were the victims of disease and a regime of systematic cruelty that rivalled the worst excesses of the Nazi concentration camps. Three million of the stream of hopeless prisoners had died in Kolyma, their graves unmarked because there were no graves. A tractor gouged out a few feet of frozen earth and then shovelled the daily quota of corpses into the pit, skeletal hands, feet and sometimes heads were left projecting when the permafrost set the earth ironhard, chopped off later by a mechanical grader.

  John Summers had been put in a separate enclosure with three other special grade prisoners. Two of them had no legs and the third was blind. At night the barbedwire compound was permanently floodlit. Day after day Summers was detailed to collect all the new corpses and deliver them on a flat barrow to the guardroom for registration. The routine was simple. The name and prison number were recorded with the date of death, the duty guard thrust his bayonet into the silent heart of the already dead prisoner and the corpse was stripped and thrown onto the pile of other bodies to await the next mass-burial.