Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  Paris in the springtime; Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan, and de Gaulle were all looking forward to it as the last best chance for superpower peace. There were reasons that spring to be quietly optimistic about the course of world affairs, but high over Russia on May 1 that course changed abruptly and irreversibly. One beneficiary was John F. Kennedy, campaigning against Richard Nixon for the presidency of the United States and struggling to persuade voters that he had the requisite international experience. The loss of Article 360, as things turned out, did much to erode the foreign-policy credentials of Nixon as well as Eisenhower and may even have been decisive in an agonizingly tight race. But there were others with reason to be thankful for the disappearance of that peculiar airplane—intelligence professionals enjoying the unprecedented influence conferred on them by the cold war’s cult of secrecy; military brass sitting atop armed forces that still consumed a tenth of the nation’s gross domestic product seven years after the end of the Korean War; and above all the missile manufacturers—Convair, Douglas, Lockheed, the Martin Company—girding themselves for an open-ended arms race to outproduce the Soviets in the technologies of an exotic new national defense that only Eisenhower seemed ready to resist. It is no surprise that many believed Article 360’s loss was no accident on America’s part; nor that some still do.

  * * *

  Five years earlier, an inspector at the U.S. Postal Service received an unusual request from a postmaster in Los Angeles.

  Dozens of heavy parcels every week, some of them from defense contractors, were being sent to a PO box in the name of C & J Engineering in the residential community of Sunland at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. C & J Engineering was not listed in any phone book, but the mail drop was emptied regularly by an unmarked van. Would the Post Office inspector be good enough to drop by one day and follow it? The inspector obliged and drove into an ambush. He followed the van south from Sunland toward Burbank, the patchwork of movie studios and subdivisions at the entrance to the San Fernando Valley. Then he turned left into an industrial zone on the east side of Burbank Airport. “Our security people nabbed him just outside the plant and had him signing national security secrecy forms until he pleaded writer’s cramp,” Ben Rich wrote later.

  Rich was at that time a senior Lockheed designer. “The plant” did not officially exist but is better known now as the original Skunk Works, a name adopted by its employees because the smell of a nearby plastics plant recalled the pungent moonshine still that Al Capp named the Skonk Works in his Li’l Abner comic strip. It was—if legend even approximates to reality—the throbbing hypothalamus of the American military industrial complex; a mosh pit of young men with slide rules pulling hundred-hour weeks in a permanent fug of sweat and smoke, abducted from their girlfriends and families in the service of a higher cause.

  In one beige assembly hall, the Skunk Works was the locus of all that was ingenious, irrepressible, patriotic, and strictly need-to-know in the most warlike years of the cold war. It was the birthplace of stealth as an alternative to mutually assured destruction; of smart bombing as an alternative to carpet bombing; of fantasy as a solution to reality. It was the cradle of radar absorption, of machines that could cruise over Siberia at Mach 3, and of the weird black albatross, part jet, part glider, that for want of any hint of poetic imagination among the engineers who built her came to be known as the U-2. Kubrick had nothing on the Skunk Works, nor did Dan Dare.

  The plant’s output was legendary. So was its secrecy. Kelly Johnson was the irascible genius responsible for both; the man who would be Q if history were a Bond film. Born in Michigan to Swedish parents, he won his first aircraft design prize at age thirteen. As head of Skunk Works, he enjoyed telling prospective employees that if they signed on there would be gaps in their résumés that they could never fill. He cashed personal checks for over one million dollars from the CIA to help it hide the flow of funds toward the aircraft he was building. He was the originator of a special brand of secrecy, more instinctive than learned, that felt as natural to those in his orbit as rock and roll did to those in Elvis Presley’s.

  The CIA people who flew U-2s out of Adana were in Johnson’s orbit, and so were their air force neighbors who occupied the huts and hangars at each end of the runway. “We were Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Number Two as far as the air force was concerned, and that was fine with them; most of them, anyway,” the senior agency man there remembers. Another security officer says that even though the base was busy with navy as well as air force personnel, “nobody asked any questions” about the black planes that rolled in and out of the middle hangar apparently at random. “Somebody told the base commander, ‘Just don’t ask,’ and nobody did.”

  Trainee U-2 pilots were steeped in Johnson’s secrecy from the start. As they grow old they still refuse to say how high they flew. When they were mistaken for UFOs, people covered for them. Soaring over Death Valley and Nevada’s Jackass Flats at seventy thousand feet and more, the U-2s’ silver underbellies (at first they were not painted black) reflected the setting sun long after it had dipped below the horizon for airliners seven miles below them. People noticed. In the winter of 1955–56 there was a spike in puzzled comments to air traffic controllers from commercial pilots craning upward while crossing the southwestern United States. These reports were forwarded to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where the nation’s UFO intelligence was being collated. A hastily assembled team called Operation Blue Book was given a number in Washington to call when nothing else could explain a silver point sailing across the western sky. In Washington a flight log would be consulted and more often than not the point of light turned out to be explicable. Operation Blue Book would ask no further questions and invent a story.

  One place these stories never mentioned was Groom Lake, also known as Watertown, or Area 51. The first two names are legitimate entries in the gazetteer of Kelly Johnson’s secret world. The third is not. It has appeared on maps of southern Nevada but has never been used officially by the U.S. military. It identifies the user as a likely believer in jellied aliens and secret swarms of helicopters. Most of all it is a place in the American imagination—though it does exist: a hard, flat lake bed ringed by bone-dry mountains seventy-five miles into the desert from Las Vegas, almost but not quite out of range of a four-wheel drive and a high-powered pair of binoculars. It was chosen by Johnson’s chief test pilot as a suitably private proving ground for the U-2.

  Willie Fisher should have known about Groom Lake. If he was the master spy they made him out to be, he should have come back from his field trips with its dust in his hatband and images of spy planes stuffed into his hollow nickels. There is no evidence that he ever went near the place or had the slightest inkling of what happened there. To this extent the Johnson brand of secrecy worked wonders. But the truth is that Fisher, the amiable reverse Fulbright, was not much of a challenge. The U-2 was only as secret as it could be for a plane built ten minutes from Hollywood. It was an American secret. Quite quickly, it was an open one.

  The U-2’s first foreign deployment was to England in 1956. Within days, plane spotters with long lenses had gravitated to the perimeter fence at Royal Air Force Lakenheath in Suffolk. Within a year, London’s Daily Express was reporting, more or less accurately, that “Lockheed U-2 high altitude aircraft have been flying at 65,000 feet, out of reach of Soviet interceptors, mapping large areas behind the Iron Curtain with revolutionary new aerial cameras.” As soon as a U-2 detachment arrived in Germany, so did KGB emissaries in black sedans to watch it. As soon as it transferred to Turkey, listening posts and radar stations in the Caucasus began to track its every foray toward the Soviet border. It first penetrated Soviet airspace on July 4, 1956, and though the Express was right that it could not be shot down, it was spotted by radar at once.

  This was not spying by any previous definition. Compared with the Soviet fetish for deep cover it was brazen. It was clever, bold, arduous, and dangerous but also dead simple. It was
just the sort of spying for someone like Francis Gary Powers.

  * * *

  When Jessica Powers-Hileman looks back on the way her brother was received on his return to the United States in 1962, she says after what seems like a long pause: “I don’t think he was expecting it to be like it was. At least I’m assuming he did not expect it to be like it was. He knew a little about what the good old New York Times had been writing about him while he was in prison, but we came from a part of the country where you trusted everybody. We didn’t lock our doors. We were poor, but if you needed a bed for the night we’d have you in and make you comfortable. Didn’t matter who you were.”

  The part of the country where the Powers family came from was the extreme southwestern corner of Virginia, a few miles off the Trail of the Lonesome Pine. The forested mounds of the Appalachians rise gradually to the Kentucky state line, and in the folds between them sits the town of Pound, population 1,075 and falling. Pound has a knack for national prominence. For twenty years, until 2001, reporters from the Associated Press would periodically make the scenic drive from Kingsport, Tennessee, to meet diners at the Golden Pine and watch them dance, because the dancing was illegal. (The town’s ban on dancing in public places was ruled unconstitutional, but in deference to local churches an ordinance still requires permits.)

  Before the dancing ban, there was Gary Powers. And before Gary there was his grandfather, a carpenter, who rode five miles into the hills from the eastern edge of town sometime before the First World War and found a level piece of land where he decided his family would settle.

  It did work out that way, but not without a struggle. “Oliver Powers worked his whole life to buy that land,” his son-in-law, Jack Goff, remembers. Oliver was Gary’s father. He also had to provide for six children, including an only son who he had vowed would never have to work the mines.

  Powers senior worked the mines—something he later found he had in common with the first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. But in the meantime they nearly killed him. A runaway coal train deep under Harman, Virginia, crushed him against the roof of a tunnel and left him with a permanent limp and fierce hopes for a better life for Gary. “Oliver wanted Gary to be wealthy; that was the main drive with him,” said Goff. To that end the older Powers labored obsessively. When the only work was in Harman, he moved the family there, driving coal trains again despite his limp. When mine work slackened, he opened a shoe repair business that has wife could mind when he went back underground. When too few shoes came in, he earned a little extra by carrying mail. When the war brought better-paying work to Michigan, he moved the family to Michigan. When it was over, they came back to Pound.

  Jack Goff was Gary Powers’s best friend. As if to prove it, he apprenticed himself to Gary’s father, married one of Gary’s five sisters after the war, and still lives with her on Gary Powers Road, on land Oliver Powers bought.

  They met in Harman in a four-room schoolhouse, “then ran around together for twenty years,” he says. They played with the same horsehide football after school, hunted rabbit together, and spelunked together through the old bootleggers’ caves that burrow under Pine Mountain near the Appalachian watershed. Powers would later call himself a loner on account of growing up the only boy among five sisters. In reality he grew up with Jack, who has a photograph of his friend that is quite unlike the many that exist of Powers as a pilot. He sits on a granite boulder high in the Cumberland Mountains, alone except for Jack Goff and his camera, transparently content.

  There were other boys in the valley. Jessica Powers-Hileman tells a story about two of them who persuaded her brother, against her father’s wishes, to help them roll a decrepit Model A Ford down the dirt road leading back to Pound. The steering stuck. The car plunged off the road, and Oliver Powers took a maple switch to all six of his children, including young Jessica, even though she had been asleep in bed at the time. “It was the only time I ever got switched, and it was Gary’s fault,” says Jessica. Yet he was easy to forgive. He was calm, quiet, good-natured, and good-looking. He had smooth skin, jet black hair, and “dreamy eyes,” especially in what his first wife called his “wholesome, hamburger-loving stage.” His homecomings, from college and then the air force, were big events. This is the first thing his sister says when asked how she remembers him, and the last: “We only had one brother. I can’t say exactly how it was. I can’t express it, but when he came home we were all happy.”

  Powers was athletic and proud of it, left guard on his high school football team in Michigan and a contender in the hundred-yard dash at college. He brought his athleticism home. The family kept caged albino squirrels that once greeted his return by escaping up the maple trees from which his father had harvested switches after the business with the errant Ford. So Gary shinned up the trees and recovered all the squirrels. “That was him all over,” Jessica recalls. “That was the kind of thing he liked to do.”

  For a while there was also an alligator on the Powers property. It ended up in the Knoxville Zoo but was even then a useful reminder of Oliver Powers’s small eccentricities and stubborn cast of mind.

  He wanted very badly for his son to be a doctor. “My dad only got to go to fourth grade, but he wasn’t easily fooled.” Jessica says. “When he sent Gary to college, he wanted him to have a position that would make him a lot of money. He knew doctors made a lot of money.”

  Oliver Powers was setting himself up for disappointment. When not climbing mountains and hurling footballs at each other, his son and Jack Goff had been true children of the aviation age. They played “air wardens,” collecting and comparing aircraft silhouettes cut from cornflake packets until nothing flew over the Cumberlands that they could not identify from thirty thousand feet. As a fourteen-year-old, Gary had begged his father for a joyride in a Piper Cub at a fair in West Virginia. He never really came down. He went dutifully to medical school after college, but dropped out, joined the air force, and by the spring of 1954, a year before Tony Bevacqua, had checked out on F-84 and been cleared to load and drop a medium-sized nuclear bomb.

  He later said to his friend Jack, in a pause during a rabbit hunt: “If anything ever happens to me, just remember I was doing what I thought was best for the most people.”

  It was as neat an expression of utilitarian altruism as you could expect from a philosopher, never mind a pilot—and there is no doubt that Gary Powers was what the patrons of the Golden Pine would consider a good man. But he was not that simple. He could be moody. He was fiercely jealous of his wife, and in his own quiet way he was as driven as his father.

  By the time of his arrival at Turner Air Force Base outside Albany, Georgia, Powers was a twenty-four-year-old fighter jock with a degree, a second lieutenant’s silver bar, and everything to live for. But he also had a sense of history passing him by. He had felt awed at Milligan College in Kentucky by fellow freshmen starting their studies after fighting and winning the war in the Pacific. He wanted to enlist and serve in Korea but went to medical school instead to please his father. Korea was still drawing in young men when he attended air gunnery school in Arizona in 1953, but this time he was waylaid by appendicitis. “Again I felt I’d lost my chance to fight, to prove myself,” he wrote.

  In July 1954 Powers was promoted to first lieutenant and found himself taking home four hundred dollars a month. For someone who had collected lumps of coal from beside the railway tracks in Harman for Popsicle money, it was a princely sum. But it was not a doctor’s pay, and he did not have a doctor’s prospects. Small wonder that when his name appeared on a list of men required to report to wing headquarters at Turner AFB early one morning in January 1956, he paid attention.

  * * *

  Powers was about to be drawn into the most audacious espionage extravaganza since the nineteenth-century showdown between the British and Russian empires known as the Great Game. It would make his whole life a secret, then turn it inside out and shake it until there was nothing left in it that wasn’t public. It w
ould take him to places no son of a Virginia coal miner had ever been, soaring over the mountain ranges where the British and Russian empires had confronted each other with brass telescopes and Enfield revolvers nearly a century earlier.

  At that time the engine of history was Russia’s search for natural frontiers. In 1956 it was the Soviet Union’s unbending resolve to keep them shut.

  Anyone brave enough, even now, to hike north up the Afghan-Pakistan border from the Khyber Pass will notice a striking change in the built environment at about thirty-six degrees north and seventy-two east. As the border swings to the east, Tajikistan comes into view across the Wakhan Corridor. And unlike the unguarded line between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Tajik frontier is marked with a ten-foot barbed-wire fence. It is a holdover from Soviet times that the current Tajik government values highly. (It even outsources patrol duties to Russian frontier troops who trudge its entire length 365 days a year in fake fur hats against the bitter cold of the Pamirs, with authentic AK-47s slung over their shoulders.) The Tajik fence is only a few hundred miles long, but it is part of an epic feat of rudimentary self-defense that delineates the former Soviet border along six thousand miles of wild terrain from the Caspian to the Pacific.