Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  That was the good news. The bad news was that, unlike Fisher, the U-2s’ cover had been blown the moment they went to work.

  The official protest was hand delivered to the State Department by the Soviet ambassador to Washington on July 10. It was also published in every major Soviet newspaper. It was not accurate in every detail, but it was on the right track. It timed Stockman’s entry into East German airspace at 8:18 a.m. on the fourth and charted his route over Grodno, Minsk, Vilnius, Kaunas, and Kaliningrad.

  Fighters scrambled to intercept the intruder had not come within fifteen thousand feet of its cruising altitude, but the CIA knew from receivers inside the U-2 that Soviet radar had followed it all the way. It was the same with every ensuing flight. At one point on Knutson’s foray toward Leningrad he counted fifteen MiGs in his drift sight, climbing toward him and falling away as their control surfaces lost grip in the thin air.

  On July 19, Eisenhower summoned Dulles to his office and reminded him that he had been assured the U-2 would be virtually undetectable. More even than golf, Ike liked the idea of a legacy of superpower peace. From the outset the U-2 program had struck him as a potential destroyer as well as creator of that peace. He admitted that if a hostile power tried to fly reconnaissance planes over the United States he would consider it an act of war. Long after it was too late, he wrote in his memoirs: “I was the only principal who consistently expressed a conviction that if ever one of the planes fell in Soviet territory a wave of excitement mounting almost to panic would sweep the world.”

  The protest note was deeply embarrassing for Khrushchev to have to send, since it implicitly acknowledged he had been powerless to bring the U-2s down. But he would manage that soon enough, as Edwin Land had pointed out as part of his original pitch for the “super glider.” (“The opportunity for safe overflight may last only a few years,” Land warned, “because Russians will develop radars and interceptors or guided missile defenses for the 70,000 foot region. We therefore recommend immediate action.”)

  Two years on, Eisenhower told Dulles he was already falling out of love with the U-2. From now on he would personally approve each overflight. There would be no more blanket permissions for Mr. Bissell and no more flights at all unless the benefit clearly outweighed the potential cost. And there the program might have died, but for Khrushchev’s tragic tendency to overplay his hand.

  On November 5, 1956, as Barbara Powers killed time in Athens and her husband in Adana, Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian revolution, killing twenty thousand civilians and taking fifteen hundred casualties themselves. Khrushchev had agonized for two weeks before deciding that the only alternative to invading was the collapse of the Soviet empire. “We have to act,” he told his closest ally. “We have no other course.” Two weeks later he overcompensated for his earlier hesitation by issuing his notorious threat to bury capitalism. Toward the end of his rant to Western diplomats, they started walking out, but his words rang in their ears and flashed down cables to their respective capitals. This was the leader who earlier in the year had said he was “quite sure that we shall very soon have a guided missile with a hydrogen-bomb warhead which could hit any point in the world.”

  There was a wild man in the Kremlin, no doubt about it.

  Eisenhower was more concerned than anyone not to provoke him. But he also knew better than most how much of Khrushchev’s foreign policy was bluff and how badly the United States needed to know the realities behind it.

  Bissell had responded nimbly to the news that the president was unhappy that his secret air force had been detected so quickly. He had sent Detachment B to Turkey. From there, he argued, U-2s would encounter sleepier radar stations and fewer fighter squadrons than the Wiesbaden group. It was another hunch, but Eisenhower was angry with the butcher of Budapest and politically confident, having just been re-elected to the White House. He bought it.

  Powers and the other seven pilots were sleeping two to a trailer. Their officers’ club was a Quonset hut with a single bare bulb. The agency was processing a request for water skis and a power boat, but they had not arrived and the summer had been hot. The pilots’ poker games could last three days. Adana felt like Watertown without the food.

  On or about November 18, Powers happened to be walking past the base’s secure cryptographic unit to which orders from Washington were sent. The detachment commander saw him. “You’re it, Powers,” he said. Weather permitting, he would be making the first overflight from Turkey. The coal miner’s son from Virginia would be the first American to peer beyond European Russia into the empty spaces where some people said the arms race was being won.

  There was still no word from the agency on what he should do if shot down. There were only hints. A survival kit stowed under the pilot’s seat included a selection of men’s and women’s gold watches, heavy winter hunting gear, two dozen gold Napoleon francs, a message in more than a dozen languages requesting help and promising to do no harm, and a .22-caliber handgun with silencer, presumably in case the message was not understood.

  Powers was also offered an L pill. “L” stood for lethal. It was a glass cyanide capsule to be crushed between the teeth if he wanted to commit suicide, and he was by no means the first American to be given the choice. The B-29 crews who dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were given L pills in case they were captured and tortured for information about the weapons in their bomb bays. U.S. agents in the Korean War were also often offered cyanide in case of torture. A CIA manual from that era stated that after crushing the pill the user should inhale through the mouth. The manual continued: “It is expected that there will be no pain, but there may be a feeling of constriction about the chest. Death will follow.”

  As recently as 2007 it was claimed in an otherwise authoritative study of the early arms race that U-2 pilots “were under instructions not to survive.” In fact, the one life-threatening aspect of these flights on which the CIA was crystal clear was that taking the L pill along for the ride—never mind ingesting it—was strictly optional.

  Joe Murphy was the CIA security officer at Adana with Powers in 1956 and again in 1958. He says: “There was never an instruction to these guys to take their own lives. They had the capability to do that were they in a torture situation, but there was never an instruction.”

  For this flight, Powers did not even pack an L pill. On November 20 he took off from Adana, turned east, and crossed into Iran. Then, as his wife and sisters and most of the free world slept, he checked his drift sight, eased his yoke very carefully to the left, and headed north, up the middle of the Caspian, into the unknown.

  Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes, attracts both main tribes of Western traveler—the tourist and the wanderer. They mingle warily among its ancient walls. They recognize each other by their sneakers and their boots. They may briefly forget who they are, swept up in the magnificence of the views of the mountains and the Urubamba River, but they almost always come and go as separate species. Only occasionally do they arrive together.

  In the summer of 1955, twin twenty-two-year-old brothers from Mansfield, Ohio, flew to Lima and made the spectacular journey to Cuzco and the lost city of the Incas on a trip funded by their father to celebrate their recent graduation. They were sons to be proud of: tall and handsome but also quiet, curious, and unfailingly polite. Each had a sense of humor, one more evident than the other. Both were expensively educated. Their names were Millard and Frederic Pryor.

  After a few days in the mountains they parted, Millard for home.

  “That’s it,” he said, “I have a job to do.”

  “He was going to be assistant to the president of some small company, something in business,” Frederic recalls. “My brother was a very hardworking traditional bourgeois who made tons of money.”

  For his own part Frederic headed south. He had a backpack but no idea what he wanted to do with his life and no inkling that it would lead him surprisingly quickly to somewhere much more unsettled and unsettling t
han South America. He took a train across the Bolivian altiplano and tumbled out of the highlands in the general direction of Paraguay, where he had a notion he might find utopia.

  General Alfredo Stroessner, “El Excelentísimo,” was barely a year into his dictatorship, and Asunción was filled with military parades that Pryor wasn’t interested in watching. While wandering the city’s back streets he saw a sign saying SOCIEDAD DE HERMANOS.

  “So I knocked on the door.”

  A man’s head appeared in a second-floor window.

  “Was wollen Sie?”

  The young American had studied some German at college. “Ich will mit Ihnen arbeiten,” he said, looking up. I want to work with you. He was let in and given directions and the next day caught a boat up the River Paraguay to Rosario. It was about an eighty-mile overnight chug.

  “From Rosario it was another fifty miles to the sociedad, mainly through forest,” Pryor says. “They told me where to get off the boat and pointed in the right direction, and I was on my own. I started walking at about nine in the morning and got there by about ten a.m. the next morning. Fifty miles isn’t far when you’ve got nothing else to do.

  “I got lost twice along the way, the second time quite close to the community, as it turned out. And it was while I was lost the second time that I saw this little blond girl skipping through the woods. I asked her in German if she knew where the Sociedad de Hermanos was, and she looked at me blankly. So I tried Spanish, then French. Eventually she said, ‘Do you speak English?’ ”

  The Sociedad de Hermanos was founded as the Bruderhof in a Germany laid waste by the First World War. It was the dream of the Anabaptist preacher Eberhard Arnold to create a Christian brotherhood “which held all property in common, regarded all work as of equal worth, upheld a radical peace testimony with complete non-participation in war … practiced simplicity of life, was governed by unanimous consent of the members in each community and based membership on unity of faith in Christ regardless of race, class or nationality.”

  The Bruderhof was too communistic for the Nazis, who expelled its members from Germany in 1937. It was too German for the British, who allowed its refugee members to establish a commune in the Cotswolds but then threatened them with internment when war broke out. It was unconditionally welcome—as the Nazis themselves would later be—only in Paraguay.

  Fred Pryor had read about Paraguay’s peculiar patchwork of utopian enclaves as an undergraduate at Oberlin, Ohio. He majored there in chemistry, but the most important thing he learned was that he didn’t want to be a chemist. How much more fascinating, in an otherwise bipolar world of capitalists and Communists, was the idea of anarchists, Mennonites, and ecumenically minded Anabaptists scraping together their visions of paradise in the dark heart of South America? “How could these people live together? Why didn’t things fall apart?”

  Pretty soon they did, but for a few years in the mid-1950s the Society of Brothers in the Paraguayan forest prospered and grew, welcoming more or less anyone who stumbled on its neat white bungalows.

  The blond girl led Pryor there, and he was found work as a cowboy. “They asked if I could ride a horse, which I could,” he says. “They asked if I could lasso, which I could. What they didn’t ask me was if I could ride a horse and lasso at the same time, and the answer was I couldn’t.” He was taken off horses and put on house painting. He stayed three months, marveling at the work of the Society’s hospital, which treated ten thousand Paraguayan Indians a year without charge and was funded entirely by the sale of wooden toys, and adapting without much difficulty to the realities of communal property and the simple life. These included the sharing of gramophones by strict order of rotation, because the society owned only six of them.

  Pryor then hitched a ride back to Asunción with a Mennonite farmer, who gave him something to eat that he would later blame for a bad case of hepatitis. But before the disease took hold he traveled to Buenos Aires, grew a beard, and took ship for England, working his passage aboard the Ovington Grange having persuaded the captain that he knew about engines: “Smart-ass that I was, I said I’d studied thermodynamics, which I had.” The vessel carried birdseed. As far as he could tell, it carried enough to feed every British bird for the next hundred years.

  At Oberlin, Pryor had acquired a reputation as an intellectual clown. One contemporary who went on to serve in several presidential administrations calls him “not serious” as an undergraduate (even though he would become “superserious” as a professor). Others tell stories—untrue, he says—of how he once spent a summer testing toilet seats for the Dow Chemical Company, and of the time he tried to prove that male students’ choice of toilet stall in the campus restrooms depended on their mood and level of self-confidence.

  Ill with jaundice, Pryor returned to America in the spring of 1956. He still had no firm plans. He knew only that he wanted to recuperate and prove to himself—and possibly to his brother and father—that he could be serious. He was already finding that “college humor does not work on adults” and was anxious to show that even though he seemed to have been given the family’s whole portion of wanderlust, he could still get a decent job. He took and passed a civil service exam and spent a few months examining chemical patents at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington. In fact he almost lost the job before reporting for work because of budget cuts but was saved by a blind date with the daughter of a senior official at the Civil Service Commission, who intervened on his behalf.

  Patents bored him anyway. In September, still fascinated to know what made one Paraguayan commune hum while another tore itself apart, he went to Yale to start a PhD in economics.

  At this point in his peregrinations, Carolyn Cooper, a friend from Oberlin, saw in her old classmate “a certain naïveté … a certain lack of caution, a certain trustfulness.” Another college contemporary who remains close to him after many decades describes him as one of those who sensed that a “fundamental purity of heart” will protect them from life’s ambushes.

  Pryor hated Yale. From the start he found it stifling and overly intense. It turned out that traditional economics bored him almost as much as patents, and having studied almost none of it as an undergraduate he struggled to keep up with the thoroughbreds whose doctorates would catapult them to capitalism’s commanding heights. He stuck with it for two and a half years, but when the time came to pick a topic for his thesis, he wanted out. “I just chose a topic that would take me as far away from New Haven, Connecticut, as humanly possible,” he says.

  He chose Berlin.

  * * *

  It was not hard to enroll as an American at the Free University of West Berlin at the end of the 1950s. The university had been established by General Lucius Clay, the hero of the Berlin Airlift, on the first day of the blockade of the city in 1948. Like the blockade, the university was an expression of American defiance funded largely by the American taxpayer, for both of which West Berliners were deeply grateful. Tuition was fifty dollars per semester for all comers.

  Pryor didn’t even phone ahead. “I went to Berlin. I showed up at their admissions office. I was admitted on the spot,” he says. It may have helped that he was still attached to Yale and studying for a PhD on Communism, but he abandoned his chosen thesis subject soon after arriving to specialize in Soviet bloc foreign trade. He would soon know more about how the East German and Soviet governments fixed export prices than almost anyone in the world, and it would get him into trouble. But first he had to improve his German. He enrolled in a crash course for foreigners. “I read German all day. I went to classes in German. I made an enormous effort, memorizing ten or twenty words a night, forgetting half of them the next day,” he says.

  Time magazine nosed around the university while he was there and pronounced the eleven-thousand-strong student body “a happy lot, inclined toward U.S. jazz and blue jeans.” Yet for all their openness to America and his effort with their language, Pryor’s first year in Berlin was lonely. There were no dorms,
so he lived alone in a rented room near the city center. Students who didn’t know one another well addressed one another with the formal “Sie.” When he stood up in a lecture theater to argue with a professor whose remarks on Eastern Bloc trade he found especially preposterous, his fellow students rushed to defend the professor and his German let him down on cross-examination.

  Still, he kept his chin up. “German is not a difficult language to learn,” he decided when the twenty words a night began to stick. As his confidence grew, he started phoning East German academics at the Hochschule für Planökonomie, the brain of the command economy that Khrushchev still believed would conquer the world. He began asking for interviews. The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit or Ministry for State Security—“Stasi” for short—had no rules on this. It had not occurred to the world’s most meticulous secret police force that simple curiosity might induce a Westerner to open the phone book and start asking how nonmarket economics worked. People were eager to tell him. (It turned out, for example, that the price East Germany paid for Soviet wheat was not plucked from thin air but based on the world market price at Newport News, Virginia.) Some of the people Pryor met became lifelong friends. In all he conducted thirty-five interviews with the East German economists who served as the high priests of five-year planning, and the interviews became the basis of his thesis.

  Getting to East Berlin was easy. “You just hopped on the subway and you were there,” he says. “Or the S-Bahn.” Or you drove, and the strong dollar made driving eminently possible even for a student. In 1960 Pryor bought a bright red VW Karmann Ghia and switched rooms to a more desirable address in an old apartment house on Viktoria-Luise-Platz. There were nightclubs aplenty in the brave island of freedom that was West Berlin, but Pryor was not the clubbing sort. His preference after a long day transcribing insights into state-sanctioned price fixing was for Brahms or Bach at the Hochschule für Musik, and there was plenty of that too.