Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  * One of the engineers who built the site, initially unaware what it was for, claims to have found out by asking Sergei Korolev if he could stop excavations early because they were causing flooding. The Chief Designer ordered him to keep on digging, inadvertently revealing his great secret by explaining that he needed a flame pit at least half as deep as his rocket was tall. “Will we fly to Mars as well?” the astonished engineer asked. “Of course, and farther than that,” Korolev replied.

  * For decades afterward this was not the fashionable view, nor one supported by evidence available in the West. Khrushchev was a shoe-banging cold warrior crazy enough to risk World War III by putting nuclear missiles in Cuba, and anyone who credited him with more peaceable intentions—including Eisenhower—was soft in the head. But post–cold war research has largely demolished this stereotype. In particular the writings of Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, and Kremlin papers seen by Aleksandr Fursenko, the father of Vladimir Putin’s education minister in Mr. Putin’s second presidential term, reveal a Khrushchev even more anxious to call off the arms race than Eisenhower himself.

  * It may not have known yet that Lee Harvey Oswald, who later shot President Kennedy, had offered Moscow information on the U-2 when trying to defect the previous year. Oswald had worked as a radar operator at a base used by U-2s in Japan, but his security clearance there was low.

  “Rudolf Abel” was arrested in his underpants in a room in New York City’s Latham Hotel on June 21, 1957. At his subsequent arraignment and trial he played up to the image of Soviet superspy by hardly saying a word. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty)

  Powers in his U-2 helmet. The faceplate frosted over the moment he released his canopy after the aircraft broke up over Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty)

  The early U-2 pilots trained at a top-secret Nevada base that they called the Ranch, also known as Area 51. More than half a century later it remains strictly off limits to civilians even though the neighboring nuclear test site has long since fallen silent. (Getty)

  Except to the few who saw it up close, during the cold war the U-2 only ever appeared as a thin black line against the sky. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty)

  The U.S. air base at Adana in southeastern Turkey as seen from a U-2 in 1958. (© Stan Beerli/Courtesy of the author)

  Former lieutenant Nikolai Batukhtin in Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, with an S-75 missile of the kind that his unit used to bring down Powers. (Courtesy of the author)

  Former captain Mikhail Voronov, eighty-nine years old, at his home on the Black Sea, recalling the moment that the missile fired on his order detonated near the tail of Powers’s aircraft, changing the course of history. (Courtesy of the author)

  The wreckage of Powers’s U-2 remains on permanent display in Moscow’s Central Armed Forces Museum fifty years after it was first exhibited to the public, and to bashful U.S. diplomats, in Gorky Park. (Courtesy of the author)

  The Bridge of Spies today. (Courtesy of the author)

  Upon his release, Pryor flew back to the United States with his family, determined to put his “Rip van Winkle” experience behind him. He strode through the airport flanked by police, looking like an investment banker. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty)

  No one could be exchanged on the Glienicke Bridge until Frederic Pryor was handed over to his parents at Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary crossing point between West Berlin’s American sector and the East. (©SuperStock, Inc.)

  In 1959 the official Soviet count of Western espionage, “terror,” and propaganda organizations based in West Berlin was forty-eight. The generally accepted Western estimate of the number of Communist agents operating out of East Germany at the same time was sixty thousand.

  Berlin was crawling with spies, sometimes literally. They had to crouch low to reach the end of the quarter-mile eavesdropping tunnel built by the British and Americans under the Soviet sector that had been dug up by the Russians when the snow melted in 1956.

  Even at the end of the decade there was still no wall, so spies could mingle. They mingled in the bar at the brand-new Hilton and in raincoats at the airports. They mingled in uniform at the Allied military missions in Babelsberg, the international diplomatic enclave surrounded by Soviet-controlled territory on the west bank of the River Havel, and they mingled incognito in the glass-walled cafés along the Ku’damm. They traded stories with the Reuters men (and with Annette von Broecker, the beguiling Reuters editorial assistant) in the restaurants near the news agency’s West Berlin bureau on Savignyplatz, and they traded hard information for hard currency in the CIA’s rented villas in Zehlendorf.

  The British hung out of the cockpits of RAF Chipmunks flying low over Soviet bases in the eastern suburbs and took pictures with handheld Minoltas. The French military attaché worked for the East German secret police or the KGB—no one was sure, or sure if the distinction mattered. The Russians practiced tradecraft in the ruined city center that they refused to rebuild as a way of reminding Germans of the price of Fascism. The Americans refused to recognize East Germany, but their mission to West Berlin was bigger than most of their embassies and bristling with antennae.

  Willy Brandt, the West Berlin mayor and future West German chancellor, called his city’s spies “grown-ups playing cowboys and Indians.” As ever, he was being gracious. They were not always grown-ups. Students on both sides of the East German border were frequently offered assistance with their travel expenses in return for running errands and taking “interesting” photographs.

  It was into this milieu that Fred Pryor parachuted after escaping from Yale. The graduate of Oberlin College and the Society of Brothers in remotest Paraguay was personable, funny, smart, and self-reliant. He was well traveled and interested in Communism, but everyone who knew him agreed he would have made a lousy spy. The idea was “amusing,” says one Oberlin contemporary who went on to work for the CIA. He was “just too flaky and unreliable.” Then it became more than idea, at which point, another friend remembers, “we all laughed.”

  Looking back, Pryor doesn’t find it all that funny. “They knew who I was, the secret police,” he says. “They had a file on me, even before.”

  Of course the Stasi knew who Pryor was. He was the American in the red Karmann Ghia, the lanky one at the Free University. He was the Yale PhD student with the deep and unusual interest in East German foreign trade. He was the one who had assiduously polished his German and was now crossing into the Soviet sector every few weeks, against the tide of East Germans flooding out, to interview the country’s top economists and read their theories in the Hochschule für Planökonomie.

  And the Stasi? They were the obsessives, the men in gray leather jackets with faces of stone and one informant or full-time agent for every thirty-eight adult East Germans. They were the most overstaffed security force in history, the Ministry for State Security. As the exodus of young professionals from East Berlin to West intensified in the spring and summer of 1961, they were obsessed in particular with the fear of an economic blockade should new border controls be introduced. To make a blockade hurt, the West would have to understand the country’s foreign trade. And who knew more about that than the young American who liked to breeze through Checkpoint Charlie in his scarlet sports car as if Berlin had never even been partitioned? That he knew nothing and cared less about tradecraft and covert intelligence mattered little to the Stasi. They would have expected Pryor’s interviews to report their contact with him to the authorities, and every one of them did. Even before the wall went up, it was inconceivable that the Stasi would not have a file on him.

  * * *

  The same was probably true of Marvin Makinen, though in the end it was not the Stasi who caught him.

  Unlike Pryor, Makinen was one of those students who did get the call, whose personal contrails had singled him out as of interest to one of the forty-eight espionage, propaganda, and terror organizations operating in Berlin, and who was consequently invited—rather than forced—to join the grown-u
ps in a game of cowboys and Indians. In terms of life choices and intellect, he was not unlike Fred Pryor: a young man with spectacles and a precocious mind, at large in the world, intensely aware of its variety and not intimidated by its borders. But there was less of the innocent abroad about him, and more of the maverick.

  Pryor and Makinen were contemporaries at the Free University but didn’t know each other. Makinen was a fourth-year undergraduate exchange student from the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in chemistry but with political science credits still to earn. His dean had told him he would learn more political science in a year in Berlin than in a three-credit course in Philadelphia, and his dean turned out to be right.

  In his first spring in Europe, in the break between winter and summer semesters, Makinen visited relatives in Finland. He had planned to ski with them in Lapland, but a distant cousin told him about a new package tour to Leningrad and Moscow, so he took that instead. Back in Berlin his Soviet visa had a certain cachet. In the ritual comparisons of passport stamps as students returned from France, Greece, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia (if they were daring), Makinen’s stood out. People knew where he had been, including people whose business it was to know. “So I got the call,” he said, “and I accepted.”

  He met two men from U.S. Army intelligence in a restaurant near the Studentendorf in Dahlem where he was living. They gave him a late-model Pentax, showed him how to use it, and suggested that he take advantage of the new camping routes through western Russia being advertised by Intourist. For the first time, westerners were allowed to take their own cars, and the men from army intelligence said they would lend him one. All he had to do was take a lot of pictures, and if he happened to take any of airports, bridges, military installations, passing tanks … well, that was all to the good.

  Makinen left Berlin that summer bound for Prague, Budapest, Kiev, and points east if his traveler’s checks allowed. He would be gone some time.

  Norton, Virginia, is a few miles farther from the Appalachian watershed than Pound and altogether more established. The hills stand back from Route 23 as if a town is actually meant to be there. Main Street is straight and broad instead of having to follow every twist of the river, and although the side streets have to climb a little, they still allow the construction of respectable business premises that might suit a cobbler, or a lawyer, or, in hard times, both at the same address.

  The late 1950s were hard times in Norton on account of the mechanization of the mines and the job losses that followed. Still, it was home for Carl McAfee, a young lawyer who set up there in private practice at the end of 1958 after a tour of duty in the army.

  Norton also seemed to Oliver Powers a more auspicious place than Pound to open a shoe shop.

  In the spring of 1960 McAfee and his partner had a none-too-onerous amount of lawyering to do, but they did maintain an office. “It was on the second deck in back of the bank,” he remembers, “and Oliver had his shoe shop directly underneath. And believe it or not, in those days telephones were not rampant, and we had one line. I never will forget the number. Eight one three.”

  “I became acquainted with Oliver because he had a lot of time to spend, no clients or anything, and he and I became quick friends,” McAfee continues. “I used to sit and chat with him, and he would tell me about Gary because Gary and I were the same age. He’d gone to Milligan and I’d gone to Lincoln Memorial, both in Tennessee. I didn’t know him, but Oliver used to tell me that Gary was a pilot in the air force, and that went on through ’59 and continued on into 1960 … and anyway he came running up there one morning and said, ‘Carl, my son’s been shot down over Russia.’ And I said, ‘Surely not,’ and anyway, we chatted, and he said, ‘Yeah, he has been.’ ”

  Oliver was not mistaken. Two men from the CIA had done the nine-hour drive from Washington to bring the news on May 3, a Tuesday, which was the day the U.S. government first put out a press release admitting a U-2 was missing. The press took a while to catch up because that first release said nothing about Russia, but when they did catch up all hell broke loose.

  “All of a sudden people were trying to reach Oliver,” McAfee says. “He didn’t have a telephone. I don’t think he even had a telephone in his home, but somehow or another they got my telephone number, so I started getting all these calls to ask if I would get a hold of Mr. Powers—there were newspapers galore, and they wanted to talk to him.”

  The agency people would have preferred Mr. Powers to leave the talking to them, but—“well, you’d have to know Oliver,” Mr. McAfee goes on. “If he wanted to talk, he was going to talk. That’s the problem the government had with him. I thought the world of him, and he was not one to sit back and have somebody tell him, ‘You’ve got to keep quiet, and you can’t do this or you can’t do that.’ Because he was a person of action.”

  At about the time that two agency men turned up at the Powers home in Pound, two more called on Barbara Powers and Eck von Heinerberg, the family dog, on superhouse trailer row outside Adana. They told her Gary was missing and took her to the base doctor for an injection to calm her down. Three days later they came back and told her to pack for an emergency return to the United States. Her heavier belongings—her rugs, Gary’s shotgun, the silver-gray Mercedes—would be shipped later. Eck could join her on the plane.

  It was as if the Agency’s top secret global reach was all facilitated with bungee cord: one long, sudden, jarring flight and Barbara’s two-and-a-half-year Turkish interlude was over. She was going back to Milledgeville and her dyspeptic mother. The Agency men “fed me liquor to help ease my nerves,” she later claimed. They flew with her through the night to New York, where they changed planes in a hurry and flew on to Atlanta. Eck went on by a different route in a crate, so as not to give away Barbara’s arrival to the waiting press. In Atlanta her traveling companions rented a car for the drive to Milledgeville, but halfway there they stopped and asked if she would like to buy a gift for Mother’s Day. That would be the next day, Sunday, May 8. Barbara clambered out with her one good leg and her other still in plaster. She saw her picture and Gary’s on the front page of a newspaper and fainted on the spot.

  * * *

  Stan Beerli was not unduly worried as he flew south in the Hercules, back to Oslo. He knew Powers could have been shot down, but thought the most likely explanation for his no-show was that the mission had been scrubbed. He still thought so on the plane back to Washington and on his way into work on Tuesday, May 3. But when he walked into project HQ on H Street, he found “a first-class panic” under way.

  The night duty officer in the early hours of May Day had been Carmine Vito, “the lemon drop kid.” As a U-2 pilot over Eastern Europe, Vito was said to have sucked on an L pill for a while before realizing it wasn’t one of his preferred lemon drops (not true, he later said; he only got as far as looking at it). But he really was the first man in Washington to know something might be wrong with Mission 4154: at around 4:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time he took a call from the NSA saying that a surge in Russian military radio chatter starting more than three hours earlier had ended suddenly soon after one o’clock. Then Beerli’s message had arrived via the Oslo station chief.

  Vito phoned Bob King, one of Richard Bissell’s special assistants. “Bill Bailey didn’t come home,” Vito said. “You’d better find the man, quick.”

  “The man” was Bissell. King knew he was out of town but didn’t have Walt Rostow’s number and had to tell the operator it was a “goddamn national emergency” before she gave it to him. By the time he got through, Bissell had left anyway. When he landed in Washington he went to the office—it was not far out of his way and there was a mission in progress, after all—to find the place in chaos.

  Bissell was much admired on H Street for his cool head and his troubleshooting genius. His staff were relieved to see him. He practically sauntered in, Bob King recalled, “and everybody said (if not out loud, at least to themselves), ‘Whew, now we’re off the hook because he’ll
take charge of this mess.’ … He came in as if he were about to assemble a Monday staff meeting—‘Hmmm, hmmm, yeah, OK, we’ll talk about it.’ Not excited.”

  Inside, he felt “a sense of disaster about the entire affair.” No end run round the air force was going to help him now. No quiet personal plea to Goodpaster or Dulles could put a U-2 back in the air once it was in pieces in the Urals. He was pretty certain the whole program would be canceled. He was also pretty certain the pilot would be dead. That being so, regrets apart, the next step was clear. The president had to be informed and asked to sign off on the preexisting cover story. Goodpaster was alerted at home in Alexandria. The Army Signal Corps put him through to Eisenhower at Camp David. Bissell passed on the news, and the president chewed it over in silence as he flew back to the White House on Marine One. He approved the cover story the next morning. The gist was a terse statement to be used as the basis of a press release issued from Adana:

  U2 aircraft was on weather mission originating Adana, Turkey. Purpose was study of clear air turbulence. During flight in Southeast Turkey, pilot reported he had oxygen difficulties. This last word heard at 0700Z over emergency frequency. U2 aircraft did not land Adana as planned and it can only be assumed is now down. A search effort is under way in Lake Van area.