Bridge of Spies

by Giles Whittell

  Lake Van was 1,500 miles from Sverdlovsk, where the CIA was already reasonably certain Mission 4154 had ended. “Oxygen difficulties” could only get a plane so far off course. “If the Soviets claimed it had crashed not near the border but in the middle of the country, we planned to accuse them of moving it to a site that they had selected for propaganda purposes,” Bissell wrote later. “All of this might have worked if Powers had not survived.” Might have—but he was already clutching at straws.

  * * *

  The Soviet chatter picked up by the NSA on May Day did not stop when the two dots collided on Major Voronov’s screen. In fact, at that moment it intensified. The screen dissolved into a blur of reflections that Voronov at first thought might be chaff thrown out by the intruder to confuse the missile. In any case he was preoccupied by the failure of two of his three rockets to fire.

  After the cold war that failure was used to embarrass the veterans of the Soviet rocket troops: their vaunted surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) were like guard dogs that could not even be relied on to growl; or, in one version, two out of three shots had to be aborted at the last second because they would have obliterated the control cabin in the middle of the complex. But Nikolai Batukhtin explains the failure as a success: there was indeed a risk of destroying the cabin, but it was averted automatically, as Grushin had intended. The rockets were designed to fire at an angle to the ground of not more than sixty-three degrees. Any closer to vertical and their billowing exhaust, with nowhere to go, would incinerate their launchers and much else nearby. Only one rocket was given a suitable launch angle by its guidance system—and it did the trick.

  After it had been fired, Batukhtin and three other lieutenants ran outside to see its exhaust trace and debris from an explosion drifting earthward through the clear blue sky. But Voronov stayed in the cabin and told Colonel Gaiderov, the Sverdlovsk air defense commander, that he could not confirm the target had been hit.

  A neighboring battery was ordered to fire at anything within range, and did. Captain Ayvazyan and Lieutenant Safronov, the MiG pilots scrambled from Perm and still circling over Sverdlovsk, suddenly found themselves under attack. Realizing they were friend, not foe, ground control ordered them to lose height urgently. Ayvazyan understood what was happening and put his MiG into a vertical dive from 34,000 feet, pulling out at less than 1,000 feet and landing at once. Safronov was not so quick. Hit by one of three more missiles that were fired that morning, he ejected but was found dead next to his parachute.

  At last the radar screens began to clear. Voronov realized he had probably hit the target with his one and only rocket, and shortly before 9:30 a.m. Moscow time, he got back on the radio to say so. The message was passed on from Sverdlovsk to Moscow, and a stunned calm returned to the airwaves above Russia.

  Powers was lucky—and unlucky. “If we hadn’t got him he would have made it to Scandinavia,” Batukhtin says. “There was no other missile complex like ours on his route, or even in the country.”

  * * *

  In his cell in Moscow, Powers ate nothing for a week. He had arrived in the bowels of the Lyubianka with an irregularly beating heart, a raging thirst, a headache, and an oppressive tiredness. In a scene that could have been written by Woody Allen, not one but three women doctors in white coats pronounced him fit, but he could not bring himself to eat. One of the doctors gave him two aspirin—and (could it have been?) a sympathetic glance. Another gave him an injection that he feared would be truth serum or a prelude to the brainwashing that the CIA believed would figure high on the KGB’s menu for apprehended spies. It wasn’t. He concluded it was a routine inoculation, or to help him sleep.

  For all his tiredness, sleep came hard. The cot in his cell was a narrow metal frame with metal bands instead of springs and a couple of army blankets. A light above the door was never switched off and an eye in a peephole underneath it never went away. Each day he was taken to a large interrogation room, above ground, with natural light and a long table at which up to twelve people sat. They included, to begin with, Aleksandr Shelepin, head of the KGB, and Roman Rudenko, who smoked Western cigarettes and had been chief Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. Periodically the questioning would pause for officials to talk among themselves. Powers began to form the impression that they did not know what to do with him, but this was an insidious idea that sat uneasily in his head alongside a more firmly established one—that sooner or later he would be taken out and shot.

  His first faint hopes were quickly encouraged. On Monday he was taken on a tour of Moscow. He had been gone from Peshawar barely twenty-four hours and was being shown Red Square, Saint Basil’s, and a ski jump high on the west bank of the Moscow River from the back of a Zil limousine. Truly this was not a tour that could be booked through Thomas Cook. If the idea was to confound his assumptions and make him believe anything was possible, it worked. “Perhaps I wouldn’t be shot after all,” Powers wrote. “Perhaps they were trying to impress me, both with their city and their kindness, because they were soon going to release me.”

  It was not a ridiculous thought. Again and again he was asked the obvious question: why had he been sent? More than once there was a follow-up that struck Powers as much less obvious: was it to ruin the Paris summit?

  He was barely aware of the summit. The thought had not occurred to him, but now the fact of the meeting stuck in his mind. As the Zil headed back toward the Lyubianka, scenes started swimming in his mind of Khrushchev presenting him to Ike in Paris as a sign of goodwill and forgiveness—and proof of the astonishing performance of Russian S-75 rockets.

  Powers was onto something. He understood that unless he was indeed going to be shot or hidden forever in a remote corner of the Gulag, his chief value to his captors was for propaganda. But to maximize that value they needed urgently to know if Washington knew he was alive. So the other question to which Shelepin and Rudenko kept returning was whether he had radioed his base before bailing out. Powers refused to answer, knowing that if he said he had, they might be able to prove he was lying by studying the remains of the U-2’s radio, whose range was only three hundred miles; and knowing that if he told the truth—that he had not sent out a Mayday as he plummeted to earth—the Kremlin would still have the option of killing him and covering it up without much fear of an international scandal.

  On Tuesday the questioning got tougher and Powers’s hopes shrank back to zero. His minders started to worry about his appetite. The interpreter asked if there was anything that he would eat—anything at all. He asked for something to read, including a Bible, and was promised the interpreter’s own copy of Gone with the Wind.

  * * *

  For three days, Eisenhower thought he might have gotten away with it. There were no diplomatic notes, no indignant Tass exclusives, and almost no U.S. editors interested in the anodyne press release out of Adana, Turkey, on the missing weather plane. The Washington Post ran it as a brief.

  Ike’s son, John, said later there was not “one scintilla” of doubt in his father’s mind, when they discussed the missing plane at the beginning of the week, that its pilot was dead. Allen Dulles had assured them so often since 1956 that a U-2 shoot-down was not survivable that his wisdom was now gospel. It was sad, of course, and in its own special way. It was hard to think of a lonelier way to make the ultimate sacrifice, getting blown apart or asphyxiated up there over Russia; and it was hard to think of a set of circumstances less likely to allow the remains to be brought back to the grieving family for a proper burial. But it was a noble sacrifice and the president would acknowledge it in the right way in due course. In the meantime it looked as if Khrushchev was going to take the intrusion on the chin again, and that, too, was impressive. Preparations for the summit could continue. A nuclear test ban treaty was not out of the question and would be a crowning achievement of Eisenhower’s presidency. He would recognize Khrushchev’s role in it by presenting him in Moscow with a jet-powered hydrofoil.

  Would it have been possible
for Khrushchev to hush the whole thing up for the sake of world peace? Ike assumed so, and both President de Gaulle of France and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Britain would later encourage him to believe it. But none of them knew much about the pressures that the U-2 program had imposed on Khrushchev, or those he had brought upon himself. Thanks to Marshal Biryuzov’s briefing on the reviewing stand in Red Square, the entire Soviet military establishment now knew about the overflights at least as a subject of gossip, and they knew that one had been brought down. The insult had been intolerable, but having been avenged it could be rewritten as a triumph. Khrushchev’s control of the media was firm but not absolute. The group with least to gain from the summit—the military—had the most to gain from publicizing the fine work of whichever battery commander had pressed the button. One way or other, the story would get out.

  Khrushchev knew it must be his way.

  The Supreme Soviet was in session. Fifteen hundred dutiful appointees from every oblast, okrug, krai, and far-flung autonomous republic were assembling each day in the Great Hall of the Kremlin to rubber-stamp new laws handed down by the politburo and to applaud the far-sighted inspiration of the party’s first secretary.

  On Thursday morning Llewellyn Thompson, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, was invited to the Great Hall to hear Khrushchev’s set piece speech to the Soviet. The two men knew each other well. The Thompsons had spent a winter weekend sledding at the premier’s dacha. Some politburo members were even muttering that since returning from Camp David Khrushchev seemed to trust the ambassador more than his own ministers.

  The speech could have been about Uzbek folklore and it would have been rapturously received. In fact it was a significant statement of Khrushchev’s intent to reorganize the Soviet economy in favor of civilians and at the expense of the military. Slickly titled “On Abolishing Taxes on Workers and Employees and Other Measures to Improve the Well-Being of the Soviet People,” it lasted nearly four hours (with an intermission). For the first two and a half Thompson listened politely, wondering with a trace of unease why he had been seated in a box above the podium. The answer came near the end of hour three, when Khrushchev moved suddenly from his hopes for the Paris summit to a thunderous exposé of the entire overflight program, including the May 1 debacle. As he switched subjects, witnesses said a shaft of sunlight angling in from a window high in the Great Hall lit up Khrushchev’s face. The May 1 mission had been “an aggressive provocation aimed at wrecking the summit conference,” he declared. The command had been given to destroy the plane. The command had been fulfilled.

  The hall erupted. Delegates and the Soviet press hurled shouts of “shame!” at the imperialists’ ambassador. Thompson’s face remained a mask, but inwardly he marveled at Khrushchev’s showmanship. He had seized the moment. In order not to sacrifice the future, he carefully blamed American “militarists” rather than Eisenhower. Equally carefully, he omitted to mention that the pilot was still alive.

  Teletype transcripts of the speech reached Eisenhower at a National Security Council meeting in a secure bunker outside Washington. In a huddle afterward it was agreed that a more detailed cover story would have to be issued, still on the assumption that Powers was dead.

  That evening, at an Ethiopian diplomatic reception, Thompson overheard a deputy Soviet foreign minister tell the Swedish ambassador that as far as he knew the pilot was being questioned. Thompson rushed to his office to cable Washington. Four minutes before his message reached the State Department, NASA issued its new press release—five hundred words of detailed nonsense about a plane that could fly “for as long as four hours at altitudes of up to 55,000 feet” and spent its time collecting information on “convective clouds, wind shear, the jet stream, and such widespread weather patterns as typhoons.”

  No one could fault NASA for conviction, but every spurious detail compounded the lie. When the State Department spokesman saw the release he turned ashen. When the press saw it and started comparing it with Khrushchev’s version, the game was up. All at once it was open season on the U-2.

  For years, senior executives at the networks and most East Coast newspapers had known the broad outlines of the U-2 story but kept it out of the headlines in deference to the administration’s pleading. But since overflights had restarted in 1959, mere reporters had been getting wind of the program. Now the Moscow bureaus had the scoop from none other than Khrushchev and the Washington press corps would play catch-up with a vengeance. Like a startled deer, the CIA set about covering its traces.

  First, the Agency settled on a fall guy in case the president wanted one. It would be Dick Newton, Colonel Shelton’s executive officer in Adana. He would take responsibility for sending Powers on such a reckless mission at such a sensitive time but would not be available for comment. (He was spirited from Turkey to Wiesbaden, and kept there until the tornado blew itself out.) In case the excitable British press should remember the fleeting presence of U-2s at RAF Lakenheath in the countryside north of London in 1956 and suspect a British angle now, that angle was swiftly smoothed over: three RAF pilots pulling duty with Detachment B at Adana were overnighted back to England, where they refuse to discuss their Turkish assignment to this day. The Oslo station chief went to ground so that no one at the U.S. embassy there could help the Norwegians with their investigation. (Bodo? Where?) Plans were even made to welcome Tufti Johnson, Stan Beerli’s friend and bringer of hors d’oeuvres, into comfortable American anonymity should Norway decide it needed a scapegoat from its own side.

  Ninety miles from there, the Atlanta federal penitentiary’s most cerebral New York Times subscriber—the Soviet master spy and silk-screen printer still known as Rudolf Abel—first read about the lost U-2 on Friday, May 6. He couldn’t miss it: “SOVIET DOWNS AMERICAN PLANE; U.S. SAYS IT WAS WEATHER CRAFT; KHRUSHCHEV SEES SUMMIT BLOW.” It was the three-line banner format normally reserved for coups and assassinations, and it was not encouraging. Without a live pilot the only news relevant to Fisher was that the summit was in jeopardy. The slimmer the chances of détente, the slimmer his chances of going home.

  That day was hell for Oliver Powers and his ailing wife, who Gary feared would already have suffered a heart attack over his disappearance. It was their third day knowing he was missing without knowing if he was alive. “Distressed? We all were,” Gary’s childhood friend Jack Goff remembers. “It was more like a bad dream than anything.” The family gathered at the home Oliver had built beneath the sugar maples outside Pound and prayed.

  At the end of the worst week of his political career, Eisenhower faced three choices: to continue to deny the entire Soviet story, to admit it and blame his subordinates, or to admit it, explain it, and hope the world would understand. None of them was appetizing, and the decision itself was almost impossible without knowing what had happened to the pilot. That afternoon, therefore, a car left the U.S. embassy on Moscow’s inner ring road and made the short drive to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs now housed in a Stalinist skyscraper near the Moscow River. A bland and plaintive note was handed over. It stuck to the weather reconnaissance fiction but acknowledged Khrushchev’s accusations without denying them. “In the light of the above,” it ended, “the United States Government requests the Soviet Government to provide it with full facts of the Soviet investigation of this incident and to inform it of the fate of the pilot.”

  The next day, Khrushchev obliged. Back in front of the Supreme Soviet, he dispensed with lengthy preliminaries and came quickly to the point. “Comrades, I must tell you a secret,” he said. “When I made my report two days ago I deliberately did not say that we have parts of the airplane, and we have the pilot, who is alive and kicking!”

  The applause was wild and spontaneous, and Khrushchev could not resist it. He had brought with him the fruits of Powers’s first six days of interrogation, and a bulging folder for show and tell. He named Powers. He named Colonel Shelton, the new Detachment B commander (who was quickly reassigned to a remote base in northern M
ichigan). He named Peshawar (and warned both Pakistan and Norway that they were “playing with fire”). He held up fake pictures purporting to be those Powers had taken, and a real one of the poison pin. He made hay with the idea of using a pistol or handing out gold watches at seventy thousand feet—were they for Martians?—and mentioned in passing that he thought it would be appropriate for Powers to stand trial “so that world opinion can see what actions the Americans are taking to provoke the Soviet Union.”

  He repeated his belief that Dulles and the militarists were responsible, not Eisenhower. But if that was intended as an olive branch, it was a prickly one. He could not even leave unsaid the obvious corollary—that Ike was no longer in charge. “When the military starts running the show, the results can be disastrous,” he mused. Such as? A hydrogen bomb from them, and “a more destructive hydrogen bomb in return.”

  There. He’d said it. Armageddon had been explicitly invoked. It was the zenith of Khrushchev’s career as a performer—“a masterpiece,” said one junior diplomat who watched it live on television. But it was also the beginning of the end of Khrushchev as a politician. Later, out of power and under virtual house arrest, he told a visiting American that from the moment of the shoot-down he felt “no longer in full control.”

  * * *

  At the Powers home, the news on Sunday that Gary was alive brought waves of relief, then indignation. Oliver would later rely heavily on Carl McAfee, his “boy lawyer,” for help communicating with heads of state and their intermediaries, but not today. He drove into Pound and fired off a telegram to the White House in his very own syntax: “I WANT TO KNOW WHAT ALL THIS IS ABOUT MY SON FRANCIS G. POWERS THAT IS GOING ON AND I WANT TO KNOW NOW. ANSWER.”

  Then he rolled on down the Trail of the Lonesome Pine to Norton and walked up to McAfee’s office behind the bank and started taking calls. One was from the New York Times. Powers senior had left school after fourth grade, “but that man read everything,” his daughter Jessica remembers. He had already done some reading on Khrushchev and told the reporter from New York that he was “going to appeal to Mr. Khrushchev personally to be fair to my boy. As one coal miner to another, I’m sure he’ll listen to me.”