Powers began to worry again. “I’m not going back,” he told Murphy. The Russians had told him that if anything went wrong he was to return to their side, but he wrote later that he had resolved to run—or jump—instead, even at the risk of a bullet.
Meehan sat in the Mercedes with Vogel and Pryor at Checkpoint Charlie and thought, “Oh Jesus, what to do?” Each handover point seemed to be waiting for the other, unless Vogel knew something he wasn’t saying.
At about eight fifty a Stasi man approached Vogel in the driver’s seat and muttered something in his ear. Vogel listened, then told his passengers : “We can go now.”
Meehan and Fred Pryor got out and walked the few yards to the sign that said they were entering the American Sector. Millard Pryor was waiting.
An army signalman radioed from his Jeep and a shout went out across Glienicke Bridge from the American end. Pryor was free. It was time to move.
Who made them wait? It might have been an unnamed Stasi officer, fond of protocol but in over his head. More likely, it was Josef Streit, the East German attorney general whom Donovan had pictured walking on his hands for Shishkin. Donovan was right that Streit had no real power, but for those few minutes he could know how it felt to have a finger on the pause button of world affairs. For those few minutes time stood still on the bridge and only Streit could restart it. He took his time, and Annette von Broecker was forever grateful. She arrived in time to drag a friendly witness behind the bushes at the American end and to extract from him enough detail for the first scoop of a long career.
In the meantime the convoys vanished. One took Fisher to see his real wife and daughter for the first time in seven years. The other took Powers to Tempelhof, where he, Donovan, and Murphy took off in the C-45 that eight days earlier had brought Donovan from London. Powers was given a medical examination in the cargo area. In Frankfurt they switched to the plane that had brought Fisher from New Jersey the day before. It was equipped for the personal use of the commanding U.S. Air Force general in Europe, and as it soared over the Rhine the steward came aft to take orders for cocktails. Murphy and Donovan had Scotch. Powers ordered a martini.
* * *
In Washington, after a long White House party, President Kennedy’s press secretary called an impromptu 3:00 a.m. meeting to announce that Powers was free. In Berlin, the press corps scrambled to catch up with a wire report from the Glienicke Bridge that confirmed the dawn of the age of cold war spy swaps but carried no byline. By way of compensation, von Broecker’s colleagues took her out to a local café, though not for lunch or champagne. Half a century later she looks out over the River Havel from the spot where she scribbled the notes for her first scoop. She shivers at the memory of the cold and the excitement and remembers very clearly. “They bought me a hot chocolate.”
After his martini, Powers enjoyed a steak, medium rare, with a green salad and a baked potato. He ate it with Donovan and Murphy at a table laid as if in a restaurant, thirty thousand feet over the Bay of Biscay. Afterward they talked. Donovan knew very well that Powers had been pilloried in the press for his trial performance but could only admire his nerve as a man willing to “sail a shaky espionage glider over the heart of hostile Russia at 75,000 feet … [who] as he passed over Minsk would calmly reach for a salami sandwich.”
When Powers joked that he might need a lawyer back home, Donovan told him his fee would be one Virginia ham a year. He received one in the mail the following Christmas.
The rest of Powers’s homecoming was less pleasurable. The CIA was not proud of him or done with him. In case anyone saw him, he was told to stay aboard the Super Constellation when it stopped to refuel in the Azores. From Dover Air Force Base he was taken for debriefing to Ashford Farms, an Agency compound in Maryland. Donovan continued to Andrews Air Force Base and was met there by a Powers body double who ran with him to a waiting helicopter to put the press off the scent.
On his first morning in Maryland, Powers enjoyed an emotional reunion with his parents and learned for the first time of his father’s efforts to get him released. As he wrote later, he had underestimated his dad. Then the debriefing team arrived. Their questioning lasted eight days and gave him the strong impression that the Agency was more interested in covering its own back than in finding out what had happened to him. But there was one set of operational details to which they kept returning: his altitude when hit and how he descended. They referred to intelligence that conflicted with Powers’s version, and that baffled him, as the declassified transcript shows:
Interrogator: Can you say with certainty that … you didn’t come down in stages?
Powers: No, I came straight down, straight down. This is something that was mentioned to me on the way over [from Berlin] and I don’t understand.… At 70,000 feet the airplane fell apart and came straight down as far as I know. I don’t know what kind of a shine it cut through the sky as it was falling, but it seemed to me straight down.
A minute later the interrogator picked up on Powers’s reference to what he had been told on the flight from Berlin:
Interrogator: Now of course I have access to the same information.… And there is some information to indicate that you may have been in the vicinity of 69 or 70,000 and then for some reason unexplained went too close to 74,000.
Powers: No. I didn’t climb.
Interrogator: After which you came down to approximately 60,000.
Powers: Nope.
Interrogator: And then with a fast descent, about 3,500 feet a minute, came down to 37,000 and leveled off. There was absolutely none of that at all?
There was, of course, but it did not involve Powers’s plane. The interrogator was describing in remarkable detail the flight profile of Igor Mentyukov, the Sukhoi pilot ordered to ram the U-2, who was then ordered to cut his afterburner and whose “fast descent” thereafter was followed by Russian radar operators and by NSA eavesdroppers listening to their communications from Iran.
The NSA had also reconstructed the last moments of Sergei Safronov in his MiG and added them to the confusion. John McCone, who had succeeded Allen Dulles as director of Central Intelligence after a career in business (and was as impressed by “data” as he was cynical of people) chose to believe the NSA, not Powers. He made this clear to Congress and to handpicked journalists, at untold cost to Powers’s reputation and career. Diligent historians were still affording McCone’s view as much credence as Powers’s nearly a quarter of a century later, even though McCone had been an intelligence novice at the time, while Powers’s account had the great merit of being based on firsthand experience.
It was flat wrong to say that Powers descended slowly to somewhere near thirty thousand feet before bailing out. It was also flat wrong to say he was under orders to kill himself. Not that the editorialists cared much. New York Newsday said he should forgo his back pay because he had “flopped at his job.” The Dallas Morning News refused to call him a hero because the term should be reserved for the two U-2 pilots who, “it has been reported,” had blown themselves up with their planes when their covert missions went wrong. No U-2 pilots ever blew themselves up with their planes.
The most misled and misleading commentator of all was William Tompkins, the prosecutor at the Abel trial, who still had a professional interest in the myth of the Soviet master spy. The exchange on Glienicke Bridge, he said, was “like trading Mickey Mantle for an average ballplayer. We gave them an extremely valuable man and got back an airplane driver.” Never mind that the average ballplayer in this case had been trained, deployed, and sent to photograph the Soviet Union’s most sensitive nuclear sites in less time than it had taken Willie Fisher to unpack his paintbrushes in Brooklyn.
At a packed Senate hearing in March 1962, Powers had a chance to explain his apology at his Moscow trial: “It was easy to say I was sorry because what I meant by saying that, and what I wanted them to think I meant, were quite different,” he said. “My main sorrow was that the mission failed, and I was sorry that I was the
re.”
The hearing ended with an ovation for the pilot, and he was exonerated by the official inquiry that preceded it. But his account of the shoot-down was considered suspect until long after the end of the cold war. In the meantime he was rehired by Kelly Johnson as a Lockheed test pilot and peppered with offers for his memoirs. In deference to the CIA, he did not write his memoirs until 1970 and even then submitted them to the Agency’s censors before publication. He knew he could have sold more copies by going straight into print and picked up sales where he could.
“He was flying U-2s out of Palmdale [California], where they did heavy maintenance,” his old friend Tony Bevacqua remembers. “He’d bring them up to Beale Air Force Base, near Sacramento, where I was flying SR-71s.” After the memoirs came out, he would sign a few dozen copies at a time and bring them with him on his delivery flights to Beale for Bevacqua to distribute in the spy plane fraternity. “I must have sold hundreds of copies for him that way,” Bevacqua says.
Soon after publication, Lockheed let him go. The CIA had, in fact, been paying his salary, but Johnson was loyal to his client and didn’t bring the Agency into it. He just told Powers there was no more work.
Before moving to California, Powers had divorced Barbara and married an Agency psychometrist, Sue Downey, with whom he built a new life, raising her daughter and a son born to them in 1965 in Burbank, at the foot of the Verdugo hills. Told he could no longer fly for Lockheed, he flew for another big local employer, the local NBC News affiliate. He crashed and died in 1975 while flying the station’s helicopter back to the San Fernando Valley after covering a brush fire up the coast near Santa Barbara. He ran out of fuel. Bevacqua asked around after the crash and was satisfied that there was no foul play. “That helicopter had a history that Gary was aware of of showing empty when in fact it still had fuel,” he said. “They’d fixed it, but they didn’t tell him. What a way to go.”
The banality of it was almost as shocking as Powers’s first crash, which continued to reverberate. Two years earlier, James Nathan, a young historian at the University of Delaware, had published an article in the journal Military Affairs entitled “A Fragile Détente: The U2 Incident Re-examined,” in which he assembled all the available evidence to support his view that the shoot-down had been “contrived” by the CIA to nip détente in the bud. Khrushchev, of course, would have agreed. His son still does, citing unnamed CIA sources who he says concur with the view that Powers was never meant to get through to Norway.
It was not hard in 1975 to identify powerful groups with an interest in torpedoing the Paris summit, chief among them the missile builders on both sides. Details that have emerged since the cold war actually make it possible to construct a narrative in which decision makers at the heart of the U-2 program achieve precisely this goal. It starts in Adana in 1959: Stan Beerli, the Detachment B commander with the strongest record in maintaining U-2 secrecy, is moved from Turkey back to Washington. His replacement, Colonel William Shelton, is an air force man unversed in CIA lore and disinclined to respect the niceties of Operation Quickmove. As the end of April 1960 approaches, Beerli is moved again, on a brief assignment to northern Norway that he is assured requires his personal touch (and will keep him out of Washington). In his absence, the go/no-go decision for Operation Grand Slam will be taken by General Bill Burke, another air force man, because Richard Bissell will be out of town for the weekend.
In the tense weeks preceding the final U-2 overflights, Bissell has asked Burke for his assessment of the likelihood of a shoot-down by Soviet surface-to-air missiles. Burke tells him there is a high probability of a successful intercept “provided the detection [of the U-2 by Soviet air defenses] is made in time.” This means that anyone hoping for Powers to get through must ensure that he is not detected early. Conversely, anyone hoping for him to be shot down would be wise to do everything possible to advertise his mission in advance.
Beerli leaves for Oslo believing May 1 is the target date for Powers’s flight. “As far as I knew, May 1st was the only day,” he says. “When I left Washington, that was the plan.” If so, there was no need for Powers or the Quickmove team to arrive in Peshawar before the night of Saturday, April 30. Yet by this time Powers has been waiting in the hangar there for three days, his earlier departure dates ostensibly scrubbed because of bad weather over Russia. U-2s have shuttled between Adana and Peshawar five times. Because of the mileage accumulated in those flights, the most reliable plane in Detachment 10’s inventory has been replaced with the least reliable. Worse still, according to the then U.S. ambassador to Kabul (briefed later by the Afghan foreign minister), the entire Pakistani Air Force officers’ mess in Peshawar knows about Powers’s mission in advance. In case it has not been adequately telegraphed to Soviet forces, the final go code is transmitted from Turkey to Pakistan over an open radio channel. Powers is indeed detected “in time.”
The makings of a conspiracy are strewn across the historical record. In practice, as ever, mismanagement is the more plausible explanation. Even if Burke “screwed the whole thing up,” as Beerli maintained when he learned about the myriad security lapses much later, he appeared genuinely distraught when news of the shoot-down broke.
Joe “Wonderful News” Alsop was less distraught. The same was presumably true of his friends and sources in the missile-gap lobby, including Colonel Thomas Lanphier (retired) of the Convair division of General Dynamics. At the time of the shoot-down each superpower had approximately ten operational nuclear warheads. Two months earlier Lanphier had argued before Congress that if Convair had been allowed to start building Atlas missiles in 1957 it would have four hundred of them by now. One month before the shoot-down he made a specific plea for an order for one hundred Atlases and twenty Titans. After May 1, he never had to plead again. A contract with Convair was signed and by 1963 the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command had thirteen Atlas missile squadrons with one hundred thirty-seven ICBMs between them. Twenty-six years later, each superpower had roughly nine thousand warheads. Harold Macmillan called the U-2 affair “a very queer story.” For the defense industry, it was also a very happy one.
* * *
Fisher flew home with his wife, Elena, and daughter, Evelyn. They had enjoyed a few days’ shopping in the relative abundance of East Berlin and could now enjoy the company of their beloved, stoical Willie.
He was officially revered by the KGB but was too famous to be of any more use as a spy—or for his employers to admit he had never been much use in the first place. He gave speeches, lectured schoolchildren on the patriotic glories of intelligence work, and moped occasionally that he had not been able to give his life to art.
In 1967 Burt Silverman came looking for him in Moscow, to write a book and to apologize for failing to write to him in prison. A meeting was almost arranged through a series of intermediaries but was canceled at the last moment when a reporter got wind of it. So Silverman left him a letter, in which he made his apology and wrote: “I can only say that they were different times, and I was not above fear.… Maybe the reason I’m here now is to make up for that.
“It is almost ten years to the day since your trial started back in Brooklyn. Many things have happened to all of us since then—to me, my friends … and to you as well. I had hoped to talk to you about all of it. I had also fantasized a trip to the Hermitage to talk about art and painting once again. I also thought we could talk about your feelings about America and the people you met there. Apparently, this is not to be. Some other time perhaps—when the two of us can meet simply as old friends.”
They never did. Fisher died of lung cancer in October 1971. His ashes were interred at the Donskoi cemetery under his real name, and a few Western correspondents were taken there to see for themselves the true identity of the master spy who never broke. They were even told that he was British.
His art outlived him. The Soviet embassy in Washington declined a request for one of his paintings from Robert Kennedy, but a book of reproductions of his
Russian landscapes was published by the KGB in 1999, and two of his American canvases are still in the possession of the Federal Detention Center in Manhattan.
* * *
Fred Pryor did his best to forget what his friends called his Rip Van Winkle experience in Berlin, because it was easier to forget than forgive.
The family flew straight home, pausing only for a short press conference at Idlewild Airport in New York. Millard and Mary, who had spent an estimated $25,000 to free their son, were described as “beaming with happiness.” Fred was brisk and serious, in a pressed white shirt, jacket, and striped tie. “I would like to resume a normal life,” he said.
“Resume” was perhaps misleading given his extensive wanderings since college, but he was determined to knuckle down and join his brother among the gainfully employed. He found a teaching job at the University of Michigan and soon published his first book. It was called The Communist Foreign Trade System and referred briefly in the preface to his imprisonment: “The reader can judge the nature of my ‘spying’ for himself; for this book is essentially the ‘spy document’ which was found in my car upon my arrest.”
It was not a bestseller, but for many years it was definitive.
In 1992 Pryor applied for permission to read his Stasi file. In 1994 it was granted, and he returned to a reunified Berlin. In the reading room established by then for victims of the secret police in the former Stasi headquarters on Magdalenenstrasse, the sheer heft of his ten-thousand-page file gave him what felt momentarily like special status. Then someone appeared with fifteen thousand and he took his place among the mortals.
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