At times LeMay’s antics even scared the CIA. “Soviet leaders may have become convinced that the US actually has intentions of military aggression in the near future,” warned an ad hoc committee of CIA, State Department, and military intelligence agency representatives. “Recent events may have somewhat strengthened Soviet conviction in this respect.”
From their American bases in Greenland, Norway, Germany, Turkey, Britain, Italy, Morocco, Pakistan, Korea, Japan, and Alaska, B-47s could reach just about any target in the Soviet Union, furthering LeMay’s well-publicized goal of obliterating 118 of the 134 largest population and industrial centers in the USSR. (LeMay calculated that 77 million casualties could be expected, including 60 million dead.) And he was about to get an even bigger bomber, the intercontinental B-52 Stratofortress, which was just entering into service. The giant plane could carry 70,000 pounds of thermonuclear ordnance over a distance of 8,800 miles at a speed of more than 500 miles an hour. With the B-52, the Americans no longer even needed their staging bases in Europe and Asia to attack Russia. They could do it from the comfort of home without missing more than a meal.
Most distressing for Khrushchev, he had no way of striking back. The biggest Soviet bomber in service, the Tupolev Tu4, was an aging knockoff of the propeller-driven Boeing B-29 with a 2,900-mile range and no midair refueling capacity. It could not effectively reach U.S. soil. The Tu4 would either run out of gas as it approached the American eastern seaboard or crash in the coastal states of New England. In either scenario, planes and pilots would be lost on one-way suicide missions. Unfortunately for the Kremlin, the early prototypes for a pair of bigger bombers, the Mya-4 Bison and Tu95 Bear, which were designed to hit targets deep in U.S. territory, seemed to display similarly suicidal tendencies. Their test flights had been plagued by crashes, and it would be years before they were operational in significant numbers.
The bottom line was that the United States could stage a multipronged attack on the USSR from dozens of points across the globe, while the Soviet Union was hemmed in from all sides and could not retaliate. It was this strategic imbalance, and the urgent need to redress it with an effective retaliatory capability of their own, that drove Khrushchev and the other Presidium members through the windswept countryside on February 27, 1956, to visit the secret missile laboratories of NII-88.
• • •
The tiny czarist town of Podlipki had been erased from Soviet maps. With a swipe of the pen and an eye toward subterfuge, Kremlin cartographers had rechristened it Kaliningrad, the same name they had given to a large Baltic enclave seized from Germany after the war. Such attempts at misdirection were common to conceal sensitive installations, aimed at sending American spies a thousand miles the wrong way, but this one didn’t fool the CIA for long. By the mid-1950s, German V-2 scientists repatriated from Russia had already given the agency a vague idea of what was going on behind the birch forests and high fences that hid NII-88. Allen Dulles knew, for instance, that to get there visitors had to take a series of right turns along a maze of unmarked country roads; that the approach was discreetly monitored; and that about half a mile down the main perimeter wall, a narrow automated steel gate known as the “Mousetrap” governed access to the grounds.
It was through the Mousetrap that Khrushchev’s ZIS-110 slid. In a few months, he would have a new limo—the sleeker, squarer ZIL, modeled after the 1954 Cadillac—and the first party secretary was anxiously awaiting its delivery. In addition to the modern redesign, the ZIL held the promise of being the ultimate Soviet status symbol, because only three people in the entire country would get one: the first secretary of the Central Committee, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium, and the chairman of the Council of Ministers. Like Khrushchev’s new house on Lenin Hills, with its gardens and fountains, cherry trees, and panoramic views of the Moskva River, the ZIL was a coveted perk that would help the CIA divine the shifting pecking order of communism’s quarrelsome high priests. In the opaque Soviet system, one glance at the Kremlin motor pool could yield more intelligence than a year’s subscription to the newspaper Pravda.
Pravda never made mention of the work in Kaliningrad, for if the name was even spoken “it was always in a whisper,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. Such was the secrecy surrounding the missile complex that the name of the man who awaited the Presidium delegation this February morning had also been erased from all records. He had been given a pseudonym and was obliquely referred to in official communiqués simply as the Chief Designer. The Chief Designer was a prisoner of his own success. He was deemed so important to national security that a KGB detail watched his every step. For as long as he lived, he would not be permitted to travel abroad. He could not openly wear the numerous medals and citations he received, nor could he have his photograph publicly taken. All this was for his own protection, because the Soviets were convinced that the CIA would try to kidnap or assassinate him. The veil of anonymity would be lifted only after his death, when his name would replace Kaliningrad on post-Communist maps. But back in 1956, Sergei Korolev’s true identity was a closely guarded state secret.
Korolev greeted his guests formally, exchanging rigid handshakes with the Kremlin cardinals. Molotov, the aging diplomat, whose signature had adorned the nonaggression pact with the Nazis, was the senior member of the group. By dint of his decades as foreign minister, he was also the most worldly and urbane. Kaganovich, Khrushchev’s mustachioed former mentor, was another story. Once rakishly handsome, he had grown fat, old, and ugly, and was resentful at heaving been leapfrogged by his protégé. Kirichenko was the new boy, tall and big-boned. He’d been brought in by Khrushchev, who was trying to pack the Presidium with his own acolytes. The last to extend a hand was Bulganin, Khrushchev’s bitter rival, the sly Soviet premier with a sinister silver goatee.
Bulganin and Khrushchev shared power under an uneasy arrangement that satisfied neither man and sowed confusion both at home and abroad. Bulganin, as chairman of the Council of Ministers, headed the government. Khrushchev headed the party. But who was the head of state? According to communist dogma, the government was supposed to answer to the party. But in practice, the subordination was not always so clear-cut. When Eisenhower met both men in Geneva for talks the year before, the president’s advisers had spent much of that summit trying to figure out who was really running the show in the Soviet Union. Such an ambiguous arrangement could not last indefinitely. Nor would it.
While the introductions were made, and aides scurried attentively to take their bosses’ overcoats and homburg hats, the younger Khrushchev soaked in the surroundings. Buildings of all sizes dotted the missile complex: dark, grime-covered brick structures, huge rusty hangars, water towers, military-style barracks, and corrugated steel sheds that stored, among other things, 1,500 tons of potatoes and 500 tons of cabbage so that NII-88’s cantina would not suffer from the food shortages that plagued the rest of the country. There was a decrepit, Dickensian feel to the place, so much so that Sergei Khrushchev mistakenly dated the facility’s original construction to the nineteenth century. In fact, it had been built in 1926 by the German firm of Rhein-Metall Borsig to manufacture precision machinery and was later retooled and expanded to produce artillery pieces for the war. Buildings had a tendency to age prematurely under Soviet care.
Inside, the installations were surprisingly clean and modern and gleamed with white paint. The delegation was ushered into one of the largest of these, a brightly lit hangar of imposing dimensions. At the center of the hangar, displayed on large holding rings like precious museum exhibits, lay three rockets. “This is our past,” said Korolev, pointing to the smallest of the reclined missiles. Korolev was a short, powerfully built man, with a muscular neck and the compact frame of a middleweight wrestler. He had thick black hair, slightly graying on the sides, which he slicked straight back over his large forehead with the aid of pomade. He spoke slowly, in a tone that was neither obsequious nor insecure. Korolev was accustomed to dealing with Presidium members; h
e had even reported to Stalin on several occasions after returning from Germany in 1946 and being named head of the newly created OKB Special Design Bureau at NII-88.
The rocket he pointed to was the fruit of OKB-l’s German labors, an identical replica of the V-2 called the R-l. Everything about it was German: the parts that had gone into it; the engineers and technicians who had been forcibly relocated to Russia to assemble it (it was from them that the CIA eventually gleaned most of its information on the missile complex); even the camouflage scheme, which mimicked that of the V-2. The R-l, Korolev explained, had taken three painstaking years to master. Not until 1948 had Korolev felt confident enough to try to launch it. It flew a few hundred miles—in the wrong direction.
Khrushchev listened attentively, nodding politely. Much of this he already knew. “Father was no longer a novice when it came to missiles,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. That certainly had not been the case when Beria was alive. Beria, much like Hitler’s secret police chief, Heinrich Himmler (whom he even resembled in an effete, murderous way), had tried to dominate his country’s missile programs. Though Beria had not exercised remotely the same degree of control over NII-88 as the SS chief had exerted over V-2 production, virtually all top-level decisions involving Soviet missile development had been made by him and Stalin alone, without the participation of other Presidium members. “We were technological ignoramuses,” the elder Khrushchev recounted in his memoirs, describing the first time he and his fellow Presidium members saw a missile after Stalin’s death in 1953. “We gawked,” he wrote, “as if we were a bunch of sheep. We were like peasants in the marketplace. We walked around and around the rocket, touching it, tapping it to see if it was sturdy enough—we did everything but lick it to see how it tasted.”
The missile they had seen back then was the R-2, and this was the next exhibit in Korolev’s tour of OKB-1. The delegation—Kremlin dignitaries in their somber, medal-bedecked suits, engineers in white smocks, security men from the KGB’s Ninth Directorate in black knee-length leather jackets—obediently walked over to the full-scale R-2 model. It closely resembled the R-l, except that it was nine feet longer and of a slightly wider girth, which allowed it to carry extra fuel, doubling its range to nearly 400 miles. The R-2, Korolev explained, was a hybrid: a half-Russian, half-German elongation of the original V-2. It could go farther and faster, climb higher, and carry a heavier payload than its predecessor. Alas, it could not land much more accurately, despite all the 15,000-ruble bonuses offered to captive German engineers to improve the gyroscopic and radio beacon guidance systems that had been developed in Germany during the last year of the war. Still, the R-2 represented a major technological leap in the field of structural design, where the Soviets had learned how to build a much stronger rocket, able to withstand far greater stress loads, without significantly increasing the width and weight of the materials used to build it.
At this, the Presidium members also nodded knowingly. But Molotov and Kaganovich seemed distracted, while Bulganin appeared lost in his own private universe. Perhaps they had also heard the lecture before, or perhaps they were still mulling over the consequences of Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress. Barely two days had passed since the dramatic address had so shocked and staggered its audience that, in the words of one participant, “you could hear a fly buzzing” in the stunned silence that permeated the Great Kremlin Palace. Khrushchev had spoken for nearly four uninterrupted hours, and his listeners had turned either deathly pale or beet-red with anger. When he was done, there was not the usual standing ovation, which was typically thunderous and prolonged, because in Stalin’s day no one dared to be the first to stop clapping and sit down. The cheering could last five palm-aching minutes until the “boss” signaled that he was satisfied. But Khrushchev, at the Twentieth Party Congress, had done the unimaginable: he had publicly attacked Joseph Stalin. Stalin, he said, had abused his authority and had ruined millions of innocent lives. Stalin was a murderer, a liar, and a thief, who had stolen the communist ideal and perverted it with his paranoid quest for power.
An audible gasp had echoed throughout the palace hall, as if there suddenly was not enough air to breathe. Even to think what Khrushchev had uttered aloud was considered heretical in the Soviet Union, punishable by excommunication to Siberia or outright execution. What Khrushchev had done was tantamount to the pope assembling the College of Cardinals to denounce Christ. Stalin had been a demigod, as much revered as feared. At his funeral, such was the outpouring of grief that one hundred people had been trampled to death by the mobs of mourners that had descended on Red Square to view his body lying in state next to Lenin. His victims sent tearful tributes from prisons. Grown men sobbed inconsolably on the subway. Only the Presidium members shed crocodile tears. As the Great Leader slipped in and out of consciousness, they had denied him medical attention to hasten his demise. They had hovered over his deathbed like ghouls, falling to their knees when his eyes flickered open, retreating to scheme in dark corners when they closed. When at last he drew his final strained breath, the relief on their faces was clear. They had survived the Terror.
But now Khrushchev’s speech had put them all in danger again. They had warned him not to do it; it would open up a can of worms that might consume them all, they said. “If now, at the fountain of communist wisdom, a new course is set which appears to deviate considerably from that of the Stalin era,” the CIA noted in an April 1956 analysis of the speech, “repercussions are likely to occur which may be of great moment…. It may set in motion forces extending far beyond the contemplation of the collective leaders of the CPSU.”
Khrushchev told his fellow Presidium members that 7 million Soviet citizens would soon be returning from Stalin’s Siberian gulags. From the prisons they would bring back horror stories of torture and mass murder, of starvation and sham trials. There would be no way, Khrushchev reasoned, to keep the full and terrible extent of Stalin’s purges quiet much longer.
“Don’t you see what will happen?” Kaganovich had protested. “They’ll hold us accountable…. We were in the leadership, and if we didn’t know, that’s our problem, but we’re still responsible for everything.”
Kaganovich’s feigned ignorance must have provoked a cynical snicker from the other members of the Presidium. How any Soviet citizen, least of all a fawning Stalin henchman like Lazar Kaganovich, could profess no knowledge of the fratricidal inferno that raged between 1929 and 1953 and engulfed 18 million lives was baffling. What had begun as a settling of accounts in the Central Committee had degenerated into a national feeding frenzy that left no corner of the Soviet empire unscarred. People turned in their neighbors because they wanted their apartments. Subordinates ratted out superiors because they wanted their jobs. Economic failures were blamed on “wreckers” and foreign saboteurs. Ethnic minorities were arrested en masse. Baits, Jews, Chechens, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, and Western Ukrainians were shipped by the trainload to Arctic jails. The Siberian death trains ran from as far west as Warsaw, where more than one million Poles were sent to the gulags, half never to return. The gulag archipelago that became their final resting place stretched over thirteen time zones, encompassed three thousand prison and labor camps, and employed hundreds of thousands of guards, administrators, and factory technicians. Vast railway networks had been carved over the permafrost to supply it with inmates and to haul the gold, coal, diamonds, and timber that their slave labor produced. Entire swaths of the Soviet economy depended on the blood-soaked revenue generated by the gulags, which did double duty as an engine of mass murder no less efficient than the Nazi concentration camps. The weeks-long cattle-car journeys could kill half the arrivals. Cold, disease, malnutrition, and overwork did the rest.
It was impossible for Kaganovich not to know any of this, just as it was impossible for the delegates of the Twentieth Party Congress not to have noticed that more than 1,000 of their 1,500 predecessors from the Seventeenth Congress in 1949 had been shot. Of course
Kaganovich had known. Everyone knew. Each Presidium member, Khrushchev included, had personally signed thousands of arrest and death warrants. In their speeches, they had all exhorted the security men to exceed their brutal interrogation quotas, to root out shirkers, reactionary right-leaners, and foreign spies. Molotov, in his memoirs, even justified arresting the wives and children of enemies of the people: “They had to be isolated…. Otherwise, of course, they would have spread all sorts of complaints and demoralization.” Molotov’s own wife fell victim to the purges, but he did not try to save her from a Siberian labor camp. Nor did Kaganovich rise to the defense of his brother, who committed suicide rather than face trial. They had had to remain silent, to be more Stalinist than Stalin himself, because betraying even the slightest hint of hesitation would have cost them their lives. “All it took was an instant,” Khrushchev recalled. “All you did was blink and the door would open and you’d find yourself in Lubyanka,” the KGB headquarters.
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