by Phil Patton
Yet for all the near escapes and the flamboyance, LeVier developed into the most scientific and cautious of test pilots. He was not a wild-eyed Yeager type, but was obsessed with safety. He had seen too many guys go in. In his retirement he would establish an organization to teach better, safer flying practices and was constantly frustrated with the lack of support he got from government and industry. He developed such practical and basic safety devices as the master warning light system, the trim switch on the control stick, and the afterburner igniter.
With the U-2, LeVier would take no more risks than necessary. It was hard to see out of the cockpit and hard to get a sense of horizon; he wanted the landing strip painted with markings, but the penny-pinching Kelly Johnson found the four-hundred-dollar expenditure excessive. Finally LeVier himself put strips of black electrical tape on the canopy to indicate the true horizon.
U-2—“Utility 2”—was the innocuous and noncommittal tag for the plane. But another story circulated about the source of the name.
The plane’s long wings gave it so much lift that it was hard to land. The first flight happened by accident: LeVier took it out for a taxi test, but the airplane took off. “It went up like a homesick angel,” LeVier said later, more for quotation than anything else. “It flies like a baby buggy.” The only problem was it didn’t want to come down. In the C-47 chase plane, Johnson kept after LeVier to land nose down, but the plane kept porpoising—it would get down into ground effect, the area where the proximity of the ground added to its lift, and begin a forward and aft wiggle, the “porpoise.” After five or six tries, and mounting tempers on both sides, LeVier came in and did it the way he wanted to in the first place—he stalled the plane to get it on the ground.
Once they were both down, Johnson and LeVier continued to argue. “What the hell were you trying to do, kill me?” LeVier said. He gave Johnson the finger. “Well, fuck you.”
“And fuck you, too,” Johnson replied.
The “you, too” attached itself to the airplane. Or so the tale goes.
Within minutes of the landing, a heavy rain began, the first in months, the equivalent of the lake’s total annual rainfall.
That night there was a big beer bash and the arm wrestling that Kelly, proud of the arm strength he had acquired putting up the wall laths during his youth, always fostered. “You did a great job,” he told LeVier, calmed down now. When they arm-wrestled, Johnson took LeVier down right away.
The next morning, LeVier appeared with his arm bandaged, wanting to make the point that Johnson had injured his chief test pilot. But Johnson remembered nothing of the night before.
The project was variously termed “Aquatone” or “Idealist,” but for a long time the plane was just referred to as “the Article,” as in the military phrase “test article.” Soon some of the Skunk Works folks were referring to it as “Kelly’s Angel.”
After a character in Milton Caniff’s comic strip Terry and the Pirates, it was later nicknamed “Dragon Lady.” Terry and the Dragon Lady were erstwhile enemies who had become tenuous friends as the Cold War brought hostility between Taiwan and mainland China. The reference suggested the uneasy relationship between the pilot and the tricky airplane that was the triumph of Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works—the first example of the new kinds of weapons the Cold War demanded.
To take off, the U-2 wore long, drop-off wheels on its wing tips—“pogo sticks,” they were called—and one pilot said they made the aircraft look like a vulture on crutches. That was the right image: The U-2 was delicate and shifty to fly. It would kill several men at the Ranch before it ever went overseas.
With a skin just 2⁄100 of an inch thick, the plane’s aerodynamics left only a tiny window between overspeeding and stalling. Its fuel could shift suddenly and throw it off balance, its engines were prone to flaming out, and its wings were so long they could snap with sudden maneuvers.
After the training operation was moved from the Ranch to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, in June 1957, one eager young pilot decided to fly his plane over his house to show off; he banked, dipped his wings, then stalled and crashed. He died in front of his family.
In early 1956, a pilot suffered a flameout over Tennessee and radioed back. Using a procedure set in place, where sealed envelopes had been left at selected SAC bases for just this eventuality, Bissell had the pilot directed to Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque. Then Bissell phoned the base commander and told him that in about forty-five minutes a secret plane would be landing at his field and he should immediately cover it and phone for further instructions. A half hour later Bissell got word that all had gone as planned. The U-2 had that much glide range.
What Frank Powers remembered about Watertown, as he knew the airstrip at Dreamland, was the food. There wasn’t much to do—a movie at night, a couple of pool tables, no bar, no club. He looked forward to getting back to Burbank on the weekends and the return from his new identity: from “Francis G. Palmer” back to Francis Gary Powers.
But the food was excellent. It was better food than in Turkey, where Powers was to be stationed—better food, to be sure, than in Lubyanka or Vladimir prisons, where he would be faced with fish soup, endless rations of potatoes, and, once a week, the highlight of the fare, a cube of meat the size of a thumbnail.
After his U-2 was shot down on May 1, 1960, Powers thought back to the food at the Ranch, as he called it, just as he had learned to refer to the CIA as “the company,” or “the government.” Before his release, he would lie on his cot, dreaming almost nightly of banana splits and coconut cream pies, hamburgers and green salads. Once, he argued with his cellmates about whether we dream in color or only in black-and-white. He resolved the argument that night. He had a dream that he clearly remembered was in color—a banquet of food and wine. Before he could taste any of it, he woke up.
Powers came to the Ranch in the spring of 1956, in the second class of pilots to be trained to fly the U-2. The week before, another pilot had bought it in the first U-2 to crash. In September 1956, Howard Carey, a pilot friend of Powers’s from the Ranch, was killed in Europe after a couple of curious Canadian interceptors zoomed by his U-2 for a closer look. The wake of the fighters tore the spy plane apart.
Powers had been excited about the boldness and daring of the U-2 scheme from the moment he had heard of it. Like many, he felt that the United States had stalled the Cold War after “the stalemate and compromise in Korea.” He already had a top-secret clearance: At Sandia Air Base in New Mexico, in 1953, he had gone through training for delivering nuclear weapons.
At the Ranch, he noted the miles of uninhabited land surrounding the little strip; in the airplane, which needed only a thousand feet of runway to soar into the sky, he enjoyed a feeling that he called a special aloneness.
The Skunk Works would cite the numbers forever after: It had taken just eighty-eight days to produce a prototype, eight months to fly the first plane, and now eighteen months to provide an operational spy craft. Overflights of the Soviet Union began in July 1956. The first go-ahead was for just ten days of flying. Eisenhower was leery, despite the promise of Bissell and others that Soviet missiles would never reach the U-2.
Soon it was clear that the whole thing had paid off. The pilots looked for bombers and missiles, tracked nuclear tests with filter paper that recorded the products of the explosions, even flew through clouds of fallout. They monitored and recorded radar and telemetry frequencies, and they actually learned a lot about the weather over the Soviet Union, their cover story.
When the first photos came back, Eisenhower and Dulles spread them on the floor of the Oval Office and looked at them with glee. The airplane discovered untold intelligence riches. In July 1955, the Soviets had shown off a mass of new bombers at their annual Aviation Day parade, and the bomber gap was born. Now, one U-2 pilot had found a base with thirty Bison bombers on the tarmac—was this evidence of a major buildup? Additional flights showed that this was the only base where the Bison bombers wer
e stationed; it was the entire fleet. The bomber gap closed. Eisenhower was able to keep Curt LeMay’s demands for more B-52s and the B-70 in check. Richard Bissell’s friend the columnist Joe Alsop would later leak word of the operation to the public.
Another flight revealed the space facility at Tyuratum, the Cape Canaveral of Russia. A third flight located a tower that looked like a nuclear test facility. The CIA scoffed, but two days later an explosion was recorded at the previously unknown facility. Additionally, the U-2 found evidence of new radar facilities that made it—and successor airplanes—even more vulnerable to detection.
The U-2’s most secret flights, however, were not over Soviet airspace. They were the ones that spied on the English and French and Israelis, beginning with the Suez Crisis in 1956. From them, Eisenhower learned that the French and the Israelis had lied to him—that they had many more Mirage fighters than they had acknowledged. And after the fighting began, one U-2 did two passes over Cairo West airport in a couple of hours, capturing the before and after images of a bombing attack.
Officials had figured on getting two years out of the U-2. By 1960, they had gotten four. But the Soviets were tracking the flights on radar, as they had been almost from the beginning, and their surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) were getting closer. The president often ordered the flight plans changed or the flights delayed. It drove the agency and the Skunk Works people crazy. They called Ike “Speedy Gonzales.”
The last flight, called “Grand Slam” because it would fly all the way across the Soviet Union, south to north, was approved for late April.
Weather delayed the flight. The unit shipped from Turkey to Pakistan, where the flights operated from temporary setups. The scheduled airplane, which had the best record, turned out to be due for maintenance; instead, Powers got number 360, a known “dog.” (The planes were basically built by hand and tended to have individual differences and eccentricities. Some were sturdy performers, others plagued with gremlins. Flying out of Atsugi, the Japanese U-2 base, 360 had once made an embarrassingly public crash-landing on a muddy airstrip, where armed guards chased off a crowd of camera-toting Japanese.)
The plane was constantly developing new and different technical maladies. During Powers’s flight, the autopilot quickly began to go on the blink. Tracking Powers, the Soviet military launched a salvo of SAMs. Nine miles above the earth, Powers was writing in his logbook when he saw an orange flash.
His first thought was “I’m done for.” Then the wings went and the fuselage began spinning. Powers’s legs were pinned against the panel by the force. He couldn’t eject, or his legs would be taken off above the knee. He decided to scramble out of the cockpit but found himself held in by his oxygen lines. He tried to reach the destruct button. He got within six inches of it. Then he decided he had to try to save himself. He got free of the plane. Floating beneath his parachute, he saw rolling hills, a forest, a lake, a village. In its early spring greenery, it reminded him of his native West Virginia. He remembered a map in his pocket showing alternate routes back to Pakistan and Turkey. First taking off his gloves, he pulled out the map and carefully ripped it into little pieces and scattered them. Then he thought of the coin and the poison pin inside: a silver dollar with a hidden pin laced with curare—a device for suicide.
It was the first time Powers had decided to carry the silver dollar. He did so on a whim, thinking of it vaguely as a potential weapon, not a means of self-destruction.
Then a sense of the absurdity of the device replaced his previous admiration for its cleverness. What better token of a capitalist spy pilot than a silver dollar? It was just the sort of James Bond gadget that people expected the CIA to come up with—and the agency had tried to meet their expectations. Who in 1960 used silver dollars anymore, except on ceremonial occasions?
Powers pulled the pin from the coin, hid it in a pocket of his flight suit, then dropped the silver dollar.
He saw a second parachute blossom above him, which confused him. It appeared that a Soviet pilot had had to bail out too.
On the ground, someone handed him a filter cigarette—Laika brand, named after the dog who rode into orbit on Sputnik II. It tasted like the Kents he carried in his flight suit pocket.
Twice, the pin escaped discovery in body searches. When the Soviets took his flight suit, though, he warned them about the pin. They tested it on a dog. The dog’s tongue turned blue, and it collapsed on its side. Within ninety seconds it stopped breathing; in three minutes it was dead.
He found his interrogators frequently incompetent. There was none of the torture or Korean War–style brainwashing he had worried about. There was much danger, he thought, in overestimating your enemy.
He told the Russians plainly that he had trained at the Ranch, Watertown, strip. His captors came in bearing a map and asked him to point out the Ranch, “to see if he was telling the truth.” He pointed to a spot but did not mention that it was a map of Arizona, not Nevada.
The regret in Washington was that the man they had carefully and expensively trained in Dreamland had had the temerity to survive.
Khrushchev fooled Eisenhower with incomplete statements. He hid the fact that Powers was alive until Ike came out with the cover story about a weather flight. The Russians displayed the wreckage of what they said was the U-2, but Kelly Johnson took one look at it and knew they were lying. It was another game, although he never understood why the Soviets had done it. The real wreckage was later displayed in Gorky Park.
It was a classic Cold War mind game. The United States kept insisting that Powers had had a flameout and had descended to a lower altitude to restart his engine, while Powers kept insisting he had been shot down at 68,000 feet, which he gave as the maximum ceiling for the plane. The government wanted to keep the maximum height from the Soviets; Powers wanted to signal his employers not to send over any other pilots, that the Soviets had indeed figured out how to reach the U-2’s operating altitude with SAMs. In citing 68,000 as the maximum altitude, which was not true, he was also subtly signaling that he had not told the Russians the real figure.
The Pentagon also wanted to hide the U-2’s true operating ceiling in order to preserve public trust in the strength of our nuclear deterrent. How long would it take the press to tell the public that if missiles could reach spy planes above 60,000 feet they could also reach Curtis LeMay’s bombers at their lower altitudes? It was a game something like the bomber gap game with the Russians: The president could not reveal that the U-2 had debunked the gap, for which candidate John F. Kennedy was attacking his administration, without revealing the existence of the spy plane.
Forced to chose between admitting he didn’t know what was happening in his own administration and admitting responsibility for the intrusion, Ike chose the latter, justifying the need for overflights because the Soviets had rejected his Open Skies proposal, and explicitly citing the danger of “another Pearl Harbor.”
In 1962 Powers was exchanged for Rudolph Abel, whom the CIA had described as “a master spy” but who later said he got 90 percent of his intelligence from The New York Times and Scientific American.
The exchange took place on a green bridge between Potsdam and Berlin, a scene out of a John le Carré novel. In a heavy coat and Russian-style fur hat, Powers came into view flanked by a pair of goons, then walked past the thin-faced Abel without acknowledging him.
On the plane home—one of Kelly Johnson’s Superconstellations—Powers ate a fine meal of steak and potatoes, as good as anything back at the Ranch.
He was debriefed in a safe house in the Maryland countryside. “What happened to my airplane?” Kelly Johnson asked him. He believed Powers’s story and, after the grilling at the congressional hearings, hired Powers as a test pilot flying U-2s. Apparently, Powers never knew his salary was paid by the CIA.
Powers’s book came out in 1970, for the tenth anniversary of the flight, and around the same time Lockheed let him go. He then became one of the first traffic-helicopter pilots in L
os Angeles.
The great national and political coming to terms with the shootdown followed. The planned superpower summit was bust; Eisenhower left office diminished in prestige. The whole incident became surrounded by a cloud of suspicion. The mission had been delayed by the Oval Office, and when the go-ahead finally came, there were problems with the radio and the word had been transmitted by an open telephone land line—a violation of security. Then there was “the Granger,” the radar spoofer that the Skunk Works had come up with to fool Soviet radars. If the Russians knew how the Granger worked, they could have used it as a tracking device. Three Taiwanese U-2s were later knocked down over the People’s Republic in a single day in this way.
There was one other dark possibility that Powers wondered about much later. A young Marine assigned to the radar facilities of the Japanese U-2 had defected to Russia in 1959. A formal U.S. government investigation discovered that on three occasions the Marine had spoken to the Soviets of the vital information he could bring with him if they welcomed him. That government investigation was the Warren Commission Report, and the young Marine was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Powers died in August 1977, when his traffic helicopter crashed just three miles from the Skunk Works. He had run out of fuel, but there are those who believe it was no accident.
Within months after Powers was shot down, Richard Bissell had the temerity to suggest the program continue flights over the Soviet Union. The president ruled it out. Never again, the country seemed to collectively resolve, would manned spy planes make the pilot and the country that vulnerable.