CHAPTER 11
THE CRASH HEARD ROUND THE WORLD
LENINGRAD WAS SPORTING new colors in May 1960. That year the traditional blood-red banners with Marxist-Leninist haiku celebrating May Day had some unusual competition. There were greens and newly painted yellows on some buildings, and along the main railway line to Moscow, new fences were sprouting. Russia’s second city was undergoing a face-lift in preparation for a special American visitor, a man whose military exploits in the Second World War had earned him a place in Soviet hearts. Now president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower was expected to arrive on a state visit in mid-June.
No American visitor of any kind, however, was expected that spring in Povarnia, a village near Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains. But at about 11:00 A.M., local time, on May 1, villagers heard an explosion, and in the upper sky an orange and white parachute appeared with what looked to be a man hanging from it. Home for the May Day holiday, P. E. Asabin was startled by the sound and ran out to the street, where he was in time to see a column of dust rise and then fall on the village. As he started talking to a neighbor about this strange noise, Asabin observed that many people were running out of the village toward something. Then, not more than ninety feet away, he could see a man in a parachute coming toward him. “I ran immediately to his side and caught up with him, just as he landed.”1
V. N. Glinskich also saw the mysterious parachutist. Glinskich was at work on the collective farm, spreading manure using one of the fancy, by Soviet standards, automatic dung distributers, when he heard the bang. “Then I suddenly glimpsed in the sky,” Glinskich later told the KGB. “High up I could see some kind of balloon…. When the balloon fell closer, then it became clear to me, that this was a parachutist.”2
There were some official watchers that day too. At the command dispatch point of the Sverdlovsk civilian airport in Koltsovo, two KGB officers, Captain V. P. Pankov and Lieutenant I. A. Ananeyev, witnessed the morning show. Concerned that this was some kind of enemy paratroop action, they called the chairman of the local collective farm, M. N. Berman, with an order that the stranger be detained. Moments later the two KGB men were off on their motorcycles toward the nearby village.
Meanwhile a gaggle of townspeople reached the parachutist. At first they assumed he was a Soviet. “Fsyo v poriatke? [Is everything okay?],” they asked as a few tried to help him out of his parachute, radio helmet, and flight suit. But the pilot or spaceman or whatever he was couldn’t understand them. As it became clear that he wasn’t Russian, the wonder turned to suspicion and fear. One of the villagers saw a holster with a pistol and, on the parachute harness, what seemed to him like a Finnish hunting knife. Another saw another parachute, this one red and white, descending from even higher up in the sky. Using sign language, the villagers asked the soldier, “How many are you?” The alien put up one finger. This brought some relief. But the villagers decided to act before the authorities arrived. The man was pushed into the back of a car, a two-cylinder Moskvich, and driven over to the house of Berman’s driver, who could take the stranger in the collective farm’s service car to see the boss at headquarters.3
Captain Pankov and Lieutenant Ananyev were already at the headquarters of the collective farm when the stranger arrived. A nurse took a look at the man. He had a slight abrasion on his right leg, but aside from an elevated pulse, he seemed normal. Then the KGB took over. Pankov and Ananyev had no experience interrogating strange parachutists. But there was a procedure for this, as there was for almost everything in the KGB. The villagers had brought along the man’s helmet and overalls. The helmet had radio gear installed, so the man must have been a pilot of sorts. Oddly the overalls told more. Stitched into the side was a leaflet topped by an American flag and an inscription in several languages, including Russian: “I am an American and do not speak your language. I need food, shelter, assistance. I will not harm you. I bear no malice toward your people. If you help me, you will be rewarded.”4 Once they filled out all the paperwork on the American pilot, the KGB men had to take this fellow to Sverdlovsk, the nearest city where there was a major KGB center with an English-speaking interpreter.
In Sverdlovsk, Francis Gary Powers finally met someone who could speak at least broken English. He gave his name as he was required to do, as if he were a prisoner of war. The KGB interpreter was fascinated by a pin that he had found in the one of the pockets of the overalls that the villagers had taken from Powers. “What is this needle for?” “It is an ordinary needle, used for ordinary things.” The Geneva Convention said nothing about describing suicide devices.
KHRUSHCHEV DID NOT yet know who Francis Gary Powers was, but the illegal flight of his U-2 spy plane over the USSR had been on the Soviet leader’s mind from the moment he awoke on May Day. Ordinarily the first secretary’s family accompanied him to Red Square for the traditional parade, but this year the routine had been broken by a telephone call from Malinovsky at 5:00 A.M.5 The Soviet defense minister told Khrushchev that less than half an hour earlier a foreign plane had been detected crossing north into Soviet territory from Afghanistan. Having been severely reprimanded by the Presidium for not shooting down the U-2 that had violated Soviet airspace on April 9, Malinovsky was determined that this U.S. spy plane would not get away. He ordered a halt on all civil air traffic over most of the Soviet Union to facilitate the pursuit.6
Khrushchev tried to conceal the developing story from his family, telling them only that he would have to leave first for the Kremlin, and they were to follow later in another car. Subdued and preoccupied, he ate his breakfast without saying a word. His son, Sergei, knew not to ask what the matter was: “A great deal could happen in our vast country that we were not supposed to know at home.”7 But Khrushchev could not hold the secret long. Walking to his car with Sergei, he said, “They flew over again.” “How many?” his son asked. “Like before—one. It’s flying at a great height. This time it was detected at the border, at the same place.”8
From the initial reports, Khrushchev knew that the U-2 was already near Tyuratam, the site of three of the country’s now five ICBM launchpads. When asked by his son before leaving the residence whether the Soviet air defense command would catch this intruder, Khrushchev did not show his customary optimism. What he found so infuriating was how well, and how easily, the American spy planes revealed the weaknesses in Soviet defenses. “[The Soviet military chiefs] claim that they’ll shoot it down—unless they miss,” Khrushchev replied. “You know perfectly well that we have only a few T-3s [high-altitude interceptor jets] there and that missiles have a small operational radius at that altitude. It’s all up to chance.”9
As Khrushchev’s limousine sped off to the Kremlin, it seemed as if the Soviet military would confirm his pessimism. Because of the national holiday, there weren’t many T-3s available to scramble, and some of the Soviet air defense missile sites that Powers passed on his way north were not even manned. But around Sverdlovsk Powers flew over two battalions armed with the Soviet Union’s new S-75 surface-to-air missile (SAM).
Soviet commanders ordered the first battalion to fire on the intruder. Two missiles jammed while being launched, but one was fired successfully. Exploding just behind the U-2, it caused the fragile plane to break apart. In the confusion, the second SAM battalion also fired a salvo, hitting one of the MiG-19s pursuing the U-2 at a lower altitude and causing the death of a Soviet pilot. It was the red and white parachute of that mortally wounded airman that Powers and the townspeople of Povarnia had seen in the sky.
Khrushchev was already standing on the balcony of Lenin’s Tomb reviewing the colorful waves of May Day celebrants when he received news of the capture of the American pilot. The commander of Soviet air defenses, carried by the newfound pride of his service, rushed to the platform. Marshal Sergei Biryuzov was still dressed in his combat uniform, rather than the full-dress uniform he would have worn for the May Day celebration. This breach in protocol caused a minor stir in the Kremlin family section behind
the dais, where the Soviet elite strained to read meaning into Biryuzov’s unusual appearance.10
Khrushchev was delighted to hear that this time the American intruder had not gotten away. Immediate instructions were sent to Sverdlovsk to bring the pilot to Moscow. The chairman of the KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin, and the procurator general of the USSR, R. A. Rudenko, who had represented the Soviet Union at the Nuremberg war crimes trial, were to conduct the interrogation themselves. Powers was to be held and questioned at the dreaded Lubyanka, the KGB’s headquarters just north of Red Square.
“BILL BAILEY didn’t come home.” Richard Bissell, the CIA’s deputy director for plans, had dreaded ever hearing those words, agency code for a missing U-2. At least, Bissell believed, he did not have to worry that the Soviets would learn very much from this mishap. The skin of the U-2 was so fragile, and it was flying at so high an altitude, that the plane and its pilot would have been destroyed if the plane had gone down. As he had told President Eisenhower, the odds were one in a million that the pilot could survive the event.11 However, it was a shame to lose Powers. In four years with CIA he had flown more U-2 flights over the Soviet Union than any other pilot.
There was a plan on the shelf to deal with a failed mission. Four years earlier Bissell had developed the false story to be put out if a U-2 were ever lost over hostile territory. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (reorganized as the National Air and Space Administration [NASA] in 1958) would issue a public statement that it had lost contact with a U-2 conducting high-altitude weather research. At the time Bissell proposed this cover story, two of President Eisenhower’s closest scientific advisers—Edwin Land, the owner of Polaroid, and James Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—had raised objections. In their view it would be better for the United States to own up immediately to this high-level espionage as a regrettable requirement of the Cold War. The White House, however, accepted Bissell’s plan, which by 1960 had become standard operating procedure.12
The plan was silent on what to do if the pilot survived. This was a curious oversight because U-2 pilots had survived crashes during training. In December 1956 a U-2 pilot suffering from high-altitude sickness had flown his plane too fast, causing it to disintegrate at a very high altitude over a test ground in Arizona. The pilot managed to eject the plane’s canopy and was sucked out of the cockpit at twenty-eight thousand feet. He parachuted to safety.13 There were other stories of pilots surviving malfunctions, but none had been shot down. Perhaps the oversight also reflected an assumption that no U-2 pilot would allow himself to be caught alive.
Eisenhower learned of the plane’s disappearance on the afternoon of May 1. He was at Camp David and received the news by telephone. The president was told simply that the U-2 was overdue. More than anyone in his administration, he dreaded hearing this kind of news. He felt completely responsible for the U-2 flights. He approved each individually, and he had never found the decision easy to make. Twice he had imposed moratoriums on these flights because of his concerns that they were too provocative. Now he faced a potential failure just before the long-awaited superpower summit. It would be hard to imagine a more inopportune moment.
Even though it was possible the plane had gone down, Eisenhower had reason to hope the Soviets would not be able to learn much about the mission. He had been assured that the fragility of the U-2, which was really more of a glider than an airplane, made it impossible that the pilot and the sensitive equipment aboard would survive impact. “This was a cruel assumption,” Eisenhower later acknowledged, “but I was assured that the young pilots undertaking these missions were doing so with their eyes wide open and motivated by a high degree of patriotism, a swashbuckling bravado, and certain material inducements.”14
DETAILED INTERROGATION of Francis Gary Powers began immediately after his arrival in Moscow on May 1. The prisoner was led from his cell into a large room with a long table.15 There were about twelve people there, though only two mattered. The setting was stark and forbidding, but Powers at least could be thankful that his questioners abstained from any kind of torture, including the nonlethal but nevertheless annoying tactic of shining a bright light into a prisoner’s eyes. The KGB report on his first interrogation concluded that he had “answered all questions.” The authors of this book are the first scholars to have had access to the official Soviet interrogations of Powers. In fact Powers said very little of consequence and nothing proscribed by the CIA’s policy for captured pilots. He had been instructed in training that were he to be captured he was “perfectly free to tell the full truth about their mission with the exception of certain specifications of the aircraft.”16 True to these guidelines, Powers admitted he was a civilian working for the CIA but concealed from his captors the cruising altitude of the U-2, the number of times he had overflown Soviet territory, and the names of his superiors at the CIA. The needle was one thing he was prepared to talk about. He now admitted that it was indeed unusual. “It contains a very active poison. A prick from this needle brings instant death,” he told his interrogators. Powers added that this was specially given to him “in the event of atrocities or torture, but he was never to use it on anybody but himself.”17 He was being truthful. Indeed, pilots had the right not to bring the suicide device on their mission, and they were told that the use of it, under any circumstances, was optional.18 Powers decided to break his silence on the needle because his situation was already bad enough without accidentally causing a death in the KGB.19
The hard questioning began two days later, on May 3.20 The KGB chief, Shelepin, asked Powers how he had been able to maintain radio contact from a high altitude. The question bothered Powers. As he well knew, the U-2s were outfitted with radios, but the pilots had strict instructions on when to use them. When the pilots reached cruising altitude and were about to enter enemy airspace, they were expected to click their radio switch to signal that the mission was a go. Then they were to maintain absolute radio silence until they landed at a friendly base.21 Powers had followed procedure on May 1. He had maintained radio silence even during those harrowing moments after he heard the explosion near his plane.
Powers feared that if he answered the question honestly, it would lead to other questions that might enable the Soviets to figure out that the U.S. government had no evidence that he had survived the attack on his aircraft. Powers believed that the Soviets would be much less likely to kill him if the Kremlin assumed that Washington thought he was still alive. For the first time since his ordeal began, Powers dropped the façade of cooperation. “I don’t believe I can answer that question,” he said, “it would not be in my self-interest.”
The interrogators pushed him. “But it is in your interest to answer it.”
Powers still refused to answer, but he perceived an advantage to exploit in his interrogators’ interest in the radio question. Perhaps he could use this issue to force the Soviets to announce publicly that he was alive, thereby ensuring he could not be held indefinitely or killed without international knowledge. “My mother is very sick,” Powers replied. “If I do not answer the question, your government might report in the press that I am still alive, and this would be very welcome to me.”
Powers’s performance worked. Shelepin and Rudenko were now convinced that the American pilot was indeed hiding something important. Powers’s U-2 had initially zigzagged away from one of the SAM sites protecting Sverdlovsk, and the Soviets suspected that the CIA had been able to warn him about this site in flight. Shelepin and Rudenko pressed Powers for more details: “When would you answer this question?”
Powers stalled, deciding to hold off on any further discussions about deals. “I don’t know…,” he replied. “It seems to me that it would be more to my advantage not to answer than to answer this question.”
The KGB chief and the chief prosecutor were perplexed by his stubbornness. “We insist that you answer this question,” they said. If a deal was not possible, then he might yet be bullied
into talking. “If you don’t answer then it is not only not in your interest but it would be damaging to you.” Powers would not give up. “I would prefer not to answer,” he said.
Powers’s display of nerve in the Lubyanka coincided with the release of the prearranged cover story in Washington. On May 3, NASA issued a statement that a joint NASA-USAF Air Weather Service mission had apparently gone down in the Lake Van area of Turkey. “During the flight in eastern Turkey,” said the release, “the pilot reported over the emergency frequency that he was experiencing oxygen difficulties.”22 The deception was transparent to the Soviet authorities, but it was to have a side effect never imagined by the CIA’s Bissell. The reference to an “emergency frequency” increased the KGB’s impatience at getting the captured U.S. pilot to divulge what he knew about the U-2’s communications capabilities.
FOR ALL THE satisfaction at Powers’s capture, this unwanted American guest had arrived at an awkward time for Khrushchev. Within two weeks the Soviet leader was expected to travel to Paris for the long-awaited summit of the four powers that had defeated Nazi Germany in 1945: the USSR, the United States, Great Britain, and France. Since his January announcement of unilateral cuts in the Soviet military, Khrushchev had tried to choreograph his moves with maximum effect on this upcoming summit meeting, having made a trip to France in the spring to involve Charles de Gaulle in a plan to get NATO to accept limits on nuclear delivery vehicles.
Khrushchev's Cold War Page 36