At home Khrushchev was already busy maneuvering to consolidate support for his ambitious domestic and foreign agenda. The Supreme Soviet, where Soviet leaders traditionally gave something akin to a state of the Soviet Union speech, was due to meet in the first week of May. For months the Central Committee had been preparing the presentation of the next phase in Khrushchev’s push to improve the Soviet standard of living. Khrushchev was now prepared to risk some of the measures that Presidium members Mikoyan and Furtseva had argued for unsuccessfully in 1958. He would announce a cut in the workweek from forty-eight hours to forty-two hours. Spending on consumer goods by the government would increase. At the same time, the Soviet state would “abolish” income taxes, though an increase in payroll taxes would weaken the effect of this tax cut.23 This was the domestic complement to his international détente policy. If he could reach some kind of general settlement with the United States to demilitarize the Cold War, then he could afford to reorder spending priorities at home.
In recent weeks support for his policy of unilateral disarmament had eroded somewhat. While he was in France in late March and early April, the Kremlin received an anonymous letter, apparently from a Soviet military commander, that criticized the January troop cuts.24 Khrushchev, who could have just as easily buried the letter, instead took it as a potentially dangerous sign of rumblings in the Soviet officer corps. He opted to deal directly with this infection of dissent before it spread. At the very first Presidium session after his return on April 3, Khrushchev had the letter read aloud.25 Then he defiantly attacked the political education of Soviet military commanders, who by their dissent were showing insufficient loyalty to the leadership of the Communist Party. He ordered that this education be improved and that the government consider setting up a reporting system to monitor what commanders were saying.
The anonymous letter had at least one fan in the top leadership of the Kremlin, Marshal Voroshilov, who insisted on showing his sympathy for military critics of Khrushchev’s efforts to cut defense spending.26 “Is it correct for us to reduce allotments for the construction of [civil air] shelters?” Voroshilov had asked at a Presidium meeting in late April in defiance of Khrushchev’s proposed defense budget. This comment had been reported to Khrushchev, who had been absent from the meeting.27
THE NEWS ABOUT Powers did not initially provoke Khrushchev to alter his strategy for the Paris summit. The Soviet leader still clung to an almost mystical belief in Eisenhower’s personal desire for peace. At a New Year’s Eve party a few months after his return from the United States, Khrushchev told the U.S. ambassador, “If only [Eisenhower] could serve another term, he was sure that our problems could be solved.”28 Khrushchev perceived the American president as being nearly alone among his advisers in this regard. Until the death of Foster Dulles in May 1959, Khrushchev had held out little hope that the genial Eisenhower would get his way. Now that the president seemed to have the upper hand in Washington, Khrushchev believed that the hard-liners around Eisenhower were doing whatever they could to derail the summit. He also suspected that Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence, had intentionally ordered the U-2 mission to disrupt the improvement of relations between Eisenhower and him. The Soviet leader was not about to give the American spy chief the satisfaction of letting that happen.
Khrushchev’s concerns about the importance of Eisenhower’s personal engagement in the summit extended to the composition of the U.S. delegation. In April the president had alerted Khrushchev that were the conference to last more than a week, he would have to leave for Lisbon to honor a previous commitment to the prime minister of Portugal. In his place the delegation would be headed by Richard Nixon. Khrushchev disliked Nixon, whom he associated with Foster Dulles’s approach to the Cold War. Khrushchev believed that somehow the United States would define its interests differently if Nixon rather than Eisenhower was heading the delegation. Khrushchev assured the French that he did not intend to hang around Paris to negotiate with the U.S. vice president. “I don’t respect Nixon,” he told the French ambassador in Moscow.29
Khrushchev convinced himself that he could exploit the U-2 incident to strengthen Eisenhower’s hand against the hawks around him. On April 28 he had used the occasion of a speech in Baku celebrating forty years of Soviet rule in Azerbaijan to warn the world that recent U.S. actions were complicating preparations for the summit. With the American pilot Powers in Soviet custody, he now had even better proof of the Eisenhower administration’s apparent schizophrenia. Khrushchev planned to reveal enough about the U-2 mission to embarrass hard-line American cold warriors without pushing the president so far as to endanger the summit.
As the interrogations of Powers began at Lubyanka Prison, Khrushchev decided that the French, his future hosts, should be the first Westerners to get an inkling of his new worries about Washington. Meeting with the French ambassador, Maurice Dejean, on May 3, the same day as the U.S. announcement of the lost weather mission, Khrushchev warned the ambassador that “he had real reason to doubt the desire of some of the leaders to find a solution to the problems under discussion.”30 He did not reveal that reason but used the conversation to outline his concerns about the machinations of those in the United States who did not want to pursue détente. In a message dated April 30, de Gaulle had suggested that perhaps some of the meetings in Paris should be held behind closed doors.31 At the meeting with the French ambassador, Khrushchev couched his rejection of secret sessions in terms of not wishing to give Western hawks any opportunity to ruin the summit. Secret discussions, he believed, would shield the opponents of détente from international public opinion. Thus, he concluded, the summit “could be reduced to zero.”
Khrushchev also mentioned to the French that he would be sharing his assessment of the international situation with the party leadership during the session of the Supreme Soviet scheduled to open on May 5. “My report will establish, in an incontestable manner, that there are people who do not wish a détente and who instead are seeking a return to the cold war.” He added: “At this moment, I cannot reveal the evidence I am talking about.”
Two days later, as Khrushchev had told the French he would, he released some of the evidence to the Supreme Soviet. In the midst of a three-and-one-half-hour speech outlining his domestic reform package, he reported that on May 1 a U.S. plane on a mission of “aggressive provocation aimed at wrecking the summit conference” had violated Soviet airspace and been shot down.32 Observing that this action was only the latest sign that the “imperialists and militarists” around Eisenhower were gaining strength, Khrushchev expressed his confidence that the president still wanted the upcoming negotiations to succeed though he faced a tough task in controlling his own administration. The Soviet leader singled out the new American secretary of state, Christian Herter, Assistant Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon, and Vice President Nixon as representatives of the harder line. He referred to the possibility that Nixon might replace Eisenhower at the Paris talks as “leav[ing] the cabbage to the care of the goat.”33 Saying that disarmament and a “peaceful settlement with Germany, including the question of West Berlin,” were the “vital problems of the day,” Khrushchev indicated that he still intended to go to Paris, though he held out less hope that anything would be accomplished there.
Khrushchev spoke from a position of strength. The day before, the Presidium had approved a series of leadership changes that he had designed to increase his influence in that body.34 Brezhnev was chosen to replace Marshal Voroshilov as Soviet president, a purely ceremonial post, but one that Brezhnev later used to acquire his own power. Voroshilov was to be removed from the Presidium in July. Khrushchev also removed two former protégés, Nikolai Belyaev and Aleksei Kirichenko, from the Presidium. He blamed Belyaev for recent agricultural failures in the “virgin lands” of Kazakhstan. Kirichenko’s reappointment to the Soviet embassy in Czechoslovakia had been arranged a few weeks earlier, but any hope that he could retain a seat on the Presidium was dashed. Me
anwhile Khrushchev added three new allies as full members of the Presidium: Aleksei Kosygin, Nikolai Podgorny, and Dmitri Polyansky.
In his speech to the Supreme Soviet, Khrushchev never mentioned Francis Gary Powers. In fact he said nothing about the fate of the pilot of the downed American plane. For the moment Khrushchev preferred to let Washington tangle itself in its own lies.
THE FIRST LEAK to Washington that Powers might be alive came from a most unlikely source. Jakob Malik was a veteran Soviet diplomat who was as uninformative to foreign diplomats as he was trustworthy to the Kremlin. But perhaps drink or age got to him at a reception at the Ethiopian Embassy that followed Khrushchev’s Supreme Soviet speech. In response to a question from the Swedish ambassador about the fate of the pilot, Malik responded, “I don’t know exactly. He is being questioned.” No one as yet suspected the American pilot was alive. Malik realized his mistake immediately and tried to explain away his gaffe. In reporting this incident to the Soviet Foreign Ministry later in the day, he explained that there was little reason for anxiety that the Swedish ambassador would tell the Americans. “He is neutral, after all.”35
U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, who had been within earshot of the conversation at the reception, did not need the Swede to give him a special report. At 7:00 P.M., Moscow time, he cabled the first intelligence the administration had that Powers was still alive. Thompson was not 100 percent sure—he could not have been—that Malik was telling the truth. In his dispatch home he mentioned the “possibility” that Powers was alive.36
A few hours before the cable arrived, Eisenhower had convened the National Security Council to discuss how to maintain the cover-up. The talk at the NSC was about what Khrushchev had said in his speech on the plane’s having been shot down. No one as yet was prepared to contemplate that the pilot or any incriminating piece of the plane could have survived.37
Eisenhower’s instincts were to stick with the NASA cover story and not say any more. Secretary of State Herter and his other advisers pressed him to authorize a new statement that would show that the United States—despite Khrushchev’s bluster—stuck by its original (and false) explanation. “I accepted the recommendations of my associates,” Eisenhower later recalled, and the United States headed further along the murky road of international deceit.38 Officials at the State Department announced that the president had authorized an “inquiry” to determine how this plane managed to violate Soviet airspace. The department also stated that the plane mentioned by Khrushchev might be the NASA science plane whose “pilot reported difficulty with his oxygen equipment. It is entirely possible,” the statement added, “that having failure in the oxygen equipment, which could result in the pilot losing consciousness, the plane continued on automatic pilot for a considerable distance and accidentally violated Soviet airspace.”39
After Thompson’s cable entered the bureaucratic bloodstream in the afternoon, the administration still had a hard time believing that Powers could have survived this crash. Nevertheless, the State Department reflexively prepared a diplomatic note requesting information on Powers’s condition. It was to delivered to the Soviets the next day.
POWERS KNEW NOTHING of the drama in Washington. In Moscow his interrogations continued, eleven hours a day, every day. Shelepin returned on May 6 to put more pressure on Powers. By reiterating in its May 5 statement that a U.S. pilot had reported oxygen difficulties, the State Department had unknowingly hardened the KGB’s belief that the U-2 pilot must have maintained contact with his base. Once again Shelepin put the question to him. Again Powers refused to answer. “Your silence does not help your situation,” the KGB chief responded.40
As he had the very first time he had been asked about the U-2’s radio capabilities, Powers brought up the medical condition of his mother, who he was sure would be saved by news that her son was still alive. This time Shelepin decided to make a direct offer to him: “If you honestly answer this question, then you will be given the chance to write your mother a letter.” Powers refused to give up what he believed was the last card that he had to play: “Give me the chance to write my mother a letter and to receive an answer and I will answer all of your questions.”41
THE OFFICIAL “INQUIRY” from the State Department about Powers’s condition and word from insiders of Jakob Malik’s mistake prompted Khrushchev to reveal finally that Powers was alive and under arrest. At the closing session of the Supreme Soviet on May 7 he told his audience and the world what had actually been found in Sverdlovsk on May Day, squeezing every ounce of drama out of the story. To a chorus of “shame, shame,” Khrushchev unfurled photographs alleged to be from the film in Powers’s cameras. To a chorus of “bandits, bandits,” he produced the needle that had been dipped in poison for the U-2 pilot to commit suicide. In describing the foreign currency and gold that Powers had carried along on his flight to bribe his way home, Khrushchev made fun of the CIA’s precautions: “Why was all this necessary in the upper layers of the atmosphere?” He had an answer: “Or maybe, the pilot was to have flown still higher to Mars and was going to lead astray Martian ladies?”42
NEWS THAT POWERS was alive stunned Washington. Eisenhower was both surprised and angry. Khrushchev had mentioned many details in his speech about the U-2 program, especially the highly classified detail that flights actually took off from a secret airfield in Pakistan and not from Turkey. Eisenhower assumed Powers had “started talking as soon as he hit the ground.”43
Commenting on Khrushchev’s revelation, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow advocated admitting to the act of espionage without suggesting that the president had personally authorized the mission. “This would preserve for us,” Thompson argued, “[the] great asset we have in the regard which Soviet and other people have for [the] President.”44
Initially Washington took Ambassador Thompson’s advice. In response to this latest Khrushchev performance, the administration formally acknowledged that the U-2 had been on an intelligence mission but that the mission was unauthorized: “As a result of the inquiry ordered by the President, it has been established that insofar as the authorities are concerned, there was no authorization for any such flights as described by Khrushchev.” As the administration had hoped, the world press reported this statement as if President Eisenhower himself had not authorized intelligence missions over the Soviet Union, thus giving the impression that the CIA had acted alone, as some kind of rogue element in the federal government.45
Washington’s allies reacted with grave concern about the effect of this incident on the forthcoming summit. Publicly the British and French leaders showed support for the American president. Privately they castigated him. “The Americans have created a great folly,” Prime Minister Macmillan confessed to his diary. The British leader had very good reason to be annoyed. The Paris summit had been his idea. He believed in the power of face-to-face meetings to shape high politics in a positive manner. He was also no stranger to the problem of balancing espionage and diplomacy. The British, who received U.S. spy planes on loan, were participants in the top secret USSR overflight program. Macmillan had suspended these flights weeks before the summit and had been told that the Americans would do the same.46
Macmillan wanted to minimize the consequences of the American mistake. He sent word to Eisenhower that Washington should take a leaf from the British book in such matters. In the meantime the British government steadfastly refused to acknowledge any intelligence activities. In fact the country’s foreign intelligence service, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), had no formal legislative existence. Macmillan wanted Eisenhower to say nothing.
The president was unhappy with the way his administration’s official explanation of the U-2 affair was developing. He disliked the implications of what his ambassador in Moscow and the British prime minister were suggesting. How could he let the world think that U.S. airplanes could violate Soviet airspace, an act of war, without higher authorization? In the nuclear era, when millions of people could be destr
oyed by solitary planes carrying hydrogen bombs, an unauthorized flight was inexcusable.
He ordered the State Department to correct the record. On May 9 Secretary of State Herter retracted the earlier characterization of the flight as unauthorized. In its place, the secretary announced that such flights, while violations of international law, were necessary in the real world of Cold War politics. The administration’s new position was that the president had authorized the U-2 operations in general, though not this flight in particular. The Soviets had refused to accept President Eisenhower’s Open Skies proposal in 1955 and so had reaped the U-2 program as one of the consequences. Herter made no mention of the role of U.S. public opinion in pressing a reluctant Eisenhower to pursue the U-2 overflights so dangerously close to the summit. Both the international press and the Soviets interpreted Herter’s statement to mean that the United States was determined to continue its policy of overflights of Soviet territory.
THE KGB’S EFFORTS to break Powers continued in spite of Khrushchev’s dramatic announcement. To keep the pressure on him, the pilot was not told that the world knew he was alive. But after two more days of Powers’s repeating that he would not discuss the U-2’s radio capabilities unless he was in open court or had received evidence that his parents knew he was alive, Shelepin concluded he would have to switch tactics. On May 10 Powers was shown the front pages of Izvestia and the New York Times of May 8, which had reported on Khrushchev’s statement that the U.S. pilot had survived the crash. The interpreter read from Izvestia Khrushchev’s comment: “We also have the pilot, who is alive and kicking.” He read as well from some regional U.S. newspapers, one of which quoted Powers’s father saying, “I’m 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.” This broke the tension in the room. Hearing his father’s voice in those words, Powers began to cry.47
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