Powers then said he was ready to answer the one question that had obsessed his captors since the beginning of this ordeal. Although he still had no intention of telling the whole story to the KGB, he now thought he could risk a useful half-truth because there would be an international scandal if the KGB killed him during the interrogation. “There were no radio communications of any kind from the moment of my takeoff to the moment when I was shot down,” he said, carefully covering up the radio signaling all U-2 pilots did before entering Soviet airspace. “I was capable of contacting my base only a half hour before landing,” he added. “In fact, the radio on the U-2 had only a 400 to 500 mile range.” The range of the radio on the U-2 was actually much greater, the reason why radio silence had to be maintained, but the Soviets did not need to know that.
“You didn’t radio in when you were shot down?” Shelepin responded incredulously.
“I didn’t even have the opportunity to send any kind of signal,” replied Powers.
“Why didn’t you tell us this earlier?” asked the KGB chief.
“If you knew that I did not have any contact with my base and that the people of my service did not know what had happened to me,” Powers explained coolly, “then you would probably not have published that I was alive and what had happened to me.”
This truthful response evoked unexpected candor from the KGB chief. “The issue is not with you,” said Shelepin. “The matter is that the USA committed an aggressive act.” He then explained that he believed Powers’s flight was a deliberate provocation to scuttle the summit due to begin in only a few days. “Why else were you sent?” asked Shelepin.
Powers’s response was curt and patriotic. “I don’t know why I was sent. There must have been good reasons.” He then proceeded to offer the same rationale that President Eisenhower later gave in his first public defense of the flight. Powers recalled that he had once read in the newspaper that there were fears that the Soviet Union was planning to attack the United States. When his interrogators explained that it was difficult to differentiate between an intruder on a spy mission and one on a bombing run carrying thermonuclear weapons, Powers explained that he refused to accept that his government was taking unnecessary risks. It needed this intelligence.
IN SPITE OF Secretary Herter’s statement, Khrushchev continued to believe that the U-2 flight had been orchestrated by one of Eisenhower’s opponents in Washington. He might have thought differently if he had heard Eisenhower himself admit to sending the spy plane, but since that hadn’t happened, Khrushchev intended to go ahead with his policy of demilitarizing the Cold War in 1960. Preparations continued for the long-awaited official visit of Soviet air chief, Marshal Konstantin Vershinin, to the United States. Vershinin was due to leave on May 14 for Washington, where he would be the guest of the Pentagon. In the same spirit Khrushchev let the Foreign Ministry proceed with its preparations for the Paris summit. He made no effort to redraft any of the summit proposals that had been under review since early April.
Khrushchev was beginning to wonder, however, whether he had selected the right partner in Eisenhower. His uncertainty about the degree of the president’s complicity in the U-2 flight was on display two days later, when he and Marshal Biryuzov went to view the wreckage of the U-2 plane, which the Soviets had put on public view in Gorky Park. To the journalists at the park, Khrushchev lamented the difficult pressures on the well-meaning American president from the hard-liners around him. He singled out Secretary of State Herter for attack: “Far from feeling guilty and ashamed of aggressive actions, he justifies them and says they will continue into the future.”48 But for the first time Khrushchev was clearly finding it difficult to hold to his policy of not attacking Eisenhower personally for the outrage. “I was horrified to learn that the President had endorsed the acts,” he said in response to a question about whether the State Department’s May 9 statement had affected his opinion of Eisenhower. He still spoke of the importance of a successful summit and alluded to a future Eisenhower visit to the USSR, but a new tentativeness had crept into his words. “I am a human being and I have human feelings. I had hopes and they were betrayed…you must understand that we Russians always go whole hog: when we play, we play and when we fight, we fight.”49
The Presidium gathered the next day, May 12, to place its official stamp on the instructions and proposals that Khrushchev and the Soviet delegation were to take with them to Paris. No stenographic account from that meeting seems to exist. Later there were rumors that the Presidium was split over whether Khrushchev should go.50 But Mikoyan did not recall this as an episode in the story of Khrushchev’s struggle with the Foreign Ministry, and it was not cited in the bill of particulars against him when he was overthrown in October 1964.51 Instead what is known is that the Presidium endorsed the entire package of proposals and draft negotiating instructions that Gromyko’s team had been preparing for over a month.52
Indeed, Khrushchev was authorized to show flexibility on general housekeeping matters in Paris. If his Western counterparts refused to commit to a negotiating agenda, he was to let this pass. The goal was to foster a discussion with the powerful people who made decisions for the West. With regard to the U.S. delegation, the instructions had both sweet and sour elements for Eisenhower. Khrushchev was to remind the president of the fruitful discussions they had during his visit to America: “Negotiations between the USA and the USSR,” he was supposed to say, “have exerted very good influence on the international situation and, as hoped by the Soviet Union, could lead to a very good start in the direction of the establishment of general relations and cooperation between our countries.”
Khrushchev would have one demand for the Americans: The Kremlin expected the United States to undertake measures to stop all future intrusions into Soviet airspace. “The Soviet people hope not only to live in peace, but in friendship with the American people.”53 Ending the U-2 flights was a prerequisite.
While clearly the product of a sincere effort to achieve a successful summit, the instructions on Berlin displayed a crude understanding of how to achieve results at a summit. In discussing how to handle these proposals in Paris, the Presidium did not provide for any fallback positions. Instead it decided that the negotiations on this point “should be conducted in such a way to leave no doubt among the Western powers in the Soviet Union’s determination to complete a German peace treaty in order to liquidate the remnants of the past war, in particular the occupational regime in West Berlin.”54 The West would be offered the two-year interim agreement. As Khrushchev and the Foreign Ministry envisioned it, the interim agreement would not be a device to permit four-power negotiations in a calmer environment but merely a two-year postponement of what Khrushchev had hoped to achieve by fiat in 1958.
On disarmament, the Soviets had something more to offer. They were going to push hard for the dismantling of nuclear delivery devices in the first phase of general and complete disarmament. On the issue of inspections, Khrushchev was open to some form of on-site verification by foreign observers of the destruction of ICBMs and intercontinental bombers. Although the proposals were still very vague, they were less likely to be dismissed out of hand by the Western powers. Something might indeed come out of them.
IN THE DAYS before he left for Paris, Eisenhower had some idea of what Khrushchev might propose at the summit. The United States had known since early April to expect that the Soviet leader might use the meeting to spell out what he had meant by an interim Berlin agreement in his conversations with de Gaulle. After the Soviets submitted their final proposals to the French on May 9, they had been translated into English for the president.55 The French had also briefed their NATO allies on the Soviet interest in the French proposal for eliminating the means of delivering nuclear weapons. At NATO meetings in late April and early May the Western powers had discussed what this arrangement might mean in practice. Of all the participants, the American delegation was most hostile to the idea. Secretary of State Herter called the Fr
ench interest in this proposal “embarrassing to the West” and believed that the Soviets would find a way to cheat, rendering the whole concept of mutual disarmament very risky without an elaborate international inspection body.56
Eisenhower was neither optimistic nor pessimistic about what could be achieved in Paris. He was not as dismissive of nuclear disarmament as his new secretary of state, but he planned to continue to insist on verification and wondered if Khrushchev would ever go along. On Berlin, Eisenhower saw little room for negotiations. He just wanted the Soviets to accept the status quo. Change might be possible around the edges, perhaps involving a reduction in strength of allied contingents in West Berlin. With his approval, the State Department had started speaking of German self-determination instead of German reunification. In other words, if the Soviets thought that a change was required in the Germanys, then there should be an all-German vote or at least an all-Berlin vote. The United States was convinced that in either case the German people would vote for liberal capitalism, not Marxism-Leninism.
The U-2 affair distracted Eisenhower from his preparations for the summit. Instead of calmly weighing the arguments that he was receiving from the British and his own Soviet expert in Moscow about how to handle Khrushchev, he was preoccupied with reestablishing his leadership over national security. In his memoirs the president argued that he believed he had an obligation to take responsibility for this act. “To deny my part in the entire affair,” he argued, “would have been a declaration that portions of the government of the United States were operating irresponsibly, in complete disregard of proper presidential control.”57 As supreme allied commander during World War II Eisenhower had made some difficult and controversial decisions. He had never shirked responsibility for deciding whether to proceed with the Normandy landings, to give gasoline to General George Patton’s Third Army, or to try to beat the Russians in a race to Berlin.
On May 11 Eisenhower used a press conference to remove any doubt that he had authorized the Powers mission. Press conferences were difficult for this president. He never seemed able to get through one without getting tangled in his own syntax. Sometimes he did it intentionally. Before a press conference in 1955, Eisenhower had assured his press secretary, James Hagerty, “Don’t worry, Jim…I’ll just confuse them.”58 Sometimes the slipups were unintentional. Now, on May 11, Eisenhower spoke unusually clearly. “No one wants another Pearl Harbor,” he said. Because of the secrecy in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, the United States had to resort to espionage. It was a “distasteful but vital necessity.”59 Otherwise how could the United States keep track of those military forces that are “capable of massive surprise attacks”? Eisenhower wanted to reduce secrecy in international affairs because he knew how incompatible it was to security. For this reason he had made his Open Skies proposal in Geneva in 1955 and planned to renew that offer to Khrushchev in Paris. In the meantime he was not about to be apologetic about the need for espionage.
Ten years later, as a pensioner, Khrushchev recalled how angry he had become when he learned that the White House had refused to stick with its denial of responsibility for authorizing Powers’s mission. “A long as President Eisenhower was dissociated from the U-2 affair,” Khrushchev recalled, “we could continue our policy of strengthening Soviet-US relations, which had begun with my trip to America and my talks with Eisenhower.”60 The president made that impossible at his May 11 press conference.
Eisenhower’s statement put Khrushchev in a corner. Building up the prestige of the Soviet Union—in other words, U.S. respect for its power—was as essential to his program of constructing socialism as achieving détente in Europe and trade with the West. Yet the U.S. president’s words suddenly made superpower détente and Soviet prestige appear to be irreconcilable concepts. “Here was the President of the United States,” Khrushchev recollected later, “the man whom we were supposed to negotiate with at the meeting in Paris, defending outrageous, inadmissible actions!”
KHRUSHCHEV MAY HAVE learned of Eisenhower’s statement before the Presidium meeting that approved his instructions on May 12, but he didn’t allow it to alter his careful strategy for the summit. The first sign of the explosion to come was the announcement the next day that Marshal Vershinin would be postponing his trip to the United States. But it was not until May 14, the very day he was supposed to go to Paris, that Khrushchev revealed to his colleagues how upset Eisenhower’s embrace of the U-2 incident had made him.
At Vnukovo Airport, Khrushchev hastily assembled Malinovsky and Gromyko for an impromptu discussion with Presidium members who had come to see the delegation off. Khrushchev’s foreign policy aide, Oleg Troyanovsky, recalled that this took place in a glass-enclosed VIP lounge not far from the plane.61 Once aboard the Il-18 for the flight to Paris, Khrushchev announced that he had effectively thrown away his prepared script. With his aides huddling around him, he said that he wanted his speech for the next day rewritten. His staff would have to prepare it quickly once they arrived in Paris, so that it could be sent back to Moscow for formal approval by the rest of the Presidium.62 Khrushchev would insist on an apology from the United States as the price for his participation in the summit. If he didn’t get it, the Soviet delegation would leave Paris without divulging any of its proposals on disarmament or Berlin.
In Paris the delegation moved into the Soviet Embassy. The group was in a mild panic. The new speech needed to be completed and approved in a hurry and then translated into French and English. Gromyko’s deputy moaned to those who had time to listen, “What a situation, what a situation.”63 Khrushchev was now prepared to sacrifice the summit to get an apology from the Americans for the U-2 affair. He wanted Eisenhower to swallow his words and retract his defense of overhead reconnaissance: “A sovereign state cannot let the American president get away with his perfidious statement.”64 He also expected the United States to punish those “directly guilty of the deliberate violation” of Soviet airspace and to declare that “in future it will not violate the state borders of the USSR with its aircraft.” Khrushchev still believed that Allen Dulles had been solely responsible for Powers’s mission. All he wanted was for Eisenhower to admit this. In hammering out this new position, Khrushchev wondered if there were any way he could compel the president to apologize. Then he thought: “[W]e couldn’t possibly offer our hospitality to someone who had already, so to speak, made a mess at his host’s table.”65 He would threaten to withdraw the invitation he had given Eisenhower to visit the USSR in June. “We were charged up with explosive ideas,” Khrushchev later said.66
The next morning Khrushchev handed a copy of his six-page declaration, including the demand for an apology from President Eisenhower, to his host, French President Charles de Gaulle. Implicitly he wanted the French leader to pressure his American counterpart to give in, to allow the negotiations to continue. He stressed that the Americans were seeking to live by a double standard in international politics. “The United States has on more than one occasion declared that if Soviet planes appeared over U.S. territory, the United States would start a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Why is it, then, that when the situation is reversed they do not expect the same reaction? What is this unilateral right that they claim?”
Khrushchev expected some sympathy from de Gaulle, who was himself chafing at U.S. power. As he had explained to the Presidium in February, when he first presented his French strategy, Khrushchev knew that ultimately the French position alone would not determine whether there was a détente.67 However, he had worked hard to bring de Gaulle into his camp, above all by planning to associate the Soviet disarmament proposals with the French strategy of destroying nuclear delivery vehicles. The summit was in Paris, and de Gaulle would assuredly not want a failure. Yet despite good reasons to expect the contrary, the French president refused to play into Khrushchev’s hands. After listening to the Soviet leader’s explanation of his new demands, the Frenchman showed absolutely no sympathy. All nations spy, said de Gaulle, and the issue
of the U-2 was a matter between the United States and the Soviet Union. He did not want Khrushchev to lose sight of the big picture. The summit was designed, de Gaulle reminded him, to push ahead on the larger questions of international politics. If the Soviets thought they had to leave Paris, that would be unfortunate, but it would be up to them to decide what they needed to do.68 After meeting with de Gaulle, Khrushchev went to see Macmillan, to warn that the summit was in trouble if the Americans did not admit their mistake. The British prime minister also expressed the wish that Khrushchev not allow the U-2 incident to undermine this significant opportunity to improve international relations.69
EISENHOWER ARRIVED in Paris on May 15 to reports of Khrushchev’s last-minute insistence on an apology. At meetings with the French and the British leaders at 2:30 and 6:00 P.M., Eisenhower discussed the meaning of the Soviet demand. He was firmly against giving an apology, even at the risk of losing the state visit to Moscow.70 He did not believe that it would come to that, however. He shared the hope of his Western colleagues that Khrushchev would back down if told that the alternative was a failed conference. None of the participants held out much hope for a breakthrough on Berlin. All agreed that an interim agreement that specified an agreement within two years was tantamount to a new Soviet ultimatum and was unacceptable. But the three Western leaders believed that enough progress could be made in the area of disarmament to persuade Khrushchev to stay.
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