Bridge of Spies (29 page)
Authors: Giles Whittell
Tags: #History, #Motion Picture, #Nonfiction, #Retail
He floated past a set of power lines and landed hard in a field, where a farm worker who had been watching his descent from a tractor walked over and started to fold the parachute. A Moskvich car bumped over the field from the direction of the nearest village. The driver got out and helped Powers to his feet. “Are you OK?” he asked in Russian. No reply; just a troubled look from a man in shock.
“Are you Bulgarian?”
A crowd was gathering, drawn by the fireworks and the sight of Powers’s orange and white parachute on its long descent, and now by the sheer strangeness of his alien presence in their field. He carried a pistol in a holster outside his suit. A passenger from the Moskvich took it and gestured to Powers to get into the backseat. His seat pack went in the trunk. In it was a message printed on silk in fourteen languages: “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.” The Moskvich drove off, heading for Kosulino. Powers was offered a cigarette and took it. The passenger with the gun studied it for a while, then traced the letters “USA” in dust on the dashboard. Powers nodded.
* * *
Around ten o’clock there was a sudden ripple of movement in the row of dark overcoats on the reviewing stand in Red Square. Diplomats noticed it from their seats opposite the mausoleum. Khrushchev’s son noticed it from the family’s seats to the right. A man in air force uniform was pushing through the politburo toward Khrushchev himself, then whispering in his ear. It was Air Marshall Biryuzov, with the news.
* * *
“We were expecting him at noon,” says Stan Beerli, who was waiting in Bodo with the Hercules and the Quickmove recovery crew. “We started clicking about a half hour before that.”
A single click in reply was all they needed in the communications van in Bodo. They would know Powers was throttling back somewhere over the Arctic Ocean and starting his long glide back to earth with two drum-sized bobbins of nuclear secrets wound tightly in his Hycon B. But the click never came. They waited for a couple of hours, then started packing up. The Quickmove Hercules took Beerli back to Oslo, where he called the Agency’s extension at the U.S. embassy. Three words: “The party’s over.” Then Beerli headed back to Washington.
Powers was already in Moscow. He spent that night in a cell beneath the Lyubianka, having been strip-searched, well fed, questioned for several hours, and relieved of his poison pin by a KGB man with a briefcase. As it was taken away, he asked an interpreter to make sure it was handled with great care. The KGB later put out the story that it was tested on a dog and that the dog perished in ninety seconds.
*
One of the engineers who built the site, initially unaware what it was for, claims to have found out by asking Sergei Korolev if he could stop excavations early because they were causing flooding. The Chief Designer ordered him to keep on digging, inadvertently revealing his great secret by explaining that he needed a flame pit at least half as deep as his rocket was tall. “Will we fly to Mars as well?” the astonished engineer asked. “Of course, and farther than that,” Korolev replied.
*
For decades afterward this was not the fashionable view, nor one supported by evidence available in the West. Khrushchev was a shoe-banging cold warrior crazy enough to risk World War III by putting nuclear missiles in Cuba, and anyone who credited him with more peaceable intentions—including Eisenhower—was soft in the head. But post–cold war research has largely demolished this stereotype. In particular the writings of Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, and Kremlin papers seen by Aleksandr Fursenko, the father of Vladimir Putin’s education minister in Mr. Putin’s second presidential term, reveal a Khrushchev even more anxious to call off the arms race than Eisenhower himself.
*
It may not have known yet that Lee Harvey Oswald, who later shot President Kennedy, had offered Moscow information on the U-2 when trying to defect the previous year. Oswald had worked as a radar operator at a base used by U-2s in Japan, but his security clearance there was low.
“Rudolf Abel” was arrested in his underpants in a room in New York City’s Latham Hotel on June 21, 1957. At his subsequent arraignment and trial he played up to the image of Soviet superspy by hardly saying a word. (
Time & Life Pictures/Getty
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Powers in his U-2 helmet. The faceplate frosted over the moment he released his canopy after the aircraft broke up over Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960. (
Time & Life Pictures/Getty
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The early U-2 pilots trained at a top-secret Nevada base that they called the Ranch, also known as Area 51. More than half a century later it remains strictly off limits to civilians even though the neighboring nuclear test site has long since fallen silent. (
Getty
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Except to the few who saw it up close, during the cold war the U-2 only ever appeared as a thin black line against the sky. (
Time & Life Pictures/Getty
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The U.S. air base at Adana in southeastern Turkey as seen from a U-2 in 1958. (
© Stan Beerli/Courtesy of the author
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Former lieutenant Nikolai Batukhtin in Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, with an S-75 missile of the kind that his unit used to bring down Powers. (
Courtesy of the author
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Former captain Mikhail Voronov, eighty-nine years old, at his home on the Black Sea, recalling the moment that the missile fired on his order detonated near the tail of Powers’s aircraft, changing the course of history. (
Courtesy of the author
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The wreckage of Powers’s U-2 remains on permanent display in Moscow’s Central Armed Forces Museum fifty years after it was first exhibited to the public, and to bashful U.S. diplomats, in Gorky Park. (
Courtesy of the author
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