Bridge of Spies (31 page)

Norton also seemed to Oliver Powers a more auspicious place than Pound to open a shoe shop.

In the spring of 1960 McAfee and his partner had a none-too-onerous amount of lawyering to do, but they did maintain an office. “It was on the second deck in back of the bank,” he remembers, “and Oliver had his shoe shop directly underneath. And believe it or not, in those days telephones were not rampant, and we had one line. I never will forget the number. Eight one three.”

“I became acquainted with Oliver because he had a lot of time to spend, no clients or anything, and he and I became quick friends,” McAfee continues. “I used to sit and chat with him, and he would tell
me about Gary because Gary and I were the same age. He’d gone to Milligan and I’d gone to Lincoln Memorial, both in Tennessee. I didn’t know him, but Oliver used to tell me that Gary was a pilot in the air force, and that went on through ’59 and continued on into 1960 … and anyway he came running up there one morning and said, ‘Carl, my son’s been shot down over Russia.’ And I said, ‘Surely not,’ and anyway, we chatted, and he said, ‘Yeah, he has been.’ ”

Oliver was not mistaken. Two men from the CIA had done the nine-hour drive from Washington to bring the news on May 3, a Tuesday, which was the day the U.S. government first put out a press release admitting a U-2 was missing. The press took a while to catch up because that first release said nothing about Russia, but when they did catch up all hell broke loose.

“All of a sudden people were trying to reach Oliver,” McAfee says. “He didn’t have a telephone. I don’t think he even had a telephone in his home, but somehow or another they got my telephone number, so I started getting all these calls to ask if I would get a hold of Mr. Powers—there were newspapers galore, and they wanted to talk to him.”

The agency people would have preferred Mr. Powers to leave the talking to them, but—“well, you’d have to know Oliver,” Mr. McAfee goes on. “If he wanted to talk, he was going to talk. That’s the problem the government had with him. I thought the world of him, and he was not one to sit back and have somebody tell him, ‘You’ve got to keep quiet, and you can’t do this or you can’t do that.’ Because he was a person of action.”

At about the time that two agency men turned up at the Powers home in Pound, two more called on Barbara Powers and Eck von Heinerberg, the family dog, on superhouse trailer row outside Adana. They told her Gary was missing and took her to the base doctor for an injection to calm her down. Three days later they came back and told her to pack for an emergency return to the United States. Her heavier belongings—her rugs, Gary’s shotgun, the silver-gray Mercedes—would be shipped later. Eck could join her on the plane.

It was as if the Agency’s top secret global reach was all facilitated with bungee cord: one long, sudden, jarring flight and Barbara’s two-and-a-half-year Turkish interlude was over. She was going back to Milledgeville and her dyspeptic mother. The Agency men “fed me liquor to help
ease my nerves,” she later claimed. They flew with her through the night to New York, where they changed planes in a hurry and flew on to Atlanta. Eck went on by a different route in a crate, so as not to give away Barbara’s arrival to the waiting press. In Atlanta her traveling companions rented a car for the drive to Milledgeville, but halfway there they stopped and asked if she would like to buy a gift for Mother’s Day. That would be the next day, Sunday, May 8. Barbara clambered out with her one good leg and her other still in plaster. She saw her picture and Gary’s on the front page of a newspaper and fainted on the spot.

*  *  *

Stan Beerli was not unduly worried as he flew south in the Hercules, back to Oslo. He knew Powers could have been shot down, but thought the most likely explanation for his no-show was that the mission had been scrubbed. He still thought so on the plane back to Washington and on his way into work on Tuesday, May 3. But when he walked into project HQ on H Street, he found “a first-class panic” under way.

The night duty officer in the early hours of May Day had been Carmine Vito, “the lemon drop kid.” As a U-2 pilot over Eastern Europe, Vito was said to have sucked on an L pill for a while before realizing it wasn’t one of his preferred lemon drops (not true, he later said; he only got as far as looking at it). But he really was the first man in Washington to know something might be wrong with Mission 4154: at around 4:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time he took a call from the NSA saying that a surge in Russian military radio chatter starting more than three hours earlier had ended suddenly soon after one o’clock. Then Beerli’s message had arrived via the Oslo station chief.

Vito phoned Bob King, one of Richard Bissell’s special assistants. “Bill Bailey didn’t come home,” Vito said. “You’d better find the man, quick.”

“The man” was Bissell. King knew he was out of town but didn’t have Walt Rostow’s number and had to tell the operator it was a “goddamn national emergency” before she gave it to him. By the time he got through, Bissell had left anyway. When he landed in Washington he went to the office—it was not far out of his way and there was a mission in progress, after all—to find the place in chaos.

Bissell was much admired on H Street for his cool head and his troubleshooting
genius. His staff were relieved to see him. He practically sauntered in, Bob King recalled, “and everybody said (if not out loud, at least to themselves), ‘Whew, now we’re off the hook because he’ll take charge of this mess.’ … He came in as if he were about to assemble a Monday staff meeting—‘Hmmm, hmmm, yeah, OK, we’ll talk about it.’ Not excited.”

Inside, he felt “a sense of disaster about the entire affair.” No end run round the air force was going to help him now. No quiet personal plea to Goodpaster or Dulles could put a U-2 back in the air once it was in pieces in the Urals. He was pretty certain the whole program would be canceled. He was also pretty certain the pilot would be dead. That being so, regrets apart, the next step was clear. The president had to be informed and asked to sign off on the preexisting cover story. Goodpaster was alerted at home in Alexandria. The Army Signal Corps put him through to Eisenhower at Camp David. Bissell passed on the news, and the president chewed it over in silence as he flew back to the White House on Marine One. He approved the cover story the next morning. The gist was a terse statement to be used as the basis of a press release issued from Adana:

Lake Van was 1,500 miles from Sverdlovsk, where the CIA was already reasonably certain Mission 4154 had ended. “Oxygen difficulties” could only get a plane so far off course. “If the Soviets claimed it had crashed not near the border but in the middle of the country, we planned to accuse them of moving it to a site that they had selected for propaganda purposes,” Bissell wrote later. “All of this might have worked if Powers had not survived.”
Might
have—but he was already clutching at straws.

*  *  *

The Soviet chatter picked up by the NSA on May Day did not stop when the two dots collided on Major Voronov’s screen. In fact, at that moment it intensified. The screen dissolved into a blur of reflections that Voronov at first thought might be chaff thrown out by the intruder to confuse the missile. In any case he was preoccupied by the failure of two of his three rockets to fire.

After the cold war that failure was used to embarrass the veterans of the Soviet rocket troops: their vaunted surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) were like guard dogs that could not even be relied on to growl; or, in one version, two out of three shots had to be aborted at the last second because they would have obliterated the control cabin in the middle of the complex. But Nikolai Batukhtin explains the failure as a success: there was indeed a risk of destroying the cabin, but it was averted automatically, as Grushin had intended. The rockets were designed to fire at an angle to the ground of not more than sixty-three degrees. Any closer to vertical and their billowing exhaust, with nowhere to go, would incinerate their launchers and much else nearby. Only one rocket was given a suitable launch angle by its guidance system—and it did the trick.

After it had been fired, Batukhtin and three other lieutenants ran outside to see its exhaust trace and debris from an explosion drifting earthward through the clear blue sky. But Voronov stayed in the cabin and told Colonel Gaiderov, the Sverdlovsk air defense commander, that he could not confirm the target had been hit.

A neighboring battery was ordered to fire at anything within range, and did. Captain Ayvazyan and Lieutenant Safronov, the MiG pilots scrambled from Perm and still circling over Sverdlovsk, suddenly found themselves under attack. Realizing they were friend, not foe, ground control ordered them to lose height urgently. Ayvazyan understood what was happening and put his MiG into a vertical dive from 34,000 feet, pulling out at less than 1,000 feet and landing at once. Safronov was not so quick. Hit by one of three more missiles that were fired that morning, he ejected but was found dead next to his parachute.

At last the radar screens began to clear. Voronov realized he had probably hit the target with his one and only rocket, and shortly before 9:30 a.m. Moscow time, he got back on the radio to say so. The message was passed on from Sverdlovsk to Moscow, and a stunned calm returned to the airwaves above Russia.

Powers was lucky—and unlucky. “If we hadn’t got him he would have made it to Scandinavia,” Batukhtin says. “There was no other missile complex like ours on his route, or even in the country.”

*  *  *

In his cell in Moscow, Powers ate nothing for a week. He had arrived in the bowels of the Lyubianka with an irregularly beating heart, a raging thirst, a headache, and an oppressive tiredness. In a scene that could have been written by Woody Allen, not one but three women doctors in white coats pronounced him fit, but he could not bring himself to eat. One of the doctors gave him two aspirin—and (could it have been?) a sympathetic glance. Another gave him an injection that he feared would be truth serum or a prelude to the brainwashing that the CIA believed would figure high on the KGB’s menu for apprehended spies. It wasn’t. He concluded it was a routine inoculation, or to help him sleep.

For all his tiredness, sleep came hard. The cot in his cell was a narrow metal frame with metal bands instead of springs and a couple of army blankets. A light above the door was never switched off and an eye in a peephole underneath it never went away. Each day he was taken to a large interrogation room, above ground, with natural light and a long table at which up to twelve people sat. They included, to begin with, Aleksandr Shelepin, head of the KGB, and Roman Rudenko, who smoked Western cigarettes and had been chief Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. Periodically the questioning would pause for officials to talk among themselves. Powers began to form the impression that they did not know what to do with him, but this was an insidious idea that sat uneasily in his head alongside a more firmly established one—that sooner or later he would be taken out and shot.

His first faint hopes were quickly encouraged. On Monday he was taken on a tour of Moscow. He had been gone from Peshawar barely twenty-four hours and was being shown Red Square, Saint Basil’s, and a ski jump high on the west bank of the Moscow River from the back of a Zil limousine. Truly this was not a tour that could be booked through Thomas Cook. If the idea was to confound his assumptions and make him believe anything was possible, it worked. “Perhaps I wouldn’t be shot after all,” Powers wrote. “Perhaps they were trying to impress me,
both with their city and their kindness, because they were soon going to release me.”

It was not a ridiculous thought. Again and again he was asked the obvious question: why had he been sent? More than once there was a follow-up that struck Powers as much less obvious: was it to ruin the Paris summit?

He was barely aware of the summit. The thought had not occurred to him, but now the fact of the meeting stuck in his mind. As the Zil headed back toward the Lyubianka, scenes started swimming in his mind of Khrushchev presenting him to Ike in Paris as a sign of goodwill and forgiveness—and proof of the astonishing performance of Russian S-75 rockets.

Powers was onto something. He understood that unless he was indeed going to be shot or hidden forever in a remote corner of the Gulag, his chief value to his captors was for propaganda. But to maximize that value they needed urgently to know if Washington knew he was alive. So the other question to which Shelepin and Rudenko kept returning was whether he had radioed his base before bailing out. Powers refused to answer, knowing that if he said he had, they might be able to prove he was lying by studying the remains of the U-2’s radio, whose range was only three hundred miles; and knowing that if he told the truth—that he had not sent out a Mayday as he plummeted to earth—the Kremlin would still have the option of killing him and covering it up without much fear of an international scandal.

On Tuesday the questioning got tougher and Powers’s hopes shrank back to zero. His minders started to worry about his appetite. The interpreter asked if there was anything that he would eat—anything at all. He asked for something to read, including a Bible, and was promised the interpreter’s own copy of
Gone with the Wind
.

*  *  *

For three days, Eisenhower thought he might have gotten away with it. There were no diplomatic notes, no indignant Tass exclusives, and almost no U.S. editors interested in the anodyne press release out of Adana, Turkey, on the missing weather plane. The
Washington Post
ran it as a brief.

Ike’s son, John, said later there was not “one scintilla” of doubt in his
father’s mind, when they discussed the missing plane at the beginning of the week, that its pilot was dead. Allen Dulles had assured them so often since 1956 that a U-2 shoot-down was not survivable that his wisdom was now gospel. It was sad, of course, and in its own special way. It was hard to think of a lonelier way to make the ultimate sacrifice, getting blown apart or asphyxiated up there over Russia; and it was hard to think of a set of circumstances less likely to allow the remains to be brought back to the grieving family for a proper burial. But it was a noble sacrifice and the president would acknowledge it in the right way in due course. In the meantime it looked as if Khrushchev was going to take the intrusion on the chin again, and that, too, was impressive. Preparations for the summit could continue. A nuclear test ban treaty was not out of the question and would be a crowning achievement of Eisenhower’s presidency. He would recognize Khrushchev’s role in it by presenting him in Moscow with a jet-powered hydrofoil.