Bridge of Spies (32 page)

Would it have been possible for Khrushchev to hush the whole thing up for the sake of world peace? Ike assumed so, and both President de Gaulle of France and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Britain would later encourage him to believe it. But none of them knew much about the pressures that the U-2 program had imposed on Khrushchev, or those he had brought upon himself. Thanks to Marshal Biryuzov’s briefing on the reviewing stand in Red Square, the entire Soviet military establishment now knew about the overflights at least as a subject of gossip, and they knew that one had been brought down. The insult had been intolerable, but having been avenged it could be rewritten as a triumph. Khrushchev’s control of the media was firm but not absolute. The group with least to gain from the summit—the military—had the most to gain from publicizing the fine work of whichever battery commander had pressed the button. One way or other, the story would get out.

Khrushchev knew it must be his way.

The Supreme Soviet was in session. Fifteen hundred dutiful appointees from every oblast,
okrug, krai
, and far-flung autonomous republic were assembling each day in the Great Hall of the Kremlin to rubber-stamp new laws handed down by the politburo and to applaud the far-sighted inspiration of the party’s first secretary.

On Thursday morning Llewellyn Thompson, the U.S. ambassador to
Moscow, was invited to the Great Hall to hear Khrushchev’s set piece speech to the Soviet. The two men knew each other well. The Thompsons had spent a winter weekend sledding at the premier’s dacha. Some politburo members were even muttering that since returning from Camp David Khrushchev seemed to trust the ambassador more than his own ministers.

The speech could have been about Uzbek folklore and it would have been rapturously received. In fact it was a significant statement of Khrushchev’s intent to reorganize the Soviet economy in favor of civilians and at the expense of the military. Slickly titled “On Abolishing Taxes on Workers and Employees and Other Measures to Improve the Well-Being of the Soviet People,” it lasted nearly four hours (with an intermission). For the first two and a half Thompson listened politely, wondering with a trace of unease why he had been seated in a box above the podium. The answer came near the end of hour three, when Khrushchev moved suddenly from his hopes for the Paris summit to a thunderous exposé of the entire overflight program, including the May 1 debacle. As he switched subjects, witnesses said a shaft of sunlight angling in from a window high in the Great Hall lit up Khrushchev’s face. The May 1 mission had been “an aggressive provocation aimed at wrecking the summit conference,” he declared. The command had been given to destroy the plane. The command had been fulfilled.

The hall erupted. Delegates and the Soviet press hurled shouts of “shame!” at the imperialists’ ambassador. Thompson’s face remained a mask, but inwardly he marveled at Khrushchev’s showmanship. He had seized the moment. In order not to sacrifice the future, he carefully blamed American “militarists” rather than Eisenhower. Equally carefully, he omitted to mention that the pilot was still alive.

Teletype transcripts of the speech reached Eisenhower at a National Security Council meeting in a secure bunker outside Washington. In a huddle afterward it was agreed that a more detailed cover story would have to be issued, still on the assumption that Powers was dead.

That evening, at an Ethiopian diplomatic reception, Thompson overheard a deputy Soviet foreign minister tell the Swedish ambassador that as far as he knew the pilot was being questioned. Thompson rushed to his office to cable Washington. Four minutes before his message reached the State Department, NASA issued its new press
release—five hundred words of detailed nonsense about a plane that could fly “for as long as four hours at altitudes of up to 55,000 feet” and spent its time collecting information on “convective clouds, wind shear, the jet stream, and such widespread weather patterns as typhoons.”

No one could fault NASA for conviction, but every spurious detail compounded the lie. When the State Department spokesman saw the release he turned ashen. When the press saw it and started comparing it with Khrushchev’s version, the game was up. All at once it was open season on the U-2.

For years, senior executives at the networks and most East Coast newspapers had known the broad outlines of the U-2 story but kept it out of the headlines in deference to the administration’s pleading. But since overflights had restarted in 1959, mere reporters had been getting wind of the program. Now the Moscow bureaus had the scoop from none other than Khrushchev and the Washington press corps would play catch-up with a vengeance. Like a startled deer, the CIA set about covering its traces.

First, the Agency settled on a fall guy in case the president wanted one. It would be Dick Newton, Colonel Shelton’s executive officer in Adana. He would take responsibility for sending Powers on such a reckless mission at such a sensitive time but would not be available for comment. (He was spirited from Turkey to Wiesbaden, and kept there until the tornado blew itself out.) In case the excitable British press should remember the fleeting presence of U-2s at RAF Lakenheath in the countryside north of London in 1956 and suspect a British angle now, that angle was swiftly smoothed over: three RAF pilots pulling duty with Detachment B at Adana were overnighted back to England, where they refuse to discuss their Turkish assignment to this day. The Oslo station chief went to ground so that no one at the U.S. embassy there could help the Norwegians with their investigation. (Bodo? Where?) Plans were even made to welcome Tufti Johnson, Stan Beerli’s friend and bringer of hors d’oeuvres, into comfortable American anonymity should Norway decide it needed a scapegoat from its own side.

Ninety miles from there, the Atlanta federal penitentiary’s most cerebral
New York Times
subscriber—the Soviet master spy and silk-screen printer still known as Rudolf Abel—first read about the lost U-2
on Friday, May 6. He couldn’t miss it: “SOVIET DOWNS AMERICAN PLANE; U.S. SAYS IT WAS WEATHER CRAFT; KHRUSHCHEV SEES SUMMIT BLOW.” It was the three-line banner format normally reserved for coups and assassinations, and it was not encouraging. Without a live pilot the only news relevant to Fisher was that the summit was in jeopardy. The slimmer the chances of détente, the slimmer his chances of going home.

That day was hell for Oliver Powers and his ailing wife, who Gary feared would already have suffered a heart attack over his disappearance. It was their third day knowing he was missing without knowing if he was alive. “Distressed? We all were,” Gary’s childhood friend Jack Goff remembers. “It was more like a bad dream than anything.” The family gathered at the home Oliver had built beneath the sugar maples outside Pound and prayed.

At the end of the worst week of his political career, Eisenhower faced three choices: to continue to deny the entire Soviet story, to admit it and blame his subordinates, or to admit it, explain it, and hope the world would understand. None of them was appetizing, and the decision itself was almost impossible without knowing what had happened to the pilot. That afternoon, therefore, a car left the U.S. embassy on Moscow’s inner ring road and made the short drive to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs now housed in a Stalinist skyscraper near the Moscow River. A bland and plaintive note was handed over. It stuck to the weather reconnaissance fiction but acknowledged Khrushchev’s accusations without denying them. “In the light of the above,” it ended, “the United States Government requests the Soviet Government to provide it with full facts of the Soviet investigation of this incident and to inform it of the fate of the pilot.”

The next day, Khrushchev obliged. Back in front of the Supreme Soviet, he dispensed with lengthy preliminaries and came quickly to the point. “Comrades, I must tell you a secret,” he said. “When I made my report two days ago I deliberately did not say that we have parts of the airplane, and we have the pilot, who is alive and kicking!”

The applause was wild and spontaneous, and Khrushchev could not resist it. He had brought with him the fruits of Powers’s first six days of interrogation, and a bulging folder for show and tell. He named Powers. He named Colonel Shelton, the new Detachment B commander
(who was quickly reassigned to a remote base in northern Michigan). He named Peshawar (and warned both Pakistan and Norway that they were “playing with fire”). He held up fake pictures purporting to be those Powers had taken, and a real one of the poison pin. He made hay with the idea of using a pistol or handing out gold watches at seventy thousand feet—were they for Martians?—and mentioned in passing that he thought it would be appropriate for Powers to stand trial “so that world opinion can see what actions the Americans are taking to provoke the Soviet Union.”

He repeated his belief that Dulles and the militarists were responsible, not Eisenhower. But if that was intended as an olive branch, it was a prickly one. He could not even leave unsaid the obvious corollary—that Ike was no longer in charge. “When the military starts running the show, the results can be disastrous,” he mused. Such as? A hydrogen bomb from them, and “a more destructive hydrogen bomb in return.”

There. He’d said it. Armageddon had been explicitly invoked. It was the zenith of Khrushchev’s career as a performer—“a masterpiece,” said one junior diplomat who watched it live on television. But it was also the beginning of the end of Khrushchev as a politician. Later, out of power and under virtual house arrest, he told a visiting American that from the moment of the shoot-down he felt “no longer in full control.”

*  *  *

At the Powers home, the news on Sunday that Gary was alive brought waves of relief, then indignation. Oliver would later rely heavily on Carl McAfee, his “boy lawyer,” for help communicating with heads of state and their intermediaries, but not today. He drove into Pound and fired off a telegram to the White House in his very own syntax: “I WANT TO KNOW WHAT ALL THIS IS ABOUT MY SON FRANCIS G. POWERS THAT IS GOING ON AND I WANT TO KNOW NOW. ANSWER.”

Then he rolled on down the Trail of the Lonesome Pine to Norton and walked up to McAfee’s office behind the bank and started taking calls. One was from the
New York Times
. Powers senior had left school after fourth grade, “but that man read
everything
,” his daughter Jessica remembers. He had already done some reading on Khrushchev and told the reporter from New York that he was “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.”

When Gary was shown the clipping a few days later in the long interrogation room in Moscow, he broke down and wept.

(The KGB no longer had anything to gain by withholding from Powers the knowledge that his parents knew he had survived, since Khrushchev had made sure that the whole world knew. But Powers’s interrogators still wanted to know if he had sent a distress signal before going down. If he had, they reasoned, he could also have
received
radio messages in flight, including one alerting him to the SAM sites near Sverdlovsk. That might explain the strange kink in his route north of Chelyabinsk—but it would also point to a highly placed mole in the air defense establishment. When he finally told them he had maintained radio silence throughout his flight, they were more baffled than ever.)

In Milledgeville, the Agency men on the Barbara Powers detail bowed to the inevitable when the news broke that Gary was alive. They sat her down in her mother’s kitchen and told her she was going to have to give a press conference. A doctor was on his way “to give you something to ease your nerves,” they said, and she was grateful. The Baldwin Hotel downtown was already full to bursting with out-of-town reporters, and now they descended on the pilot’s mother-in-law’s front yard. Barbara faced them from a swing seat on the porch and proudly joined the ranks of CIA-affiliated obfuscators.

“I do not consider my husband a spy,” she told the throng. “He was assigned to reconnaissance flights, period. To me this is a big difference. Gary is definitely not the cloak-and-dagger type.”

It was only a matter of time before someone asked about her leg, and she didn’t miss a beat. “I broke it in a waterskiing accident,” she said.

*  *  *

For nearly a week the men of Mikhail Voronov’s S-75 battery talked quietly and curiously among themselves. Having been alerted to the orange and white parachute on May 1, Voronov had sent an officer and two men to find the pilot, but the Moskvich car got to him first. Batukhtin and ten others from the regiment were assigned to cordon off the debris field but were told nothing about the debris. By the evening,
reasonably sure they had scored a hit without starting a war, they celebrated with a few hundred grams of vodka.

A Tupolev carrying a fearsome concentration of senior air force and KGB officers had touched down in Sverdlovsk soon after midday. Some returned to Moscow with the prisoner. Others supervised the search for evidence and summoned a crane to heave the U-2’s engine from a swamp. No one in Kosulino was told anything. Voronov’s first confirmation that he had shot down an American who was still alive came from Khrushchev himself, in his second speech to the Supreme Soviet.

By then the remains of Article 360 were in Moscow, where the best and brightest of the Soviet aviation design bureaus would try, without much success, to reverse engineer it into a stratospheric dragon lady of their own. But first it was put on show.

Khrushchev the exhibitionist was on a roll. For a few more days his “fetish for secrecy” (Ike’s grumpy sound bite) was subordinated to his fetish for propaganda. The dismembered U-2 was displayed in the Hall of Chess in Gorky Park, with captions in Russian and English and helpful wall-mounted displays on its route, cameras, pilot, and dastardly purpose. The pressure suit and pistol were there. So were the parachute and the poison pin. One of the first to take a look around was … Khrushchev. Trailing almost as many reporters as he had eight months earlier on Roswell Garst’s corn farm, he paused in front of the crumpled fuselage just in case anyone had any questions. As far as he was concerned, the summit was still on, he said. But was the same true of the Eisenhowers’ visit? At this he paused for fully half a minute. Those present thought he was genuinely thinking it through. “Put yourself in my place and answer for me,” he said at last. “I am a man, and I have human feelings.” If the visit happened, it was not going to be much fun.