Bridge of Spies (42 page)

As they waited, Drozdov studied Powers and Fisher. Powers was wearing a good coat and a warm hat and looked well fed, he reckoned. Fisher looked awful, “as if he’d been on a real prison regime.” The truth was that Fisher smoked too much but had never been more admired than in prison. Powers had lost a bit of weight, but by prison standards both had been pampered. It paid to be a real spy.

Pryor, the innocent, had suffered. At Checkpoint Charlie he was still having trouble taking in developments. “It was so unreal I couldn’t allow myself to be anything but a passive observer,” he says. “It was like participating in a stage play.”

The play dragged on. As arranged, Frank Meehan and Millard Pryor were on the south side of the checkpoint waiting for the handover, but there was a delay. Meehan strolled across the border and approached the Mercedes. “Just get in the car, Frank,” Vogel said. Meehan got in. Stasi men, unmistakable in their gray leather jackets, were more in evidence than usual on the East German side. Vogel made light of them by asking Pyror if he recognized any from prison, but he did not appear to understand the holdup.

On the bridge, Donovan felt the need to say something. He tried a joke. Maybe Vogel was arguing with Pryor over his fees, he said. “This could take months.” Shishkin loved it, which was a good thing. He had Abel now and could have marched him off the bridge at any moment. If he had, there would have been little the Americans could have done for Pryor if the Stasi decided to hold on to him. For the next few minutes the only thing keeping Shishkin on the bridge was what Tolstoy might have called his honor. That and the sense that Donovan might have come after him with his fists, and perhaps the strange pleasure of being suspended above the water, between two worlds, in a moment of history.

Powers began to worry again. “I’m not going back,” he told Murphy. The Russians had told him that if anything went wrong he was to return to their side, but he wrote later that he had resolved to run—or jump—instead, even at the risk of a bullet.

Meehan sat in the Mercedes with Vogel and Pryor at Checkpoint Charlie and thought, “Oh Jesus, what to do?” Each handover point seemed to be waiting for the other, unless Vogel knew something he wasn’t saying.

At about eight fifty a Stasi man approached Vogel in the driver’s seat and muttered something in his ear. Vogel listened, then told his passengers : “We can go now.”

Meehan and Fred Pryor got out and walked the few yards to the sign that said they were entering the American Sector. Millard Pryor was waiting.

An army signalman radioed from his Jeep and a shout went out
across Glienicke Bridge from the American end. Pryor was free. It was time to move.

Who made them wait? It might have been an unnamed Stasi officer, fond of protocol but in over his head. More likely, it was Josef Streit, the East German attorney general whom Donovan had pictured walking on his hands for Shishkin. Donovan was right that Streit had no real power, but for those few minutes he could know how it felt to have a finger on the pause button of world affairs. For those few minutes time stood still on the bridge and only Streit could restart it. He took his time, and Annette von Broecker was forever grateful. She arrived in time to drag a friendly witness behind the bushes at the American end and to extract from him enough detail for the first scoop of a long career.

In the meantime the convoys vanished. One took Fisher to see his real wife and daughter for the first time in seven years. The other took Powers to Tempelhof, where he, Donovan, and Murphy took off in the C-45 that eight days earlier had brought Donovan from London. Powers was given a medical examination in the cargo area. In Frankfurt they switched to the plane that had brought Fisher from New Jersey the day before. It was equipped for the personal use of the commanding U.S. Air Force general in Europe, and as it soared over the Rhine the steward came aft to take orders for cocktails. Murphy and Donovan had Scotch. Powers ordered a martini.

*  *  *

In Washington, after a long White House party, President Kennedy’s press secretary called an impromptu 3:00 a.m. meeting to announce that Powers was free. In Berlin, the press corps scrambled to catch up with a wire report from the Glienicke Bridge that confirmed the dawn of the age of cold war spy swaps but carried no byline. By way of compensation, von Broecker’s colleagues took her out to a local café, though not for lunch or champagne. Half a century later she looks out over the River Havel from the spot where she scribbled the notes for her first scoop. She shivers at the memory of the cold and the excitement and remembers very clearly. “They bought me a hot chocolate.”

After his martini, Powers enjoyed a steak, medium rare, with a green salad and a baked potato. He ate it with Donovan and Murphy at a table laid as if in a restaurant, thirty thousand feet over the Bay of Biscay. Afterward they talked. Donovan knew very well that Powers had been pilloried in the press for his trial performance but could only admire his nerve as a man willing to “sail a shaky espionage glider over the heart of hostile Russia at 75,000 feet … [who] as he passed over Minsk would calmly reach for a salami sandwich.”

When Powers joked that he might need a lawyer back home, Donovan told him his fee would be one Virginia ham a year. He received one in the mail the following Christmas.

The rest of Powers’s homecoming was less pleasurable. The CIA was not proud of him or done with him. In case anyone saw him, he was told to stay aboard the Super Constellation when it stopped to refuel in the Azores. From Dover Air Force Base he was taken for debriefing to Ashford Farms, an Agency compound in Maryland. Donovan continued to Andrews Air Force Base and was met there by a Powers body double who ran with him to a waiting helicopter to put the press off the scent.

On his first morning in Maryland, Powers enjoyed an emotional reunion with his parents and learned for the first time of his father’s efforts to get him released. As he wrote later, he had underestimated his dad. Then the debriefing team arrived. Their questioning lasted eight days and gave him the strong impression that the Agency was more interested in covering its own back than in finding out what had happened to him. But there was one set of operational details to which they kept returning: his altitude when hit and how he descended. They
referred to intelligence that conflicted with Powers’s version, and that baffled him, as the declassified transcript shows:

A minute later the interrogator picked up on Powers’s reference to what he had been told on the flight from Berlin:

There was, of course, but it did not involve Powers’s plane. The interrogator was describing in remarkable detail the flight profile of Igor Mentyukov, the Sukhoi pilot ordered to ram the U-2, who was then ordered to cut his afterburner and whose “fast descent” thereafter was followed by Russian radar operators and by NSA eavesdroppers listening to their communications from Iran.

The NSA had also reconstructed the last moments of Sergei Safronov in his MiG and added them to the confusion. John McCone, who had succeeded Allen Dulles as director of Central Intelligence after a career in business (and was as impressed by “data” as he was cynical
of people) chose to believe the NSA, not Powers. He made this clear to Congress and to handpicked journalists, at untold cost to Powers’s reputation and career. Diligent historians were still affording McCone’s view as much credence as Powers’s nearly a quarter of a century later, even though McCone had been an intelligence novice at the time, while Powers’s account had the great merit of being based on firsthand experience.

It was flat wrong to say that Powers descended slowly to somewhere near thirty thousand feet before bailing out. It was also flat wrong to say he was under orders to kill himself. Not that the editorialists cared much.
New York Newsday
said he should forgo his back pay because he had “flopped at his job.” The
Dallas Morning News
refused to call him a hero because the term should be reserved for the two U-2 pilots who, “it has been reported,” had blown themselves up with their planes when their covert missions went wrong. No U-2 pilots ever blew themselves up with their planes.

The most misled and misleading commentator of all was William Tompkins, the prosecutor at the Abel trial, who still had a professional interest in the myth of the Soviet master spy. The exchange on Glienicke Bridge, he said, was “like trading Mickey Mantle for an average ballplayer. We gave them an extremely valuable man and got back an airplane driver.” Never mind that the average ballplayer in this case had been trained, deployed, and sent to photograph the Soviet Union’s most sensitive nuclear sites in less time than it had taken Willie Fisher to unpack his paintbrushes in Brooklyn.

At a packed Senate hearing in March 1962, Powers had a chance to explain his apology at his Moscow trial: “It was easy to say I was sorry because what I meant by saying that, and what I wanted them to think I meant, were quite different,” he said. “My main sorrow was that the mission failed, and I was sorry that I was there.”

The hearing ended with an ovation for the pilot, and he was exonerated by the official inquiry that preceded it. But his account of the shoot-down was considered suspect until long after the end of the cold war. In the meantime he was rehired by Kelly Johnson as a Lockheed test pilot and peppered with offers for his memoirs. In deference to the CIA, he did not write his memoirs until 1970 and even then submitted them to the Agency’s censors before publication. He knew he could
have sold more copies by going straight into print and picked up sales where he could.

“He was flying U-2s out of Palmdale [California], where they did heavy maintenance,” his old friend Tony Bevacqua remembers. “He’d bring them up to Beale Air Force Base, near Sacramento, where I was flying SR-71s.” After the memoirs came out, he would sign a few dozen copies at a time and bring them with him on his delivery flights to Beale for Bevacqua to distribute in the spy plane fraternity. “I must have sold hundreds of copies for him that way,” Bevacqua says.

Soon after publication, Lockheed let him go. The CIA had, in fact, been paying his salary, but Johnson was loyal to his client and didn’t bring the Agency into it. He just told Powers there was no more work.

Before moving to California, Powers had divorced Barbara and married an Agency psychometrist, Sue Downey, with whom he built a new life, raising her daughter and a son born to them in 1965 in Burbank, at the foot of the Verdugo hills. Told he could no longer fly for Lockheed, he flew for another big local employer, the local NBC News affiliate. He crashed and died in 1975 while flying the station’s helicopter back to the San Fernando Valley after covering a brush fire up the coast near Santa Barbara. He ran out of fuel. Bevacqua asked around after the crash and was satisfied that there was no foul play. “That helicopter had a history that Gary was aware of of showing empty when in fact it still had fuel,” he said. “They’d fixed it, but they didn’t tell him. What a way to go.”

The banality of it was almost as shocking as Powers’s first crash, which continued to reverberate. Two years earlier, James Nathan, a young historian at the University of Delaware, had published an article in the journal
Military Affairs
entitled “A Fragile Détente: The U2 Incident Re-examined,” in which he assembled all the available evidence to support his view that the shoot-down had been “contrived” by the CIA to nip détente in the bud. Khrushchev, of course, would have agreed. His son still does, citing unnamed CIA sources who he says concur with the view that Powers was never meant to get through to Norway.

It was not hard in 1975 to identify powerful groups with an interest in torpedoing the Paris summit, chief among them the missile builders on both sides. Details that have emerged since the cold war actually make it possible to construct a narrative in which decision makers at the heart of the U-2 program achieve precisely this goal. It starts in Adana in 1959: Stan Beerli, the Detachment B commander with the
strongest record in maintaining U-2 secrecy, is moved from Turkey back to Washington. His replacement, Colonel William Shelton, is an air force man unversed in CIA lore and disinclined to respect the niceties of Operation Quickmove. As the end of April 1960 approaches, Beerli is moved again, on a brief assignment to northern Norway that he is assured requires his personal touch (and will keep him out of Washington). In his absence, the go/no-go decision for Operation Grand Slam will be taken by General Bill Burke, another air force man, because Richard Bissell will be out of town for the weekend.