Bridge of Spies (9 page)

Before the dancing ban, there was Gary Powers. And before Gary there was his grandfather, a carpenter, who rode five miles into the hills from the eastern edge of town sometime before the First World War and found a level piece of land where he decided his family would settle.

It did work out that way, but not without a struggle. “Oliver Powers worked his whole life to buy that land,” his son-in-law, Jack Goff, remembers. Oliver was Gary’s father. He also had to provide for six children, including an only son who he had vowed would never have to work the mines.

Powers senior worked the mines—something he later found he had in common with the first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
But in the meantime they nearly killed him. A runaway coal train deep under Harman, Virginia, crushed him against the roof of a tunnel and left him with a permanent limp and fierce hopes for a better life for Gary. “Oliver wanted Gary to be wealthy; that was the main drive with him,” said Goff. To that end the older Powers labored obsessively. When the only work was in Harman, he moved the family there, driving coal trains again despite his limp. When mine work slackened, he opened a shoe repair business that has wife could mind when he went back underground. When too few shoes came in, he earned a little extra by carrying mail. When the war brought better-paying work to Michigan, he moved the family to Michigan. When it was over, they came back to Pound.

Jack Goff was Gary Powers’s best friend. As if to prove it, he apprenticed himself to Gary’s father, married one of Gary’s five sisters after the war, and still lives with her on Gary Powers Road, on land Oliver Powers bought.

They met in Harman in a four-room schoolhouse, “then ran around together for twenty years,” he says. They played with the same horsehide football after school, hunted rabbit together, and spelunked together through the old bootleggers’ caves that burrow under Pine Mountain near the Appalachian watershed. Powers would later call himself a loner on account of growing up the only boy among five sisters. In reality he grew up with Jack, who has a photograph of his friend that is quite unlike the many that exist of Powers as a pilot. He sits on a granite boulder high in the Cumberland Mountains, alone except for Jack Goff and his camera, transparently content.

There were other boys in the valley. Jessica Powers-Hileman tells a story about two of them who persuaded her brother, against her father’s wishes, to help them roll a decrepit Model A Ford down the dirt road leading back to Pound. The steering stuck. The car plunged off the road, and Oliver Powers took a maple switch to all six of his children, including young Jessica, even though she had been asleep in bed at the time. “It was the only time I ever got switched, and it was Gary’s fault,” says Jessica. Yet he was easy to forgive. He was calm, quiet, good-natured, and good-looking. He had smooth skin, jet black hair, and “dreamy eyes,” especially in what his first wife called his “wholesome, hamburger-loving stage.” His homecomings, from college and then the
air force, were big events. This is the first thing his sister says when asked how she remembers him, and the last: “We only had one brother. I can’t say exactly how it was. I can’t express it, but when he came home we were all happy.”

Powers was athletic and proud of it, left guard on his high school football team in Michigan and a contender in the hundred-yard dash at college. He brought his athleticism home. The family kept caged albino squirrels that once greeted his return by escaping up the maple trees from which his father had harvested switches after the business with the errant Ford. So Gary shinned up the trees and recovered all the squirrels. “That was him all over,” Jessica recalls. “That was the kind of thing he liked to do.”

For a while there was also an alligator on the Powers property. It ended up in the Knoxville Zoo but was even then a useful reminder of Oliver Powers’s small eccentricities and stubborn cast of mind.

He wanted very badly for his son to be a doctor. “My dad only got to go to fourth grade, but he wasn’t easily fooled.” Jessica says. “When he sent Gary to college, he wanted him to have a position that would make him a lot of money. He knew doctors made a lot of money.”

Oliver Powers was setting himself up for disappointment. When not climbing mountains and hurling footballs at each other, his son and Jack Goff had been true children of the aviation age. They played “air wardens,” collecting and comparing aircraft silhouettes cut from cornflake packets until nothing flew over the Cumberlands that they could not identify from thirty thousand feet. As a fourteen-year-old, Gary had begged his father for a joyride in a Piper Cub at a fair in West Virginia. He never really came down. He went dutifully to medical school after college, but dropped out, joined the air force, and by the spring of 1954, a year before Tony Bevacqua, had checked out on F-84 and been cleared to load and drop a medium-sized nuclear bomb.

He later said to his friend Jack, in a pause during a rabbit hunt: “If anything ever happens to me, just remember I was doing what I thought was best for the most people.”

It was as neat an expression of utilitarian altruism as you could expect from a philosopher, never mind a pilot—and there is no doubt that Gary Powers was what the patrons of the Golden Pine would consider
a good man. But he was not that simple. He could be moody. He was fiercely jealous of his wife, and in his own quiet way he was as driven as his father.

By the time of his arrival at Turner Air Force Base outside Albany, Georgia, Powers was a twenty-four-year-old fighter jock with a degree, a second lieutenant’s silver bar, and everything to live for. But he also had a sense of history passing him by. He had felt awed at Milligan College in Kentucky by fellow freshmen starting their studies after fighting and winning the war in the Pacific. He wanted to enlist and serve in Korea but went to medical school instead to please his father. Korea was still drawing in young men when he attended air gunnery school in Arizona in 1953, but this time he was waylaid by appendicitis. “Again I felt I’d lost my chance to fight, to prove myself,” he wrote.

In July 1954 Powers was promoted to first lieutenant and found himself taking home four hundred dollars a month. For someone who had collected lumps of coal from beside the railway tracks in Harman for Popsicle money, it was a princely sum. But it was not a doctor’s pay, and he did not have a doctor’s prospects. Small wonder that when his name appeared on a list of men required to report to wing headquarters at Turner AFB early one morning in January 1956, he paid attention.

*  *  *

Powers was about to be drawn into the most audacious espionage extravaganza since the nineteenth-century showdown between the British and Russian empires known as the Great Game. It would make his whole life a secret, then turn it inside out and shake it until there was nothing left in it that wasn’t public. It would take him to places no son of a Virginia coal miner had ever been, soaring over the mountain ranges where the British and Russian empires had confronted each other with brass telescopes and Enfield revolvers nearly a century earlier.

At that time the engine of history was Russia’s search for natural frontiers. In 1956 it was the Soviet Union’s unbending resolve to keep them shut.

Anyone brave enough, even now, to hike north up the Afghan-Pakistan border from the Khyber Pass will notice a striking change in the built environment at about thirty-six degrees north and seventy-two east. As the border swings to the east, Tajikistan comes into view
across the Wakhan Corridor. And unlike the unguarded line between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Tajik frontier is marked with a ten-foot barbed-wire fence. It is a holdover from Soviet times that the current Tajik government values highly. (It even outsources patrol duties to Russian frontier troops who trudge its entire length 365 days a year in fake fur hats against the bitter cold of the Pamirs, with authentic AK-47s slung over their shoulders.) The Tajik fence is only a few hundred miles long, but it is part of an epic feat of rudimentary self-defense that delineates the former Soviet border along six thousand miles of wild terrain from the Caspian to the Pacific.

Between that fence and the North Pole, in 1956, lay 8.6 million square miles of denied territory—nearly three times the area of the lower forty-eight U.S. states. In this vastness a foreigner could travel only under the strictest supervision of the KGB and its subsidiaries, if at all. North of the fence lay forests that took seven days to cross by train and three-thousand-mile rivers debouching under pack ice into the Arctic Ocean. There were whole mountain ranges never sullied by a human foot. There was the great water-filled gash in the earth’s crust known as Lake Baikal, the endless land ocean of the steppe, and the terrible frozen emptiness of the taiga. And there were launchpads, test sites, and closed nuclear cities devoted entirely to the design and manufacture of the instruments of Armageddon. This much the CIA knew from cautious reconnaissance flights along the edges of Soviet airspace and a small cadre of defectors and informants. But it was not enough.

In August 1953 an earth-shattering explosion about one hundred miles west of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan marked the Soviet Union’s arrival in the age of the superbomb—the H-bomb. The Americans had already detonated one. It vaporized Eniwetok atoll near Bikini and produced a mushroom cloud twenty-five miles high, filmed in glorious orange Technicolor for the president. They called it Ivy Mike. The Russians called theirs a layer cake, or
sloika:
it was based on Andrei Sakharov’s “first idea,” to pile fission and fusion fuel layer on layer in search of the biggest bang in history. The result was not a true hydrogen bomb by some purists’ definition, but it was entirely homemade and a respectable thirty times more powerful than the one that killed 140,000 people at Hiroshima.

In 1954 the Soviets reverted to type and copied the American H-bomb
design. Yield: 1.6 megatons, or one hundred Hiroshimas. The arms race was picking up speed, and the steppe was starting to betray the cost with giant craters and concentric scorch marks. (Deformed fetuses would come later, collected by doctors in Semipalatinsk and stored secretly in jars.)

Not only the steppe suffered. A thousand miles to the north, off the island of Novaya Zemlya, the Soviet navy had loaded a nuclear warhead onto a torpedo and fired it into a fleet of more than thirty ships crewed by five hundred sheep and goats. The animals died swiftly, and the destroyer closest to the blast sank without trace. In due course word of the new northern test site seeped out, and its skyline of frigid mountains floating on white cloud served as the target of General Jack D. Ripper’s 843rd bomb wing, flown into oblivion in
Dr. Strangelove
.

In the film it is President “Dmitri,” interrupted in the course of a loud musical diversion, who provides the terrifying unpredictability at the eastern end of the hotline. In reality it was Nikita Khrushchev—showman, warrior, and Soviet premier, constantly trying not to be outflanked by his more hawkish colleagues in the politburo.

In November 1956 Khrushchev hosted a reception in Moscow for the visiting Polish prime minister. Weeks earlier, he had ordered Soviet tanks to crush the Hungarian uprising in Budapest. Western condemnation was still running at full flow, and Western diplomats invited to the reception were being careful not to seem too grateful to their hosts. Emboldened by vodka, Khrushchev struck a pose in the middle of the room, called for silence, and offered those capitalists present an impromptu harangue.

“We are Bolsheviks!” he began. “If you don’t like us, don’t accept our invitations, and don’t invite us to come to see you! Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” In Russian:
Myi vas pokhoronim!
Those three words—four in translation—were pure bluster; a delusional socioeconomic forecast based on the Marxist adage that the proletariat is the undertaker of the bourgeoisie. But the speaker was one of two men in the world who could launch a nuclear cataclysm. His words were widely misinterpreted to suggest burial under mountains of radioactive rubble. More than any other single threat they seemed to confirm that Khrushchev was out to escalate and win the thermonuclear arms race. But could he?

There was only one way to find out. Aerial photography from unmanned balloons had been tried, but they only took pictures of where the wind sent them, and they often came down in Russia. In 1953 the Royal Air Force (RAF) flew a stripped-down B-57 bomber over a new missile test range near the Volga delta, but it landed in Iran pockmarked with bullet holes and returned few useful photographs. The result was a National Intelligence Estimate in 1954 that had no intelligence on the test range or on missile production or numbers and therefore gave no estimate. No one in the American intelligence community thought the answer was more spies. The only serious suggestion was a new spy plane. As General Philip Strong told his boss, Robert Amory, chief intelligence gatherer at the CIA: “We’ve just got to get upstairs.”

Initially the air force insisted on being in charge. It invited designs for a new reconnaissance plane in 1953 and backed a beautiful but flimsy twin-engined idea from one of Kelly Johnson’s rivals. It was called the Bell X-16 and never flew. Then the charismatic inventor and entrepreneur Edwin “Din” Land, millionaire inventor of the Polaroid camera, called on Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, and urged him to take control. In a letter following up their discussion, he pressed home the argument that the time was ripe for a wholesale reinvention of the spying game.

“I am not sure that we have made it clear that we feel there are many reasons why this activity is appropriate for the CIA,” he wrote. “We told you that this seems to us the kind of action and technique that is right for the contemporary version of the CIA; a modern and scientific way for an Agency that is always supposed to be looking, to do its looking.”

Land headed a top secret panel within a semisecret commission appointed by President Eisenhower to solve the most pressing national security problem of the age—how to prevent a nuclear Pearl Harbor. He was the Thomas Edison of his time: a promiscuous inventor and a natural entrepreneur whose stake in the Polaroid Corporation made him a multibillionaire in twenty-first-century terms and whose immaculate dark eyebrows made him look a little like Cary Grant. He appended to his letter to Dulles a summary of the case for aerial reconnaissance that managed to be both concise and splendidly pompous: “During a period in which Russia has free access to the geography of all our bases and major nuclear facilities, as well as to our entirely military
and civilian economy, we have no corresponding knowledge about Russia.… Unfortunately it is the US, the more mature, more civilized, and more responsible country that must bear the burden of not knowing what is happening [there].”