Bridge of Spies (25 page)

Years later other pilots on the Yamamoto raid began disputing Lanphier’s version of events, but he stuck by his like the fighter he was. After the war he worked briefly in newspapers in Idaho, but he retained a fierce loyalty to the air force and the national defense. When invited to Washington to serve as special assistant to the secretary of the air force, he accepted. His new boss was Stuart Symington, the future senator. They worked formally together for only two years but kept in touch. By the late 1950s Lanphier, now living in Southern California,
was one of Symington’s most valued sources on the missile gap. He had maintained excellent contacts in air force intelligence and had gone one better: from 1951 to 1960 he was a vice president of Convair, maker of the mighty Atlas missile that Willie Fisher may have seen trundling over its last few miles to Cape Canaveral from San Diego under an enormous shroud.

The phrase “conflict of interest” barely begins to describe Tom Lanphier’s rabidly partisan approach to advising one of the most powerful congressional allies of the American military-industrial complex. Yet he was in good company. Air force intelligence was crammed with highly competitive analysts who believed they were in a zero-sum game not only with the Russians but also with the army and the navy. If they could make the missile-gap theory stick, America would have to respond with a crash ICBM program of its own. The dominance of the Strategic Air Command in the U.S. military hierarchy would be complete—and Convair would profit mightily. It is hardly surprising that the information Lanphier fed to Symington and Symington to every politician and columnist who would listen was authoritative, alarming, and completely, disastrously wrong.

Symington’s “on the record” projection of Soviet nuclear strength, given to Senate hearings on the missile gap in late 1959, was that by 1962 they would have three thousand ICBMs. The actual number was four. Symington’s was a wild guess, an extrapolation based on extrapolations by air force generals who believed it was only responsible to take Khrushchev at his word when, for example, he told journalists in Moscow that a single Soviet factory was producing 250 rockets a year, complete with warheads.

Symington knew what he was doing. He wanted to be president and believed rightly that missile-gap scaremongering had helped the Democrats pick up nearly fifty seats in Congress in the 1958 midterm elections. But everyone was at it. The 1958 National Intelligence Estimate had forecast one hundred Soviet ICBMs by 1960 and five hundred by 1962. In January 1960 Allen Dulles, who should have known better because he did know better, told Eisenhower that even though the U-2 had shown no evidence of mass missile production, the Russians could still somehow conjure up two hundred of them in eighteen months. On the political left a former congressional aide called Frank Gibney
wrote a baseless five-thousand-word cover story for
Harper’s
magazine accusing the administration of giving the Soviets a six-to-one lead in ICBMs. (Gibney also recommended putting “a system of really massive retaliation” on the moon.) On the right, Vice President Nixon quietly let friends and pundits know that he felt his own boss didn’t quite get the threat. And in the middle, Joe Alsop wrote a devastating series of columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers in which he calculated that the Soviets would have 150 ICBMs in ten months flat and suggested that by not matching them warhead for warhead the president was playing Russian roulette with the national future.

Alsop, who lived well but expensively in a substantial house in Georgetown, was the Larry King of his day—dapper, superbly well connected, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a good story. His series ran in the last week of January 1960. Khrushchev read it in translation and resolved to steal the thunder of the missile-gap lobby, which was threatening to land him with an arms race that would bankrupt Communism. Before the four-power summit, which was now scheduled for Paris in mid-May, he would offer to dismantle his entire ICBM stockpile. No one needed to know how big or small it was; they just needed to know that he was serious about disarmament. He revealed his plan to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at a secret meeting in the Kremlin on February 1. It was bold, crafty, and conciliatory all at the same time. It was vintage Khrushchev, and it marked the high point of his power.

Eisenhower read the Alsop columns and fulminated. He called the missile-gap men “sanctimonious, hypocritical bastards.” But he also bowed to mounting pressure from his own senior staff to beef up the evidence that the missile gap did not exist. This was why he allowed two more U-2 flights before the summit. It was an understandable decision, and a disastrous one.

It was understandable because the CIA had at last confirmed from other sources that the small stock of ICBMs Russia did have was being installed at Plesetsk, 150 miles due south of Archangel—and not in the northern Urals. Time to photograph them before they were hidden in their silos was fast running out, the Americans believed, and the more Ike knew about Khrushchev’s true nuclear disposition, the less shadowboxing he would have to do in Paris.

It was disastrous for two reasons: Eisenhower was right that the loss of a U-2 over Russia would destroy his priceless reputation for honesty. But he was wrong if he thought that Khrushchev’s silence on the subject of spy planes at Camp David meant he was resigned to them. On the contrary, privacy was now more central than ever to the Soviet leader’s strategy. His extravagant bluffing about the size of his nuclear arsenal had to work, because without the impression of a meaningful stockpile, there could be no meaningful disarmament. What Khrushchev wrote later about arms inspections applied equally to overflights: the Americans “would simply have been given the opportunity to count our weapons and see that we were weak!”

He did not believe, after Camp David, that Eisenhower would allow his confounded U-2s to violate Soviet airspace again. But if reactionary forces within the administration sent them in anyway, they would
have
to be brought down.

*  *  *

The loggers and graders had arrived outside Kosulino the previous summer. They had come to other villages too, and on a map those villages made a tight ring round Sverdlovsk. Trees were felled and tracks cut into the woods that were suitable for heavy trucks but not much else. No one in the villages was told what was going on, but star-shaped patterns in the forest could be seen from civilian flights on final approach to Sverdlovsk Airport. Richard Nixon was on such a flight in late July. So was Ray Garthoff, a junior State Department staffer assigned to travel with the vice president. Nixon had asked to be allowed to use his own plane for the domestic side trips tacked onto his Moscow itinerary that year, in order to take pictures. The request had been turned down for the same reason, but Garthoff snapped some of star-shaped patterns in the forest anyway. Were
these
the long-sought ICBM sites that Stuart Symington knew all about?

Not quite. Until September they were nothing but clearings. Then soldiers arrived to dig in for the winter. Kosulino’s battalion was led by Major Mikhail Voronov, a proud veteran of the Great Patriotic War and a confident leader of men. He had no rockets yet, but he had subordinates to train and by Lenin he would train them.

Voronov was born in 1918 in a village in western Russia too small to
have a school. When Hitler’s tanks rolled into Minsk he was a sergeant at war college in the Caucasus, and after two months of accelerated officer training he was dispatched to the front. At the battle of Tula he broke his leg. He was patched up in Tashkent, returned to the front, and apprenticed in the terrifying art of shooting at dive-bombers as the Fascists advanced on Stalingrad. At the battle of Kursk he commanded his own antiaircraft battery as wave upon wave of German fighter-bombers tried and failed to dislodge the Red Army. At Kursk he also met his wife, Valentina, who fought with him all the way to Lublin and still lived with him on the Black Sea coast sixty-three years later. The war prepared him for everything that followed, he said, including the events of May 1, 1960. That day felt “like a small war, just for me.”

*  *  *

In terms of miles covered, it was a big war.

As the star shapes were being carved out of the forest round Sverdlovsk, a thousand miles to the south the new commander of the Turkistan Air Defense Corps set out on an urgent journey to the roof of the world.

It was a journey that probably began by air, over the giant white rampart of the northern Pamirs. Behind the rampart, in the late 1950s, snow leopards reigned supreme and the world’s biggest nonpolar ice cap sent glaciers carving and tumbling toward China, Afghanistan, and the deep, fast-flowing River Pyandzh.

The commander’s plane would have skirted to the west of the main Pamir massif and dived into the gorge dug by the Pyandzh to land on a thin concrete strip wedged between the river and Khorog. Then he needed a truck.

He was driven into the mountains along the legendary frontier road to Osh, leaving trees, warmth, and all trace of civilian life behind. Beyond the first high pass, where border guards kept vigil over one another and eventually managed to grow a few tomatoes in a greenhouse warmed by hot springs, the road descended a short distance onto a vast brown plateau. For an hour the truck followed the plateau’s northern edge. To the left the lumpen shoulders of Pik Kommunizma, the highest mountain in the Soviet Union, stood back under their mantle of ice and snow. To the right, yaks grazed on oxygen-starved grass. Eventually
the truck bumped off the road and headed south toward a cluster of white domes, barely visible at first but proof of a human presence in this moonscape.

The man in the truck was General Yuri Votintsev. Two years earlier he had led the showstopping procession of Dvina missiles through Red Square. Now he had come to shake things up at the closest Soviet early-warning station to Pakistan.

The U-2’s flight planners in Washington believed that if they could smuggle the planes into Soviet airspace with no initial radar contact their chances of being tracked and shot down later in their missions would be drastically reduced. Votintsev and his superiors in Moscow knew from experience that this was true. They knew the monstrously impertinent routes flown by Cherbonneaux and Jones in 1957, even if they didn’t know the pilots’ names. They had an inkling about Knutson’s route in 1959, even if Stan Beerli thought it had gone undetected. In December that year and again in February 1960, before Eisenhower’s authorization for a final pair of flights before the Paris summit, more U-2s from Peshawar had photographed the pockmarked proving grounds of Kazakhstan from Kapustin Yar in the west to Sary-Shagan in the east. Votintsev was informed, but too late for a coordinated response.

“It took me two months to become familiar with the [radar] units, including the personnel of individual companies stationed along the Osh-Khorog road,” Votintsev wrote. “I concluded that the effective strength of the corps deployed on the country’s southern borders was not capable of accomplishing the assigned missions.”

His men had been staring at their screens and seeing occasional highflying specks, and yawning. Only the Andijon fighter squadron had shown any alacrity, but its pilots had not come within ten thousand feet of the intruders even in a zoom climb. Votintsev spent a year replacing dud officers with the best men at his disposal and installing powerful new radars along the Osh-Khorog road. It made a difference. U.S. aircraft flying along the Soviet border detected the new radars and their findings were fed into a National Intelligence Estimate of March 1960. The estimate said the only gaps left in the southern radar defenses of the entire Sino-Soviet bloc were in southwestern China.

Even so, project HQ thought the U-2s would still get through.

*  *  *

On April 8, 1960, Frank Powers and Bob Ericson, another Agency pilot still based at Adana, climbed into a C-130 and took off with the Quickmove team for Pakistan. Ericson was the mission pilot. Powers was his backup. Beerli was back in Washington as Bissell’s head of operations. His place in charge of Detachment B had been taken by William Shelton, an air force colonel who was never quite obsessive enough about secrecy for Beerli’s taste. As Beerli put it, cryptically and yet quite clearly: “Quickmove did not have such an impact on Shelton.… He was more or less Air Force rather than CIA.”

The previous two missions had not provoked protest notes, but Powers knew the window of the U-2’s invulnerability to Soviet rockets must be closing. “We could not shake the feeling that time was catching up with us,” he wrote. He would find out soon enough that rockets had been fired at an air force U-2 on a ferret run along the coast of Chukotka in the Soviet Far East. They missed, but a Dvina missile had already brought down a Taiwanese spy plane at 63,000 feet near Beijing; and in Washington another National Intelligence Estimate, this one barely a week old, had concluded that the Dvina had “some capability” up to 80,000 feet.

In Kosulino and the other villages around Sverdlovsk, the rockets had at last arrived.

In central Siberia, a luxury log cabin was being built for President Eisenhower and his family on a headland overlooking Lake Baikal.

In a secluded piece of parkland outside Moscow, for the same honored guest, engineers and landscape artists were constructing the Soviet Union’s first golf course.

*  *  *

Ericson took off at dawn on April 9 and was 150 miles into Soviet airspace before being spotted. For six hours he zigzagged over every top secret site in Kazakhstan, leaving chaos in his wake. It was a greatest hits tour, as if the pilot and his paymasters somehow knew that time was running out for Soviet overflights and he wouldn’t be back: Sary-Shagan, Semipalatinsk, Sary-Shagan (again), Tyuratam (yet again). For six hours fighters were scrambled to intercept him, some armed, some unarmed, none with much hope of success. For six hours Marshal
Sergei Biryuzov, head of all Soviet air defense forces, maintained a miserable, silent vigil in front of a giant map of the Soviet Union at his Moscow headquarters.