Bridge of Spies (8 page)

In one of the trailers an astronaut sleeps. In fact the astronauts of the Mercury project have not yet slipped the bonds of U.S. airspace, but they have been fitted for their space suits, and this figure looks very like them. He wears heavy black boots and an olive flight suit, bulky yet tight, with half-concealed tubes and lines of crossed lacing down each triceps and leg. The suit is hermetically sealed to a helmet that leaves only its wearer’s eyes visible beneath an ovoid faceplate. His mouth and nose are covered by a mask attached to a hose from a canister of pure oxygen, which he has been breathing for two hours
.

A man enters the trailer, gives the astronaut a signal, and picks up the canister. Keeping close together so the hose stays slack, they step outside
.

A van is waiting. It drives the pair to a hangar halfway down the concrete runway, in front of which a black-painted aircraft sits so low on its undercarriage that a man standing at its front end can stroke it like a horse’s nose. The wings quickly taper to invisibility in the darkness, drooping as they go, laden with fuel
.

The pilot has eaten a late breakfast of steak and eggs. There are people stationed here who will swear in years to come that steak and eggs were not available in this part of Turkey in 1960, but the balance of evidence suggests that they were, flown in on U.S. Air Force C-47 cargo planes from Wiesbaden, Germany, precisely to ensure that these men in laced pressure suits did not go hungry in the air
.

Out of the van but still connected to the canister, the pilot takes a final breath and holds it. Disconnected from the hose, he climbs a short flight of metal steps and lowers himself into the black plane’s cockpit, where he is immediately reconnected to pure oxygen from the plane’s own supply. He starts breathing again while his assistant straps him in. The suit makes even small movements awkward, so the assistant does most of the preflight checks. The canopy closes over the helmet. The single jet that takes up most of the space behind it starts with a low roar, rising quickly to a scream
.

Turkey in 1960 is a free country, at least in principle. There is nothing to stop anyone from the Soviet embassy three hundred miles away in Ankara making the scenic drive through the mountains to Adana with binoculars or night-vision goggles in the glove box and watching what happens next
.

The plane does not use the whole runway. It does not even use a tenth of it. As its wings stiffen under their own lift, stabilizers wedged beneath them fall away and the aircraft seems to stand on its tail. In fact it climbs at fifty-five degrees, but this is still so steep that it is two miles high before it clears the perimeter fence and twice the height of Mount McKinley before it makes its first left turn over the southern fringes of Adana. To the pilot, the only view is of stars
.

The mission planned for this strange black plane with its muted, suited pilot is a seven-thousand-mile tour of Eurasia, ending back here between the mountains and the Mediterranean in a little over twenty-four hours. While it is gone the base personnel will abstain from much of their usual banter, and maybe even from some of their drinking. They will be counting
down the time until it reappears as a black line high over the eastern horizon. Except that in this case it does not reappear. Fifty years later its wreckage is on permanent display in the Russian Armed Forces Museum in Moscow, next to the Great Hall of Victory, where thousands of schoolchildren each year still contemplate their grandparents’ prodigious sacrifices in the defeat of Nazism. The room full of twisted American aluminum is smaller; the lessons there less clear. Both sides claim it as evidence of a victory. Both sides have their reasons. But taken as the remnants of a moment rather than a contest, the crumpled air intakes in room 20 are a monument to hubris and luck—great mounds of it, good and bad, accumulated over years of brinkmanship and blundering in the age of
Dr. Strangelove.
These bits of plane are also a question mark. What if? What if they had stayed in one piece and the aircraft—official manufacturer’s designation “Article 360”—had completed its mission and released its pilot as planned to stretch his cramped legs and sink a long martini in the hut by the concrete outside Adana that served as the American officers’ club? The question hardly bears thinking about, but it can be answered. If Article 360 had stayed aloft, so would hopes of détente at the great power summit scheduled for mid-May that year in Paris
.

Paris in the springtime; Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan, and de Gaulle were all looking forward to it as the last best chance for superpower peace. There were reasons that spring to be quietly optimistic about the course of world affairs, but high over Russia on May 1 that course changed abruptly and irreversibly. One beneficiary was John F. Kennedy, campaigning against Richard Nixon for the presidency of the United States and struggling to persuade voters that he had the requisite international experience. The loss of Article 360, as things turned out, did much to erode the foreign-policy credentials of Nixon as well as Eisenhower and may even have been decisive in an agonizingly tight race. But there were others with reason to be thankful for the disappearance of that peculiar airplane—intelligence professionals enjoying the unprecedented influence conferred on them by the cold war’s cult of secrecy; military brass sitting atop armed forces that still consumed a tenth of the nation’s gross domestic product seven years after the end of the Korean War; and above all the missile manufacturers—Convair, Douglas, Lockheed, the Martin Company—girding themselves for an open-ended arms race to outproduce the Soviets in the technologies of an exotic new national defense that only Eisenhower seemed ready to resist
.
It is no surprise that many believed Article 360’s loss was no accident on America’s part; nor that some still do
.

*  *  *

Five years earlier, an inspector at the U.S. Postal Service received an unusual request from a postmaster in Los Angeles.

Dozens of heavy parcels every week, some of them from defense contractors, were being sent to a PO box in the name of C & J Engineering in the residential community of Sunland at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. C & J Engineering was not listed in any phone book, but the mail drop was emptied regularly by an unmarked van. Would the Post Office inspector be good enough to drop by one day and follow it? The inspector obliged and drove into an ambush. He followed the van south from Sunland toward Burbank, the patchwork of movie studios and subdivisions at the entrance to the San Fernando Valley. Then he turned left into an industrial zone on the east side of Burbank Airport. “Our security people nabbed him just outside the plant and had him signing national security secrecy forms until he pleaded writer’s cramp,” Ben Rich wrote later.

Rich was at that time a senior Lockheed designer. “The plant” did not officially exist but is better known now as the original Skunk Works, a name adopted by its employees because the smell of a nearby plastics plant recalled the pungent moonshine still that Al Capp named the Skonk Works in his
Li’l Abner
comic strip. It was—if legend even approximates to reality—the throbbing hypothalamus of the American military industrial complex; a mosh pit of young men with slide rules pulling hundred-hour weeks in a permanent fug of sweat and smoke, abducted from their girlfriends and families in the service of a higher cause.

In one beige assembly hall, the Skunk Works was the locus of all that was ingenious, irrepressible, patriotic, and strictly need-to-know in the most warlike years of the cold war. It was the birthplace of stealth as an alternative to mutually assured destruction; of smart bombing as an alternative to carpet bombing; of fantasy as a solution to reality. It was the cradle of radar absorption, of machines that could cruise over Siberia at Mach 3, and of the weird black albatross, part jet, part glider, that for want of any hint of poetic imagination among the engineers
who built her came to be known as the U-2. Kubrick had nothing on the Skunk Works, nor did Dan Dare.

The plant’s output was legendary. So was its secrecy. Kelly Johnson was the irascible genius responsible for both; the man who would be Q if history were a Bond film. Born in Michigan to Swedish parents, he won his first aircraft design prize at age thirteen. As head of Skunk Works, he enjoyed telling prospective employees that if they signed on there would be gaps in their résumés that they could never fill. He cashed personal checks for over one million dollars from the CIA to help it hide the flow of funds toward the aircraft he was building. He was the originator of a special brand of secrecy, more instinctive than learned, that felt as natural to those in his orbit as rock and roll did to those in Elvis Presley’s.

The CIA people who flew U-2s out of Adana were in Johnson’s orbit, and so were their air force neighbors who occupied the huts and hangars at each end of the runway. “We were Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Number Two as far as the air force was concerned, and that was fine with them; most of them, anyway,” the senior agency man there remembers. Another security officer says that even though the base was busy with navy as well as air force personnel, “nobody asked any questions” about the black planes that rolled in and out of the middle hangar apparently at random. “Somebody told the base commander, ‘Just don’t ask,’ and nobody did.”

Trainee U-2 pilots were steeped in Johnson’s secrecy from the start. As they grow old they still refuse to say how high they flew. When they were mistaken for UFOs, people covered for them. Soaring over Death Valley and Nevada’s Jackass Flats at seventy thousand feet and more, the U-2s’ silver underbellies (at first they were not painted black) reflected the setting sun long after it had dipped below the horizon for airliners seven miles below them. People noticed. In the winter of 1955–56 there was a spike in puzzled comments to air traffic controllers from commercial pilots craning upward while crossing the southwestern United States. These reports were forwarded to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where the nation’s UFO intelligence was being collated. A hastily assembled team called Operation Blue Book was given a number in Washington to call when nothing else could explain a silver point sailing across the western sky. In Washington a flight log would
be consulted and more often than not the point of light turned out to be explicable. Operation Blue Book would ask no further questions and invent a story.

One place these stories never mentioned was Groom Lake, also known as Watertown, or Area 51. The first two names are legitimate entries in the gazetteer of Kelly Johnson’s secret world. The third is not. It has appeared on maps of southern Nevada but has never been used officially by the U.S. military. It identifies the user as a likely believer in jellied aliens and secret swarms of helicopters. Most of all it is a place in the American imagination—though it does exist: a hard, flat lake bed ringed by bone-dry mountains seventy-five miles into the desert from Las Vegas, almost but not quite out of range of a four-wheel drive and a high-powered pair of binoculars. It was chosen by Johnson’s chief test pilot as a suitably private proving ground for the U-2.

Willie Fisher should have known about Groom Lake. If he was the master spy they made him out to be, he should have come back from his field trips with its dust in his hatband and images of spy planes stuffed into his hollow nickels. There is no evidence that he ever went near the place or had the slightest inkling of what happened there. To this extent the Johnson brand of secrecy worked wonders. But the truth is that Fisher, the amiable reverse Fulbright, was not much of a challenge. The U-2 was only as secret as it could be for a plane built ten minutes from Hollywood. It was an American secret. Quite quickly, it was an open one.

The U-2’s first foreign deployment was to England in 1956. Within days, plane spotters with long lenses had gravitated to the perimeter fence at Royal Air Force Lakenheath in Suffolk. Within a year, London’s
Daily Express
was reporting, more or less accurately, that “Lockheed U-2 high altitude aircraft have been flying at 65,000 feet, out of reach of Soviet interceptors, mapping large areas behind the Iron Curtain with revolutionary new aerial cameras.” As soon as a U-2 detachment arrived in Germany, so did KGB emissaries in black sedans to watch it. As soon as it transferred to Turkey, listening posts and radar stations in the Caucasus began to track its every foray toward the Soviet border. It first penetrated Soviet airspace on July 4, 1956, and though the
Express
was right that it could not be shot down, it was spotted by radar at once.

This was not spying by any previous definition. Compared with the Soviet fetish for deep cover it was brazen. It was clever, bold, arduous, and dangerous but also dead simple. It was just the sort of spying for someone like Francis Gary Powers.

*  *  *

When Jessica Powers-Hileman looks back on the way her brother was received on his return to the United States in 1962, she says after what seems like a long pause: “I don’t think he was expecting it to be like it was. At least I’m assuming he did not expect it to be like it was. He knew a little about what the good old
New York Times
had been writing about him while he was in prison, but we came from a part of the country where you trusted everybody. We didn’t lock our doors. We were poor, but if you needed a bed for the night we’d have you in and make you comfortable. Didn’t matter who you were.”

The part of the country where the Powers family came from was the extreme southwestern corner of Virginia, a few miles off the Trail of the Lonesome Pine. The forested mounds of the Appalachians rise gradually to the Kentucky state line, and in the folds between them sits the town of Pound, population 1,075 and falling. Pound has a knack for national prominence. For twenty years, until 2001, reporters from the Associated Press would periodically make the scenic drive from Kingsport, Tennessee, to meet diners at the Golden Pine and watch them dance, because the dancing was illegal. (The town’s ban on dancing in public places was ruled unconstitutional, but in deference to local churches an ordinance still requires permits.)