Fifties (116 page)

The truth was that as Eisenhower entered the final years of his presidency, his primary objective was to establish his legacy, which he saw as limiting the arms race. He knew from the U-2 photos that the Soviets were not a threat, so it seemed logical to get a test-ban treaty of some sort. In 1959 he said with some melancholy, “We haven’t made a chip in the granite in seven years.” His closest advisers urged him to let Symington and other Democratic critics see some of the photos taken by the U-2. That would end much of the criticism. But Eisenhower would not budge. He thought there was no way to keep the flights secret if the opposition leadership was let in. So the flights continued in secret. A spy satellite that would fly over the entire world would not be ready, it appeared, until sometime in 1961.

His critics and his enemies became bolder. The Air Force generals were the worst, he believed. They seemed to be teaming up with the munitions people—he used the old-fashioned phrase from World War One to describe the booming new defense industry—to push for endless redundant military systems. “I’m getting awfully sick of the lobbies by munitions,” he told the Republican leaders. Indeed, he sensed their primary motivation was greed: “You begin to see this thing isn’t wholly the defense of this country, but only more money for some who are already fatcats.”

When in the wake of
Sputnik
members of his own cabinet pushed for a dramatic increase in defense and space spending, he revealed his irritation. “Look,” he had said. “I’d like to know what’s on the other side of the moon, but I won’t pay to find out this year.” It was taking all his will to keep the military and the defense contractors from escalating the arms race. Even when he did increase defense spending substantially, he told his aide Andrew Goodpaster that two thirds of the increase was for public opinion. “God help the nation when it has a President who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do,” he would say.

It is our contradictions that make us interesting. Eisenhower, the famed general, wanted more to be a man of peace than a man of war. Jingoism in other men had always made him uneasy. When he heard the news of the success of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, though it meant a quick end to the war in the Pacific, he was left with
a feeling of severe depression, caused by the arrival of a new and terrifying chapter in man’s capacity to destroy man. Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles’s acute lady friend, even thought that Ike’s hatred of war was a weakness, not unlike, she said, a prostitute who values her chastity. He was a curious combination of qualities: part shrewd and conniving, and alternately innocent, naive, and trusting. He was the most political of generals, and yet he thought politicking on the part of others unseemly. He was a man who knew that his greatest asset, as a leader not just in the United States but throughout the world, was that the entire world seemed to trust him and believe in him, but he sharply increased the use of clandestine operations to overthrow governments that he disliked in underdeveloped countries. He had hoped, after the war, for a rapprochement with the Russians, but his anti-Communism seemed to harden during much of his administration. He could barely restrain his contempt toward Adlai Stevenson when he raised the issue of limiting nuclear testing in 1956, and yet in the final years of his administration he hungered, more than anything, for some form of accord with the Russians on limiting nuclear testing and perhaps even on limiting the production of nuclear weapons.

By 1958 he had begun to reduce the number of U-2 flights. He had always been uneasy with them. He knew they were provocative, and he himself would point out that nothing would move the United States more quickly to war than the knowledge that the Soviets were overflying us and taking pictures. In 1959 he became even more cautious. He was beginning to build new links to Khrushchev, and he did not want them jeopardized by the U-2 flights. There was a constant tug-of-war between him and Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, who was in charge of the flights; the CIA always seemed to want one more flight, one more picture, or a new flight pattern just a little deeper into Soviet airspace. Soon there was a byplay, Bissell and Dulles asking for more flights, and Ike trying to hold the line and giving them fewer than they wanted and more than he wanted.

What the President did not know was that the U-2 pilots themselves were becoming more nervous. There was evidence by the fall of 1958 that the Soviets were not only tracking them with radar but firing SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) that were coming, as Powers put it, uncomfortably close. The U-2 pilots, Powers noted later, knew that the Soviets were having problems with their guidance systems, but by 1960 new SAM-2 missiles were being installed throughout the country. They had a far greater range than their predecessors, and the CIA estimated that they could hit a target seventy thousand feet
high. At the same time the planes themselves were becoming heavier as more equipment was being added.

Powers was fast becoming the most senior pilot in the group: His personal life was something of a ruin; he and his wife spoke often of divorce. There was no brilliant Air Force career waiting; it was as if he had found his niche in this demanding but boring job, which above all else required endurance. He seemed so ordinary that it was hard to think of him as a spy. As James Donovan, one of the intelligence men who handled him later, said, he was just the kind of man the CIA would want. “Powers was a man, who, for adequate pay, would do it (fly a virtual glider over the Soviet Union) and as he passed over Minsk, would calmly reach for a salami sandwich.” The world of the White House, of course, and the world of the U-2 pilots did not intersect. Dwight Eisenhower might have his doubts about the continued viability of the flights, and Francis Gary Powers, his doubts, but they did not share them. In 1959 a new engine arrived, stronger and able to fly at higher altitudes, but there was an increasing edginess among the pilots.

In 1959 Eisenhower invited Khrushchev to visit America, thinking that it would be for two or three days, but somehow in the confusion Khrushchev accepted for ten days. Someone asked the President what he wanted the Soviet leader to see, and the response was Eisenhower at his best: Levittown, he said. It was a town “universally and exclusively inhabited by workmen.” (This was not an entirely accurate statement.) He wanted the premier to fly in a chopper with him and see the District. In addition, he wanted Khrushchev to go to Abilene, “the little town where I was born,” and see for himself “the story of how hard I worked until I was twenty-one, when I went to West Point.” The President noted that when Nixon had debated Khrushchev in Moscow, the Soviet leader had said that Americans knew nothing of hard work. Well, said the President, “
I
can show him the evidence that
I
did and I would like for him to see it.” But most of all, he added, “I want him to see a happy people. I want him to see a free people, doing exactly as they choose, within the limits that they must not transgress the rights of others.”

When Khrushchev finally came, it was a circus; every journalist in America turned out, for Americans had never seen a Soviet dictator in the flesh before, and this was no ordinary Soviet dictator—for Khrushchev always provided, if nothing else, good theater. Eisenhower and Khrushchev got on fairly well, although there was a sense that the boisterous Khrushchev was a bit much for the restrained Eisenhower. In private meetings, they minimized the differences between
the countries. How was it, Khrushchev asked, that a general, a man whose entire mission in life had been waging war, was so committed to finding the peace? There might have been some moments of exhilaration during the last war, but “now war has become nothing more than a struggle for survival,” the President answered. He was not afraid to say that he was afraid of nuclear war, and everyone else should be.

On the whole the trip went well. Khrushchev invited Eisenhower not just to come to Russia himself but to bring along his whole family. Ike, in one of his better moods, said, “I’ll bring along the whole family. You’ll have more Eisenhowers than you know what to do with.” For Eisenhower, this was everything he had hoped for: He would visit Moscow and bring back a limited test ban treaty; personally, he would end the worst of the Cold War. This was why he had become President. In the summer of 1960 he would attend a summit meeting with the French, British, and Russians in Paris and from there fly on to Moscow. A process of peace might truly begin and this, surely, would be the triumph of his presidency.

The less frequently the U-2 pilots flew, the more difficult each flight became. There were indications that the program was losing some of its secrecy. A model-airplane magazine published an article about the plane in March 1958, complete with drawings. It was also said that the official paper of the Soviet air force had reported on the flights and called the plane “the black lady of espionage.” An American mole working in Soviet intelligence reported that the Soviets had a great deal of intelligence on the U-2, something that apparently surprised both Dulles and Bissell. In addition, in the summer of 1958 Hanson Baldwin, the military writer for
The New York Times,
spotted one of the U-2s on the tarmac while he was in West Germany and understood immediately what the plane’s purpose was. He lunched with Robert Amory, one of Allen Dulles’s top people, and said he was going to do a story—after all, he had seen it without violating security. “
Jesus, Hanson, no!
” Amory said. It would undermine America’s most important intelligence program. They argued for a time and in the end Allen Dulles talked to Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, the
Times
publisher, who decided to hold the story. But, as Sulzberger told Dulles, the story had been set in type—in case someone like Drew Pearson got it, too. Gradually, the top people in Washington journalist circles, like Arthur Krock and Scotty Reston and Chal Roberts, of
The Washington Post,
found out about the U-2 but did
not write it up. As Michael Beschloss noted, knowing about the U-2 became something of a status symbol on the Washington dinner-party circuit.

In Washington, in late April 1960, Eisenhower was preparing for the summit and wanted no more flights. “If one of these aircraft were lost when we were engaged in apparently sincere deliberations, it could be put on display in Moscow and ruin my effectiveness,” he said to one aide. But Dulles and Bissell pleaded for one last flight, claiming it was unusually important: They wanted one more good look at the Soviet missile installation at Tyuratam. Again Eisenhower, accustomed over the years to listening to his subordinates, went against his better judgment and relented.

At the U-2 base in Turkey, Powers, by this time the only remaining member of the original group, was assigned the flight. For the first time, a U-2 would fly all the way across the Soviet Union. The flight would begin in Peshawar, Pakistan, and would end nine hours and 3,800 miles later in Bodo, Norway.

In the language of the pilots, the flights had been getting dicier and dicier all the time; this flight took these anxieties a step further. The pilots had always had unanswered questions about what to do in case they were shot down. Was there anyone they could contact? Powers had asked one of the briefing officers. No, he was told. How much should he tell? he asked. “You may as well tell them everything because they’re going to get it out of you anyway,” he was told.

The flight was delayed several times because of weather and was finally set for the last day of April. Powers slept poorly. He was not pleased with the plane he had been assigned; it was, he thought, a lemon—plagued by malfunctions. He carried his regular identification—a violation of the rules and a sign that the pilots were becoming complacent—and a new piece of equipment: a silver dollar with a pin. In case of capture by the Soviets, the pilots were to stick the pin in a groove, from which would seep out a sticky brown substance. Injecting yourself with the substance would make it appear that you had died from eating bad shrimp. The pilots had agreed among themselves they would not use the pin even if worst came to worst.

Fully dressed in his sealed flight suit, Powers climbed into the plane that morning at 5:20
A.M.
and waited for the final clearance to come from the White House. It was clear to him by this point that Washington was approving each flight. As he sweated, a friend outside took off his shirt and held it over the cockpit in order to shield him from the sun. Finally, at 6:26 he was allowed to take off. He soon picked up the trail of a Russian jet. It was traveling at supersonic
speed toward him. But he remained confident; Soviet planes still flew far below him. Unfortunately, he soon began to have problems with his own plane. When he put it on automatic pilot it began to malfunction, so he flew it manually. For a moment he considered aborting the mission, but then decided to go ahead. He was flying toward Sverdlovsk (formerly known as Ekaterinburg) for what would be the first U-2 trip over that city when he heard a dull thump. The aircraft pitched forward. A tremendous orange flash hit the cockpit and lit the sky around him.
My God,
he thought to himself.
I’ve had it now.
Later, Powers decided (and Kelly Johnson agreed) that what had happened to him was a near miss, which tore the fragile plane apart but spared his life.

He struggled with the plane, fearing the ejection seat. The plane was completely out of control, spinning wildly and hurtling toward the ground. He was sure that both wings had been severed. He finally managed to get out of the plane: For a time he fell rapidly through the air, an exhilarating feeling, even better, he thought, than floating in a swimming pool. Finally, he got his parachute open. When he landed, he was quickly picked up by a local farmer and turned over to the KGB.

In Washington on the afternoon of May 1, Dwight Eisenhower was notified by Andrew Goodpaster that a U-2 was missing and had apparently been shot down. They both lamented the death of the brave young pilot. The one thing Allen Dulles had promised Dwight Eisenhower was that if the Russians shot down a plane, the pilot would not live. It was a question Eisenhower had raised on several occasions. Dulles would always answer that it was unlikely the Soviets could shoot one down, and if they did, the pilots would blow up the planes before taking their own lives. That they would
never
capture a live pilot was the great given, thought John Eisenhower, the President’s son, who was serving as his aide at the time and going over the U-2 requests. There was no reason to think that even though a U-2 was missing a major crisis was in the works. With the amount of fuel Powers had on board the plane, Andy Goodpaster, the President’s closest aide, said, “there is not a chance of his being alive.” In the White House, aides started working on a cover story.