Ike's Spies (46 page)

IN THE SPRING OF
1960, hope had bloomed around the world. It seemed that the Cold War might be ending, to be replaced by a period of growing cooperation and trust between the Super Powers. Mr. Khrushchev had made a trip to the United States in September 1959 that was a huge success, a media event of the first magnitude. He almost seemed to be an American politician out for votes. A jolly fat man, he roared with laughter at jokes and was duly impressed by American productivity. To the delight of photographers, he matched his girth against that of a portly Iowa farmer. He spoke constantly of the need for peace. Nearly as old as Ike and fully as bald, Khrushchev—again like Ike—had a grandfather image. He seemed, somehow, comforting.

At Camp David, the serene presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains that Ike had named after his grandson, Khrushchev added to the impression that he was a reasonable man whose sole interest was movement toward genuine peace. He had previously issued an ultimatum on West Berlin—if the United States, Britain, and France did not withdraw their occupation troops from that
city, he threatened, he would turn over the access routes to the East Germans and then the Allies would have to fight their way through to Berlin. Now, at Camp David, Khrushchev said that he had not meant it to be a threat. The ultimatum was not an ultimatum. There could be negotiations.

The two leaders then agreed to meet in mid-May 1960 at a summit conference in Paris, where—it was hoped—“the Spirit of Camp David” could engulf the world. Afterward, Ike would repay Khrushchev's visit, taking along his family for a tour of the Soviet Union. Small wonder hopes were high for an end to the Cold War, for the beginning of peace.

IKE DID NOT SHARE THOSE HOPES
. He was always suspicious of media events. He had told Khrushchev that political summits tended to be like real mountain summits—barren.
⁵
He had always expected Khrushchev to back down on his Berlin ultimatum, as long as the President of the United States stood firm, as he had during the Camp David talks. Ike was unimpressed by Khrushchev's public calls for peace. He would be convinced that Khrushchev was serious only when he saw some real indication that the Soviets were ready for peace. But the Soviets operated a closed system—Westerners could not even get a road map of the Soviet Union, much less an indication of their military dispositions—so the only way to see what they were up to was to spy on them. Therefore, as the date for the summit approached, Eisenhower ordered increased U-2 reconnaissance over Russia.

He did so with some reluctance. A series of recent National Intelligence Estimates from the
CIA
had indicated that the Soviets were developing, or had developed, surface-to-air missiles (
SAMS
) capable of intercepting the U-2. The
SAMS
, according to the
CIA'S
information, could get up as high as the U-2, although they were optimized for use against manned bombers flying below 60,000 feet. The
SAMS
did not have much maneuverability above 60,000 feet, while the U-2 flew at 68,000 feet and higher. “There was therefore the thought,” Bissell recalled in 1979, “that if the missile were fired it would be a near-miss, rather than a hit.” But Gordon Gray personally told Ike that sooner or later “a U-2 would surely be shot down.”
⁶

However, the President's other advisers, from the
CIA
, the Department of Defense, and the State Department, downgraded the
danger. Foster Dulles, for example, once told Ike, laughing, “If the Soviets ever capture one of these planes, I'm sure they will never admit it. To do so would make it necessary for them to admit also that for years we had been carrying on flights over their territory while they had been helpless to do anything about the matter.”
⁷

Of all those concerned, Ike later wrote, only John Eisenhower, Richard Bissell, and Andrew Goodpaster agreed with him that “if ever one of the planes fell in Soviet territory a wave of excitement mounting almost to panic would sweep the world, inspired by the standard Soviet claim of injustice, unfairness, aggression, and ruthlessness.”
⁸

After the event, in a July 1960 postmortem, Ike said that “all his advisers, including Foster Dulles, had missed badly in their estimate regarding the U-2.… He did not wish to say ‘I told you so' but recalled that he was the one and only one who had put much weight on this factor, and that he had given it great emphasis. Being only one person, he had not felt he could oppose the combined opinion of all his associates. He added that the action that was taken was probably the right action, and what he would have done anyhow even if his advisers had correctly assessed the potential reaction.”
⁹

In other words, the President, like his advisers, was extremely anxious to make more flights, whatever the risk. The purpose, in the spring of 1960, was to fly over territory that had not been covered previously, territory that the
CIA
believed might be being used by the Soviets to build new
ICBM
sites. Ike wanted to know, before the summit, what the facts were.
¹⁰

There was also a feeling that the United States had best fly as many missions as it could before the
SAMS
got any better. Francis Gary Powers thought that was the major reason for his May 1, 1960, flight. There had been two flights in close succession in April, Powers later wrote, and “the pilots believed the resumption of the flights was due at least in part to the agency's fear that Russia was now close to solving her missile-guidance problem.”
¹¹

Powers also believed that the
CIA
had not informed Ike “of the many dangers involved, lest he consider the advisability of discontinuing the overflight program entirely.” Powers further had the impression that “Eisenhower believed the pilots had been ordered to kill themselves rather than submit to capture.”
¹²

On this last point, Powers was certainly wrong. Eisenhower had
no such impression. What he did believe was that no pilot could escape alive from a
SAM
hit.

MID-APRIL
1960,
THE WHITE HOUSE
. In the world's most famous office, John Eisenhower and Andrew Goodpaster leaned over the President's shoulders, tracing out for him on a huge map of Russia the proposed flight pattern for a U-2 mission. Ike asked a few questions. Bissell, across the President's desk, explained why the
CIA
thought there might be new missile sites along the route. Eisenhower grunted, then turned to the Secretary of State, Christian Herter (Dulles had died of cancer the previous year).

Herter was worried about the timing, with the Summit meeting only a month away. Ike's attitude was that “there would never be a good time for a failure.” Still, he too was worried. The President told Bissell he had an authorization to fly for the following two weeks.
¹³

Every day for the next fourteen days, Russia was covered by clouds. The U-2 needed near-perfect weather to fly. The weather never improved. Bissell applied for an extension. Ike had Goodpaster call Bissell and tell him the flight was authorized for one more week, that is, up to May 2. If he could not get it off the ground by then, it was scratched for good, because it would be too close to the Paris meeting to risk it.

“And that means,” as Bissell summed it up in 1979, “that all of those stories implying that nobody gave any thought to the timing or that the White House forgot that the summit was going on are a bunch of nonsense.”
¹⁴

The afternoon of May 1, 1960, Goodpaster called Eisenhower on the telephone to report that a U-2 flying a mission over Russia was “overdue and possibly lost.”
¹⁵
Whether it had malfunctioned, run out of fuel, or been shot down was unknown and unknowable.

There was no reason to panic. First, everyone assumed that Powers was dead. Second, the
CIA
had assured the President “that if a plane were to go down it would be destroyed either in the air or on impact, so that proof of espionage would be lacking. Self-destroying mechanisms were built in.”
¹⁶
Third, Khrushchev would probably say nothing about it anyway, just as he had not mentioned the many previous flights, including the two in April.

On the first and second points, the
CIA
had given Ike bad information. Powers had survived and in any case it would have been
impossible to destroy the conclusive evidence that he was engaged in spying on the Soviet Union. That evidence was the film itself. As Lyman Kirkpatrick, a
CIA
career man who became executive director of the agency, wrote in 1968, “Nobody has ever yet devised a method for quickly destroying a tightly rolled package of hundreds of feet of film. Even if Francis Powers had succeeded in pressing the ‘destruction button' which would have blown the plane and the camera apart, the odds would still have been quite good that careful Soviet search would have found the rolls of film.”
¹⁷

The
CIA
had fudged when it told the President that the plane had a “self-destruct mechanism.” The device had to be activated by the pilot. Further, it was only a two-and-one-half-pound charge, hardly sufficient to “destroy” a craft as big as the U-2.
¹⁸

But the biggest mistake of all turned out to be the assumption behind point three, that Khrushchev would keep quiet. For a while, he did. Then, on May 5, four days after the
SAM
knocked Powers out of the sky, Khrushchev broke the news, and in such a manner as to ensure the wrecking of the Paris Summit, thereby destroying the bright hopes for an end to the Cold War. Whether that was his intention or not, no one in the West knows or can know, but it
was
the result.

Speaking before the Supreme Soviet, in a blistering speech, Khrushchev said that the Russians had shot down an American plane that had intruded Soviet airspace. He angrily denounced the United States for its “aggressive provocation” in sending a “bandit flight” over the Soviet Union. In the course of a long harangue, Khrushchev said the Americans had picked May Day, “the most festive day for our people and the workers of the world,” hoping to catch the Soviets with their guard down, but to no avail.

In analyzing the event, Khrushchev suggested interpretations that were later picked up in the United States and remain very much alive in the 1980s as conspiracy theories. The Russian Premier charged that militarists in the United States, in the
CIA
and in the Pentagon, fearful of an outbreak of peace at Paris, had sent Powers over Russia precisely to wreck the conference. “Aggressive imperialist forces in the United States in recent times have been taking the most active measures to undermine the summit or at least to hinder any agreement that might be reached.”

Then Khrushchev offered an explanation that still finds wide support among American intellectuals and liberals—that Ike did
not know what the militarists were doing behind his back. “Was this aggressive act carried out by Pentagon militarists?” he asked. “If such actions are taken by American military men on their own account, it must be of special concern to world opinion.”
¹⁹

Ike did not deny the charges or reply to the innuendos. Meanwhile, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration went ahead with the long-established cover story. It issued a statement on May 5 that began, “One of N.A.S.A.'s U-2 research airplanes, in use since 1956 in a continuing program to study meteorological conditions found at high altitude, has been missing since May 1, when its pilot reported he was having oxygen difficulties over the Lake Van, Turkey, area.” The pilot was identified as thirty-year-old Francis Gary Powers, a civilian flying under contract to Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Presumably, the U-2 had strayed off course, perhaps crossing the border into Russia. The unstated assumption was that Powers' weather plane was the one the Russians had shot down.
²⁰

The following day, Khrushchev released a photograph of a wrecked airplane, describing it as the U-2 Powers had flown. It was not, however, a U-2, but another airplane. The Premier was setting a trap. He wanted Eisenhower to continue to believe that Powers was dead, the U-2 destroyed, so that the United States would stick to its “weather research” story, as it did. On May 7, Khrushchev sprang his great surprise. He jubilantly reported to a “wildly cheering” Supreme Soviet that “we have parts of the plane and we also have the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking. The pilot is in Moscow and so are the parts of the plane.”

Khrushchev made his account a story of high drama and low skullduggery interspersed with bitingly sarcastic remarks about the American cover story. Cries of “Shame, Shame!” rose from the deputies as Khrushchev heaped scorn on the
CIA
, mixed with cries of “Bandits, Bandits!”
²¹

Upon receiving this news, which he found “unbelievable,”
²²
Eisenhower made a serious mistake. At Secretary Herter's urging, he authorized the State Department to issue a statement denying that Powers had any authorization to fly over the Soviet Union.

As James Reston reported in the New York
Times
, “The United States admitted tonight that one of this country's planes equipped for intelligence purposes had ‘probably' flown over Soviet territory.

“An official statement stressed, however, that ‘there was no authorization for any such flight' from authorities in Washington.

“As to who might have authorized the flight, officials refused to comment. If this particular flight of the U-2 was not authorized here, it could only be assumed that someone in the chain of command in the Middle East or Europe had given the order.”
²³