Flight to Sverdlovsk

(See Cover)

The low black plane with the high tail looked out of place among the shiny military jets crowding the U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik, near Adana, Turkey. Its wide wings drooped with delicate languor--like a squatting seagull, too spent to fly. Its pilot seemed equally odd: a dark, aloof young man who wore a regulation flying suit and helmet but no markings, and had a revolver on his hip. Pilot Francis Gary Powers, 30, climbed into the one-man cockpit, gunned the black ship's single engine, and as the plane climbed toward take-off speed, the wide wings stiffened and the awkward outrigger wheels that had served as ground support dropped away.

Steadily the plane climbed--beyond the ceiling of transports, beyond the ceiling of bombers and interceptors, up through 60,000 ft., beyond the reach of any other operational craft and, as far as the pilot knew, of antiaircraft fire as well. Back at Incirlik, an operations officer tersely logged the take-off of the high-altitude U-2 weather research flight. If all went well, that was all the official records would ever have to say. Meanwhile, Pilot Powers banked to a course that took him north and east--arcing toward the border of Soviet Russia.

As the world found out last week, Francis Powers, onetime U.S. Air Force first lieutenant, was off on an intrepid flight that would ultimately carry him up the spine of the Soviet Union. From south to north, his high-flying instruments would record the effectiveness of Russian radar, sample the air for radioactive evidence of illicit nuclear tests. The U2's sensitive infra-red cameras could sweep vast arcs of landscape, spot tall, thin smokestacks or rocket blasts--if there were any--on pads far below.

Francis Powers was on an intelligence mission, like many unsung pilots before him. As such, he was as much a part of the long thin line of U.S. defense as G.I.s on duty in Berlin, technicians manning missile-tracking stations behind him in Turkey, shivering weather watchers drifting through a winter on ice islands in the Arctic. As such, he, and they, were engaged in giving the free world the warning it must have if it is to protect itself from Russian attack, and the shield of intelligence it must have if it is to seek peace without the danger of being lured into a fatal trap.

Cloak & Dagger. But Pilot Powers had bad luck: he got caught, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev says that he talked. Thus Khrushchev had the chance to tell the world about the U2's mission last week--with all the embellishment and distortion that best suited his case.

After taking off from his base in Turkey on April 27, said Khrushchev, Powers flew across the southern boundary of the U.S.S.R. to Peshawar in Pakistan. From there, on May 1, he took off on a reconnaissance flight that was supposed to take him up the Ural Mountains to Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula to a landing in Norway (see map). Soviet radar tracked him all the way, and over Sverdlovsk, on Khrushchev's personal order, he was shot down at 65,000 ft. by a Soviet ground-to-air rocket. Pilot Powers, said Khrushchev, declined to fire his ejection seat because that would have blown up his plane, its instrumentation and possibly Powers himself. Instead, he climbed out of his cockpit, parachuted to earth and was captured, while his plane crashed near by.

Khrushchev spared no cloak-and-dagger touches. He brandished what he called a poisoned suicide needle that Powers was supposed to use to kill himself to avoid capture. Said Khrushchev: Powers refused to use it--"Everything alive wants to live." Khrushchev displayed high-altitude, infra-red pictures of Soviet targets, which he said had been reclaimed from the U2's cameras ("The pictures are quite clear. But I must say ours are better"). No one explained how so much could be salvaged from a plane purportedly destroyed by a rocket. Khrushchev waxed in sarcasm as he reported that Powers had carried a conglomeration of French francs, Italian lire and Russian rubles, plus two gold watches and seven gold rings. "What was he going to do?" asked Khrushchev scornfully. "Fly to Mars and seduce Martian women?"

"For the time being," said Khrushchev after threatening a trial for Powers and a press conference at which the remains of the U-2 would be put on public display, "we qualify this aggressive act by an American aircraft . . . as one aimed at nerve-racking, rekindling the cold war and reviving the dead rat while it is not yet prepared for war. Imagine what would happen if a Soviet plane appeared over New York or Chicago," he went on. "U.S. official spokesmen have repeatedly declared that they have duty atomic bombers which, on the approach of a foreign plane, can take to the air and head for assigned targets . . . We do not have duty bombers, but we do have duty rockets, which accurately and inevitably will arrive at their appointed targets and do their job more surely and efficiently."

Intelligence Gap. As Khrushchev's scathing statement hit Washington, officials broke their Saturday calm for a day-long series of huddles and telephone calls to the President at his Gettysburg farm. In the end, a week of confusion was washed out with one eminently sensible decision: to tell the truth. With the President's approval, hapless Lincoln White, the same State Department spokesman who had the day before denied any U.S. overflights of Russia, dictated the statement that a U.S. jet had indeed been snooping for Soviet secrets--as U.S. planes have been doing for the past four years. "The necessity for such activities as measures for legitimate national defense," said White, "is enhanced by the excessive secrecy practiced by the Soviet Union in contrast to the free world."

Such cold-war candor gave the U.S. a chance to discuss with equal candor the massive problem of getting adequate intelligence about the vast Communist nations. The Soviet dictatorship keeps its secrets--even from its own citizens--by the classic techniques of a police state. Travel is restricted, and foreigners off the beaten path are spied on. No news of even an air crash ever appears in the Soviet press unless the Kremlin wants it there; no stories of new weapons or defense plants are ever told by Moscow's radio commentators unless there is a propaganda motive. Secrecy not only enables Khrushchev & Co. to hide what they have but to hide what they don't have as well.

Early in the high-stakes cold-war game, the U.S. knew that it was appallingly weak on its intelligence of the U.S.S.R. This meant that the U.S. had no real basis for shaping its own deterrent force. The U.S. Air Force thought for years that it had to defend itself against a big Russian bomber force when the Soviets actually had switched to missiles. In the dawning age of ICBMs, the U.S. itself became a certain target with all major defense installations well known; yet U.S. forces did not know of any military targets except major Soviet cities, and precious little about the new ones that were behind the Urals. No gap in weapons was ever so serious to U.S. security as the intelligence gap.

Fringe of Space. Soon after the cold war began, heavily loaded U.S. patrol bombers began lugging cameras and electronic gear around the rim of Russia to scout out Soviet radar defenses. As they fought their ill-equipped, cold-war intelligence battles, they counted their casualties from Siberia to Armenia. Some five years ago the Central Intelligence Agency asked California's Lockheed Aircraft Corp. to design an almost incredible plane. It must be capable of deep penetration of the Soviet land mass; it must be able to fly far above the possibility of interception--out on the fringes of space. And it must manage its lofty missions while burdened with a maximum of intricate electronic and camera gear. In an astonishing one year later, Lockheed's most expert design team delivered the U2.

By 1956 U.S. pilots at far-flung airstrips--England, Japan, Turkey, Alaska--began to see the strange, gliderlike jet come and go on its errands. But details of its mission and its performance were hard to come by. Whenever a U-2 landed, military police swarmed around it. Its pilots were civilians, and when an airman would nudge up close at the officers' club bar to swap plane lore, the U-2 pilot would smile and move along.

Inevitably, though, there were a few crashes, and, inevitably, word got around. In 1957 the Pentagon officially acknowledged the U2, described it as a high-altitude, single-engined weather research plane--which it surely is. But the public rarely got a look at it. Then one day last September members of a Japanese glider club were shooting landings at a light-plane strip 40 miles southwest of Tokyo. In midafternoon a black jet, its engine dead, wobbled down on the strip.

Fifteen minutes later a U.S. Navy helicopter arrived, disgorged a squad of Americans in civilian clothes. For the first time the pilot opened his canopy, called, "I'm O.K.," and climbed out. The Japanese noted that he carried a pistol at his waist, that his flight suit bore no markings. Moments later more U.S. civilians arrived, drew pistols and ordered the Japanese away from the plane. But not before Eiichiro Sekigawa, editor of Tokyo's Air Views, got a meticulous description.

Last Inch. The tapered, square-tipped wings, reaching for 45 ft. to either side of a slim 40-ft. fuselage, gave the U-2 the look of a high-performance sailplane. They suggest a range far beyond that circumscribed by the fuel supply. Editor Sekigawa, a glider pilot himself, speculated that the U-2 was built to climb under its own power, soar with its engine cut, for long, valuable miles in the thin upper atmosphere. Its Pratt & Whitney J57 turbojet engine could kick it along at speeds just under the speed of sound, and its light frame could almost surely be coaxed to altitudes close to 100,000 ft.

Everything about the U-2 seemed tailored to obtain the last inch of range, the last moment of endurance. The thin straight wings were a model of aerodynamic cleanliness; the raked, razorlike tail added a minimum of drag. Even the landing gear was pared to the final ounce. Light bicycle-type main wheels were aided by wingtip wheels that were dropped immediately after takeoff. Between gliding and plain powered flight, Sekigawa guessed that the U-2 could stay aloft as long as nine hours on a single trip.

"Undoubtedly the plane's activity is largely weather reconnaissance," wrote Sekigawa. "Still it would be idle to think it is not being used for other reconnaissance while it goes about researching air conditions. Otherwise, why was it necessary to threaten Japanese with guns to get them away from the crippled plane? And why did the plane have no identification marks? Why did the pilot have no identifying marks on his clothes?"

Plane-Happy. Editor Sekigawa guessed more than most brass in Washington. Once the U-2 was test-flown, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) set up a pilot training unit ostensibly under control of Lockheed--but most of Lockheed's top officials made it a point to know very little about it. Everything was turned over to Vice President Clarence L. ("Kelly") Johnson, who is in charge of Advanced Development Projects. The training unit recruited select U.S. pilots, and presumably they were drilled in the same rigorous survival training as Strategic Air Command pilots. Presumably they got long special training in high-altitude work.

In 1956 Lockheed recruited Air Force ist Lieut. Francis Powers. Powers was a plane-happy youngster born in the Cumberland mountain country in Kentucky, near the Virginia border. His father, Oliver Powers, 55, who owns a shoe-repair shop in Norton, Va., reveled in telling callers last week that Francis got his first plane ride at the age of 14, came back to announce: "I left my heart up there, Pap, and I'm goin' back to git it."

On the way to git it, Francis Powers finished high school in Grundy, Va., got a B.A. at Milligan College in Tennessee, and enlisted in the Air Force. In 1951 he was accepted for aviation cadet training, got his wings a year later. But even during the Korean war, when he was a full-fledged jet fighter pilot. Powers never saw service overseas. The Air Force did not seem to hold enough excitement for him, and in 1956 he resigned "to seek employment with civilian industry."

That employment meant the U-2 program at Lockheed. It meant the rigorous training of a modern-day espionage intelligence agent who had first of all to be a fine pilot, whose intricate instruments would do the actual work for him. Powers learned the tightlipped, laconic line of the secret agent. After he and his wife moved to Turkey, he convinced his parents that he was doing only weather work, that he never flew closer than 100 miles to the borders of Russia, that life in Adana was long repetitious periods of boredom between infrequent flights.

Grim Gamesmanship. U.S. intelligence officers believe that the Russians have long known of U-2 surveillance flights. But the U2, flying at least as high as 80,000 ft., was beyond the reach of their antiaircraft weapons. To have accused the U.S. of overflights would have been to admit an inability to defend the country against U.S. planes. Whether Khrushchev indeed got himself an accurate new antiaircraft rocket, or whether--as first U.S. stories had it--Pilot Powers came dangerously low with trouble in his oxygen system, the U.S., at week's end, did not know. In any event the bagging of a U-2 was a moment that Russia's bosses had long looked forward to, and Khrushchev understandably made the most of it.

In the grim gamesmanship of the cold war, Khrushchev scored the U-2 missions as omens of aggression. But as long as U.S. forces need to seek out the sources of possible attack, such flights will continue. Until improved reconnaissance satellites swing into orbit, bold pilots will continue their crossing of a hostile continent. The oxygen mask wall continue to put a new face on the secret agent of tradition, marking his release from the hole-and-corner, back-alley deals of history.

The State Department's blunt admission that it was engaged in aerial intelligence may have surprised sophisticates who felt the U.S. would never admit such activity. It may have shocked the innocent who were sure the U.S. would never indulge. But at this late hour of the nuclear age, it is inconceivable that any reasonable government would not accept all risks in the race for such military intelligence. The chance of exposure may be great, but the risk involved in not trying is far greater: the probable penalty would be more than mere embarrassment.

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