Confrontation in Paris

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For more than two years the leaders of the two great power blocs have been slowly picking their way toward the summit. This week, under the long, tapering shadow of the U2's wings, the summit conference and the dream of peaceful coexistence smashed against the rock of Nikita Khrushchev's intransigent belligerence.

When his white Ilyushin jet bore him into Paris a day earlier than he had originally planned. Nikita appeared to be in a comparatively calm mood. At the country residence of Soviet Ambassador to Paris Sergei Vinogradov, he fed bread crumbs to the swans, even borrowed the scythe of a neighboring farmer and tried his hand at making hay. "Mr. Khrushchev has a fair cutting motion," reported the farmer, "but since he is a stout gentleman, his stomach interfered with his swing."

But in preconference talks with France's Charles de Gaulle and Britain's Harold Macmillan, Khrushchev's geniality vanished. Obviously sensitive to the U2's revelation of the vulnerability of Russia's defenses, he toughly asserted that Russia was five years ahead of the U.S. in missile and space research, had the power to destroy the U.S. or any other enemy. "He came for no small talk," glumly conceded a Macmillan aide. And West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who, though excluded from the summit itself, had nervously flown to Paris to urge his allies to stand firm on Berlin, came away reporting that "Mr. Khrushchev seems to be in a bad mood."

Just how bad became apparent when Nikita coldly refused to attend the first scheduled summit meeting, which had been planned as an intimate and secret confab amongst the Big Four alone. Instead, he announced, he would show up only for the large (24 people), on-record meeting whose proceedings he would be free to blare out to the world.

In the Salon. Shortly before 11 a.m., the limousines, with their fluttering national standards, began to arrive at Paris' freshly scrubbed Elysee Palace. Unsmiling, the Soviet, British and U.S. delegations in turn climbed up the Elysee's colonnaded staircase to their destination: a sunny salon where once Madame de Pompadour used to hold intimate dinners for her cronies in the court of Louis XV. There, in view of the blossom-laden chestnut tree that dominates the Elysee gardens, the fateful confrontation began.

Only minutes after Charles de Gaulle opened the meeting, Khrushchev, in flat, unemotional tones, began to read off perhaps the most intemperate pronouncement the world had heard from a major statesman since Adolf Hitler died in his Berlin bunker. He denounced the U-2 flight as "aggressive . . . treacherous . . . incompatible with the elementary requirements of the maintenance of normal relations between states in times of peace . . ." He rattled his rockets ("The Soviet government reserves the right in all such instances to take the necessary retaliatory measures against those who shall violate the U.S.S.R.'s national sovereignty") and then got to the point: "When the government of one of the great powers declares bluntly that its policy is intrusion into the territory of another great power with espionage and sabotage purposes ... it is clear that the declaration of such a policy dooms the summit conference to complete failure in advance."

The Last Slap. Next came an almost incredible ultimatum. The U.S. Government, said Nikita, "must, firstly, condemn the inadmissible provocative actions of the U.S. Air Force with regard to the Soviet Union, and secondly, refrain from continuing such actions and such a policy against the U.S.S.R. in the future. It goes without saying that in this case the U.S. Government cannot fail to call to strict account those who are directly guilty of the deliberate violation by American aircraft of the borders of the U.S.S.R. Until this is done, the Soviet government sees no possibility for productive negotiations with the U.S. Government at the summit conference."

The summit meeting had been torpedoed. Butthere was another countercheck-quarrelsome yet to come--cancellation of Ike's invitation to Moscow. "Conditions have now arisen," said Khrushchev coldly, "which make us unable to welcome the President with the proper warmth which Soviet people display toward fond guests. The Soviet people neither know how to dissemble nor wish to do so. We therefore consider that the U.S. President's visit to the Soviet Union should now be postponed and that the time for such a visit should be agreed upon when conditions are ripe."

The Unpleasant Facts. Nikita finally subsided. Ike listened with no visible sign of anger. When his turn came to speak, he rejected the Soviet ultimatum, but came surprisingly close to apologizing for the U-2 incident. Khrushchev, he said, "alleges that the U.S. has, through official statements, threatened continued overflights . . . The U.S. has made no such threat. Neither I nor my Government has intended any ... In point of fact, these flights were suspended after the recent incident and are not to be resumed. Accordingly, this cannot be the issue."

The other Western leaders promptly came to Ike's support. Ike's statement "completely resolved" the U-2 problem, said Britain's Macmillan, arguing that "all espionage is in effect a violation of sovereignty, and espionage is an unpleasant fact of life." He didn't see how it was possible to make much distinction between one form of espionage and another. De Gaulle urged a day's recess, and strongly reminded Nikita that his avowed intention of publishing his speech was the one thing that would make continuance of the conference virtually impossible.

The Pure Soul. Nikita was not in a mood to accept any compromise. Stiffly, he dismissed Ike's statement with the cold rejoinder that it contained no "renunciation" of Francis Powers' flight over Russia, no "expression of regret," and no mention of "punishment for those who are directly responsible." To Western reminders that Russia had a notable espionage record of its own, Khrushchev, an avowed atheist, threw his hands above his head and said: "As God is my witness, my hands are clean and my soul is pure." If he had let Ike come to Russia, he went on piously, "I don't know how I would explain it to my little grandson."

Even the one hope which Khrushchev held out for future summit negotiations was deliberately insulting. "We would think," he said, "that there is no better way out than to postpone the conference of the heads of government for approximately six to eight months." Harshly, he underscored his point: by then, Dwight Eisenhower will no longer be President of the U.S. "The Soviet government," declared Nikita, "is deeply convinced that if not this Government of the U.S., then another, and if not another then the next one, would understand that there is no other way out but the peaceful coexistence of the two systems."

After three hours of impasse, the ugly scene came to an end. De Gaulle, still trying to stave off the complete collapse of the conference, declared that he would stay in contact with each of the delegations, decide within a few days whether to hold another session. Khrushchev unyieldingly replied that there could not be "another" session, since he did not regard this day's work as a summit meeting. When De Gaulle and Macmillan asked what his immediate plans were, Nikita was carefully noncommittal. If possible, he clearly intended to force someone else to take the blame for formally breaking up the conference. Nikita bounced out of the Elysee palace, joking with his chauffeur and declaring: "Only my face is red [in Russian an expression conveying good health]. Eisenhower's is white. And Macmillan's has no color."

An hour later, Ike issued his own account of the proceedings. "I have come to Paris," he went on, "to seek agreements with the Soviet Union which would eliminate the necessity for all forms of espionage, including overflights ... I am planning in the near future to submit to the U.N. a proposal for the creation of a U.N. aerial surveillance to detect preparations for attack. This surveillance system would operate in the territories of all nations prepared to accept such inspection."

When he came to Nikita's conduct at the meeting, Ike was stern. Said he: "Mr. Khrushchev was left in no doubt by me that his ultimatum would never be acceptable to the U.S. Mr. Khrushchev brushed aside all arguments of reason . . . The only conclusion that can be drawn from his behavior this morning was that he came all the way from Moscow to Paris with the sole intention of sabotaging this meeting, on which so much of the hopes of the world have rested."

Ike made it plain that he was still prepared to negotiate, even offered separate bilateral talks with Khrushchev to deal with the problem of espionage. Said he: "I see no reason to use this incident to disrupt the conference."

Drawing the Ring. The whole week before coming to Paris, Khrushchev had been bellowing like a wounded rogue elephant over the U2's invasion of Russian airspace. The U.S. had retorted tartly, producing exchanges that in bygone ages of diplomatic niceties would have been read by most people as the prelude to imminent war.

Nikita began the assault at a reception in the Czech embassy in Moscow, where he rambled and rumbled his grievances. Excerpt: "When Twining, the then chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, arrived here [in 1956] we welcomed him as a guest and entertained him. He left our country by air and next day sent a plane flying at great altitude to our country. This plane flew as far as Kiev . . . Only an animal might act like Twining, eating at a place, then doing its unpleasant business there."

Along with the down-on-the-farm crudity came a threat aimed at the West's more vulnerable allies. Said Nikita: "The countries that have bases on their territories should note most carefully the following: if they allow others to fly from their bases to our territory, we shall hit at those bases." To drive his point home, Khrushchev summoned to his side Pakistani Ambassador to Moscow Salman Ali and warned him that Soviet defense forces "have drawn a ring around Peshawar "--where the U2's pilot Francis Powers allegedly began his flight--and were prepared, if necessary, to take "retaliatory measures" against the Pakistani base. When Ambassador Oscar Gundersen of Norway, where Powers had planned to end his flight, asked for a definition of "retaliatory measures," Khrushchev replied: "If these provocations continue, we will have to aim our rockets at the bases."

The U.S. response was brusque. Said Secretary of State Herter: As long as the Russians "keep their society tightly closed and rigorously controlled . . . with threats of mass destruction frequently voiced by the Soviet leadership," the Government of the U.S. would be "derelict in its responsibility not only to the American people but to free peoples everywhere if it did not, in the absence of Soviet cooperation, take such measures as are possible unilaterally to lessen and to overcome the danger of surprise attack." At his press conference two days later, President Eisenhower charged that the Soviet "fetish of secrecy and concealment ... is a major cause of international tension and uneasiness today." Under such circumstances, he said, espionage "is a distasteful but vital necessity."

Barely two hours after Ike had spoken, Nikita Khrushchev lashed back. This time the scene of Nikita's diatribe was the Chess Pavilion of Moscow's Gorky Park, where Soviet propagandists had mounted a show of trophies of the U2. Walking in unannounced, Khrushchev stared at the exhibits, quipped: "I suppose you could call this an exchange of technical information." Then he clambered up on a wicker chair and held an impromptu press conference. Asked whether his estimation of Eisenhower had been changed by the U-2 incident, Nikita attacked Ike directly for the first time since the Camp David talks. Said he: "It has, of course. I was not aware that the plan of air espionage over the Soviet Union was not the caprice of an irresponsible officer. I was horrified to learn that the President had endorsed those aggressive acts."

Time for a Trial. All this was passed by Moscow's censors after only brief dithering. But it was a full 20 hours before the censors finally got the word to release the rest of Nikita's intemperate ramblings. Ridiculing the U.S. request for an interview with Powers, Khrushchev said flatly: "We shall try him ... try him severely, as a spy." When he recalled Herter's cool assertion that U.S. reconnaissance flights would be justified as long as Soviet secrecy continued, Nikita shook his fist and cried: "Impudence! Sheer impudence! There was a time--I remember it from my youth--when many criminals and other suspicious elements roamed the world. These people sometimes resorted to the following trick: a bandit with a small boy would hide under a bridge and wait for someone to cross it. The bandit would send the boy to the passerby, and the boy would say, 'Hello, mister, give me back my watch . . .' Then the armed bandit would appear, and tell the passerby: 'Why do you bully the boy? Give him back his watch and pass over your coat too.' "

Nikita's moral: "The U.S. wants to live according to this law. But we are not a defenseless passerby. If the U.S. has not yet experienced a real war on its territory, has not experienced air raids, and if it wishes to unleash a war, we shall be compelled to fire rockets which will explode on the aggressor's territory in the very first minutes of war."

A Wicked World. Had Khrushchev committed the fatal psychological error of protesting too much? When news of Powers' capture first broke, the reaction of many free-world nations was dismay and indignation at Washington. Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Mohammed Ikramullah stiffly declared that, if Soviet charges that Powers' flight began at Peshawar proved true, Pakistan would "lodge a strong protest with the Government of the U.S." With less justification, the Norwegian government did make a formal protest, asked the U.S. "to take all necessary steps to avoid that similar landings are planned in the future." In Japan, where the U.S. currently bases three U-2s, the opposition Socialist Party seized on the issue to stall parliamentary ratification of Premier Nobusuke Kishi's new security pact with the U.S. With near-hysteria, London's Daily Herald called the U.S. a "summit saboteur," and the Daily Mail angrily described Eisenhower as "a tumbled titan . . . with inept hands."

But as Khrushchev continued to pour on the agony, the phoniness of Moscow's noisy piety became all too obvious. Canadian Opposition Leader Lester Pearson declared: "It is the sheerest hypocrisy to feign passionate anger and indignation" at "a crime common to all governments and inevitable in present circumstances." Adenauer observed: "Everyone knows that aircraft have been flying at high altitudes over several countries for years . . . I have knowledge that the Russians are flying over our territory as well." In Britain, former Ambassador to Russia Sir William Hayter reminded his countrymen of the embarrassing disappearance of British Frogman Lionel Crabb (TIME, May 21, 1956) during the 1956 B. & K. visit to London. Said a senior civil servant: "Let's face it. Everybody does these jobs. We live in a bloody wicked world."

Reassured by the U.S. pledge to defend its allies, Pakistan's President Ayub Khan warned Moscow: "We will not be browbeaten." Even the Indian press, while chiding Ike for not keeping the Pentagon under tighter rein, showed an appreciation of U.S. worldwide military responsibilities unheard of in New Delhi's neutralism in the days before Red China began nibbling at India's borders.

The Great Competition. Not only did the U.S. have the backing of its allies. The summit meeting came at a time when all evidence indicated that in the competition between the U.S. and Russia, the U.S. was doing well. The revelation that U.S. planes had been flying over Russia for four years helped to reassure the nervous that SAC still could deliver its deterrent blow despite Khrushchev's vaunted rockets, and was an encouraging indication that U.S. intelligence had resources more sophisticated than those of Brooklyn-based Soviet Agent Rudolf Abel, now serving 30 years in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for his spying. Where the varied dissatisfactions of the Chinese, East Germans and Poles kept the Soviet empire in ferment, the nations of the free world were still essentially united in purpose, were even, as in South Korea, sloughing off some of the weaknesses of the past.

Even the latest interplanetary firecracker shot off by Khrushchev's obliging scientists was a dud. Moscow Radio trumpeted the news that Russia had put a 4.5-ton "spaceship" into near-circular orbit about 200 miles above the earth. Inside the new satellite, said Moscow, was a pressurized cabin containing a dummy spaceman, "all necessary equipment for future manned flight," and about 1.5 tons of instrumentation.

But the "spaceship" told the world more about Russia than Nikita had bargained on. In fact, his satellite was no more a spaceship than the previous Soviet satellite had been "an automatic interplanetary station." By the Russians' own admission, when the time came for the spaceship to descend, it would "burn up in the denser layers of the atmosphere" --a journey's end scarcely calculated to appeal to live astronauts.*

The Affluent Revolution. In the first day of the conference, the whole carefully planned agenda on the three principal issues (see below) went out the window. But the big fact of the summit meeting --at least at the start--was that the West was confronted not by a change in the issues but an apparent change in Khrushchev. The Khrushchev they had expected to meet was committed to "peaceful coexistence" at least in name. With his rejection of Stalinism, he had staked out his place in Communist history as the exponent of the affluent revolution, of a Soviet society no longer built primarily on sacrifice. He promised peace, and with it, a better life. By the logic of his promises, he urgently needed to reduce the burden that cold-war armament imposed on Russian economic and human resources.

But Khrushchev had changed his mind and his mood. As an issue, the U-2 was small enough to be ignored; it was dramatic enough to make much of. Khrushchev chose to make much of it. Why?

Best guess was that Khrushchev had concluded from recent speeches of Western statesmen that he was not going to hornswoggle the West into concessions either by "peaceful coexistence" or even summitry--and had decided to leap ahead of his critics. For in Communism's harsh code, only results count. Peering over Khrushchev's shoulder is Red China's Mao Tse-tung, who challenges him as a Marxist theoretician and as leader of the "Socialist camp." Mao, who knows that it is not China that will get hit in a nuclear holocaust, has insistently been crying out against the folly of "softness" toward capitalism. Within the Kremlin itself, there are powerful men who share Peking's distaste for Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence. When Khrushchev launched his tirade against the West at the Czech embassy, one Western guest noticed some of Russia's marshals smiling as if pleased that at last the boss was beginning to see the light. At the crucial summit opening this week, observers noted that Khrushchev seemed to be paying "great attention" to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky--both men he had often treated as flunkies in the past. Furthermore, he astonished veteran Kremlinologists with the reason he gave for insisting that he had to make his tirade public. "I can not do otherwise," said Khrushchev.

"It was a matter which involved internal politics." No Westerner has ever heard a Soviet dictator admit any concern for "internal politics" before.

Was the U-2 summit a watershed in Nikita Khrushchev's regime? Had he seized on the U-2 to scrap his policy of rapprochement with the U.S. while loudly blaming the U.S. for its failure? It seemed so. Apparently, Nikita Khrushchev was abandoning his detente policy as a ploy that had failed, and reverting to the old Stalinist policy of toughness.

Before the Big Four met, Charles de Gaulle had billed the summit as a moment when destiny would hover "between peace and vast misfortune." Destiny was still hovering.

*But one which Ike had reason to regard as characteristically Russian. In the days just after World War II, Ike recounts in his autobiography, Russia's Marshal Georgy Zhukov confided to him that the Soviets had discovered an unbeatable technique for clearing German minefields: just send a company of infantry through the mined area.

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