Red Moon Rising

6 PICTURES IN BLACK AND WHITE

On the morning of August 28, 1957, the same day that Boris Chertok and Leonid Voskresenskiy would sip cognac and swap conspiratorial jokes at the Burdenko military hospital in Moscow, ground crews at a secret airstrip outside Lahore, Pakistan, readied a mysterious plane for takeoff.

The black, single-engine craft bore little resemblance to anything that had ever taken to the skies before. As with a glider that had been retrofitted for powered flight, its slender silhouette defied conventional design. The wings were disproportionately elongated and dog-eared at the tips. Strange metallic poles held them upright like overgrown pogo sticks. An alarmingly slim sail rose from the tall tail section, which seemed so frail that it might crumble at the slightest crosswind. The landing gear was equally unusual and flimsy and appeared to consist of a lone bicycle wheel.

In the predawn Punjabi gloom, the misshapen plane looked all the more alien against the sweltering backdrop of ancient battlements and mosques and the muezzin’s call to prayer that echoed softly from minarets in the surrounding hills. Though the heat index had already crossed an oppressively humid one hundred degrees, and shimmering waves would soon rise with the sun from the steaming tarmac, technicians in sweat-stained coveralls pumped an antifreeze additive into the plane’s huge fuel tanks. The specially blended gasoline was necessary because it was cold where the aircraft was headed, the coldest place imaginable. But the mechanics gingerly filling the tanks from portable fifty-five-gallon oil drums did not know where that was; their security clearances went no further than maintenance.

While the ground crews made their preflight rounds, another group of technicians, distinguished by their white gloves, fidgeted in a bay under the single-seat cockpit. There, next to three small-diameter portholes that contained the most sophisticated photographic lenses ever devised, they loaded a 12,000-foot-long spool of high-resolution Kodak film. The custom-made film and 500-pound Hycon camera were the only outward clues as to the plane’s true purpose. Otherwise, it had no markings, identification numbers, or insignias. No running lights winked under its dark fuselage, which had been painted dull black to better blend in with the night sky. Nowhere in its equally anonymous innards was there a manufacturer’s seal or anything else that would betray that the CL-282 Aquatone had been assembled at the top-secret Lockheed Skunkworks plant in Burbank, California.

Officially, the CL-282—or the U-2, as it would eventually be called—did not exist. Neither did the pilot, E. K. Jones, who was going through his own preflight routine in a small, barrack-style building near the runway. Like the twenty-man Quickmove mobile maintenance team and the fuel drums they had brought with them, Jones had been flown in the day before from the U-2 main staging base in Adana, Turkey, to minimize American exposure to prying Pakistani eyes. At 4:00 AM a doctor measured his temperature, pulse, and blood pressure and examined his ears, nose, and throat for signs of infection. The medical exam was a formality; like every one of the two dozen U-2 pilots on the CIA’s payroll, Jones was in excellent physical condition. Photographs of the era show a compact, muscular young man, with thick, dark hair and the slightly swaggering expression common to fighter aces, test pilots, and other alpha males of the airborne community. Pronounced fit for duty, Jones made his way to a tiny cantina, where cooks had prepared a high-protein meal of steak and eggs to sustain his stomach during his nine-hour mission. While he ate, a CIA supervisor went over the flight plan one last time and waited for the coded go-ahead message from Washington.

With the time difference, it was 6:00 PM on August 27 in the District of Columbia, and the afternoon rush hour was just beginning. Richard Bissell sat in his downtown office on H Street, across from the Metropolitan Club, and waited for Allen Dulles to call with the mission’s final authorization. Spread out on his desk was a map of Soviet central Asia with the rough geographic bearings of the Tyura-Tam ICBM test site, the latest weather reports indicating clear skies over Kazakhstan, and a copy of Jones’s flight plan.

Jones did not know that he worked for Bissell, though some U-2 pilots would later reveal that they had heard rumors that their orders came from a “Mister B in Washington.” Nor did the lawyers and ordinary business executives who worked in the suites next to Bissell’s office in the Matomic Building realize that their tall, avuncular neighbor with the round-rimmed glasses and easy smile ran the CIA’s most ambitious and classified program. Such was the secrecy surrounding Bissell’s operation that to maximize security, the U-2 reconnaissance program was housed separately from the agency’s main headquarters near the Lincoln Memorial.

The U-2 had grown out of the same 1954 Killian report that had warned Eisenhower of Soviet missile gains and recommended that the United States fast-track its Atlas ICBM program to keep pace. “We must find ways,” the report had also stated, “to increase the number of hard facts upon which our intelligence estimates are based… and to reduce the danger of gross overestimation or gross underestimation of the threat.” There was a virtual information blackout on the Soviet Union, as the bomber gap would amply demonstrate, and new technologies had to be harnessed to collect more accurate data about Russian intentions. Specific recommendations were made in a separate, more classified report, which was circulated within a narrower audience at the National Security Council. It had been prepared by Edwin Land, a flamboyant Harvard dropout whose Jewish grandparents had emigrated from the very same part of Odessa where Korolev had grown up. Land had founded the Polaroid Company and was known for his “spellbinding performances” at Polaroid annual stockholders meetings, where he wooed investors like “a Broadway star.”

The United States, Land urged in his corollary report, had to begin the immediate development of two different types of high-altitude photo-reconnaissance platforms. The first of these, the construction of a state-of-the-art surveillance plane, was approved by Eisenhower in late 1954; the second, a technologically more complex option that involved outer space, struck some at the time as the stuff of science fiction. It was put on the back burner.

At the CIA, the forty-five-year-old Bissell was put in charge of the spy plane project. A Groton and Yale man, and an amateur ornithologist with the right WASP connections, Bissell hailed from a prominent Connecticut family with interests in the insurance and railroad industries. He had grown up in the famous Mark Twain House—the rambling Victorian mansion that Samuel Clemens had built with his literary proceeds—and he had summered aboard his family’s string of ever larger yachts, fostering a lifelong love of the sea. Trained as an economist, Bissell had presided over some of the financial aid programs disbursed in Europe after the war under the Marshall Plan, earning a reputation as a good planner with a disdain for convention and bureaucracy. Like Medaris, he possessed a rebellious nature when it came to following rules, and he was notorious for driving the wrong way down one-way streets in Washington whenever he was in a hurry.

At once charming and aloof, garrulous and yet secretive, Bissell was the sort of highborn gentleman scoundrel that the CIA, under Allen Dulles, loved to recruit. At the agency, he quickly proved his organizational mettle by helping to orchestrate the overthrow of the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, which had threatened the interests of the politically connected United Fruit Company. (Allen Dulles was a significant shareholder in the company, which John Foster Dulles had once represented as legal counsel. The director of the National Security Council, Robert Cutler, had sat on United Fruit’s board, and Spruille Braden, the assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, and Walter Bedell Smith, the undersecretary of state, would both join United Fruit’s board after the coup.)

Bissell’s success in Guatemala, and a similarly staged restoration of the pro-Western shah in Iran (to preserve the holdings of the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company), had marked him as a rising star within the agency. Allen Dulles was said to be grooming Bissell as his successor, and the two shared a love of sailing and socializing, though Bissell was not blessed with his boss’s famous wit or his infamously roving eye. (Dulles’s marital indiscretions were perhaps the CIA’s worst-kept secret.)

To find the right airplane for the job, a craft that could fly unmolested deep into Soviet territory, Bissell turned to Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the legendary aeronautical engineer who headed Lockheed’s most classified “black” military programs. Johnson had a blueprint for such a super-high-altitude jet-glider, the CL-282 Aquatone. He had proposed it to the air force, but Secretary Quarles had opted to go with a rival design by Bell Labs, the company he once headed, to reconfigure British bombers for reconnaissance duty. The Aquatone had been deemed too frail and ungainly for regular air force service. Besides offending the air force’s aesthetic sense, the radical weight reductions that would allow it to fly so long and so high necessitated cutting too many standard safety and redundancy systems. But it suited Bissell’s needs. He had only two requests: it had to be built quickly and quietly.

The contract was shrouded in such secrecy that the Aquatone was listed innocuously as “utility plane number two,” hence its eventual designation as the U-2. Only eighty-one people at Lockheed had been permitted to work on the Aquatone/U-2, in contrast to the thousands who typically labored on such projects, and they finished the prototype in a record eighty-eight days. During that time, janitors were not even permitted in the hangar where it was assembled. To further minimize potential security leaks, Bissell demanded that subcontractors deliver component parts to front companies at fictitious addresses, and he bypassed regular accounting procedures by paying for the plane with a series of $1,256,000 checks made out personally to Johnson and hand-delivered to his Encino home address. As far as Lockheed and the U.S. government were concerned, the U-2 was entirely off the books. Even within the White House staff, only two people—Eisenhower’s personal assistants General Andrew Goodpaster and Gordon Gray—initially knew of the plane’s existence.

A similarly circuitous route had been used to recruit and train air force pilots, who were interviewed in dingy motels around the SAC bases in Georgia and Texas and sent for reconnaissance training to a nuclear testing ground near Groom Lake, Nevada, where Bissell reasoned that the fear of radiation poisoning ensured privacy. Formally engaged as civilian employees of the Second Provisional Weather Squadron, Bissell’s boys operated under the cover of high-altitude weather research. Like the unmarked planes they flew, Jones and his fellow aviators carried no identification papers or dog tags, and no regimental crests or badges adorned their flight suits. Before each mission, their undergarments were carefully vetted to remove identifiable features that might point to a U.S. manufacturer. Even incriminating American accents could be rendered stateless in the event of capture with the one item supplied to all U-2 pilots in addition to the revolver, packets of rubles, French francs, and gold trinkets they carried in their zipper pockets: a glass cyanide capsule, the “L” suicide pill. “The ampoule should be crushed between the teeth. The user should then inhale through the mouth,” the CIA manual instructed. “It is expected that there will be no pain, but there may be a feeling of constriction about the chest. Death will follow.”

The gun and money were mostly for effect, to make the pilots feel better about their chances of survival, which Allen Dulles privately estimated at one in a million. “We told Eisenhower that it was most unlikely that a pilot would survive,” Bissell recalled, “because the U-2 was a very light aircraft, more like a glider, and would disintegrate” if it were shot down. Only three bolts, for instance, connected the tail section to the fuselage. “Holy smokes, this thing is made out of toilet paper,” the test pilot Bob Ericson had exclaimed on first seeing the craft. During a training exercise in Germany, a U-2 had broken apart by simply flying into the turbulent wake of another jet. If anything ever went wrong, Eisenhower was assured, there would be no evidence of the intrusions. The president, however, had not been entirely convinced. “Well, boys,” he had said, “I believe the country needs this information, and I’m going to approve [the program]. But I’ll tell you one thing,” he added prophetically. “Some day one of these machines is going to be caught, and we are going to have a storm.”

Bissell, Eisenhower later recalled, had agreed with his assessment of the political dangers. But John Foster Dulles, ever the hawk, “laughingly” scoffed at their concerns. “If the Soviets ever capture one of these planes, I’m sure they’ll never admit to it,” he said haughtily. “To do so would make it necessary for them to admit also that for these years we have been carrying on flights over their territory while they had been helpless to do anything about the matter.”

Secretary Dulles’s overconfidence, and his policy of purposefully provoking the Soviets, would later earn scorn from historians, who would label him “reckless.” But on that day he carried the argument, as he often did. Eisenhower relied on his foreign policy adviser and trusted his judgment on international affairs, even if he had reservations about his frosty personality, as his diary entries made clear. Some said Ike was even a little intimidated or scared of Dulles, who was frequently so forceful with the mild-mannered president that Bissell initially wondered “who was really in charge” in the White House. But after observing the pair’s interactions for several years, Bissell came to the conclusion that Eisenhower really ran the show.

Shortly before 5:00 AM in Lahore, E. K. Jones was “integrated” into a fully pressurized suit and began breathing pure oxygen for the hour prior to takeoff. He did this to lower the nitrogen level in his blood to avoid getting the bends, in much the same way deep-sea divers decompressed in special chambers before surfacing—only in reverse, as he would be climbing rather than descending. The pressurized suit Jones wore would keep his body from boiling and exploding at the altitude he would travel, a height where the air is so thin that atmospheric pressure drops to one-twenty-eighth that of sea level. Gases at such low-density atmospheres expand rapidly, and the boiling point of liquids falls to ninety-eight degrees, just below body temperature. Wernher von Braun had demonstrated this effect, known as Boyle’s law, for television viewers on one of his Disney programs. Explaining why astronauts would need pressurized suits to survive, he had shown training footage of a special chamber designed to simulate the vacuum of outer space. Inside the chamber was a beaker of water at body temperature. At 14.7 pounds per square inch, the atmospheric pressure at sea level, the liquid was stable. But when a thin membrane sealing off a powerful suction device was popped, the air was instantly sucked out of the chamber, the pressure fell to near zero, and the water in the beaker suddenly convulsed with bubbles and boiled over. “This is what would happen to an astronaut’s blood if he was not wearing a protective suit,” von Braun explained somberly.

Jones would not be traveling into space. But at the height the U-2 reached, he would skirt the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, and his special orange flight suit would keep the gases in his intestines from expanding and bursting like overinflated balloons if the U-2’s cabin pressure suddenly failed or if he had to parachute out of the plane. Unfortunately, there were no further contingency plans for either of those unpleasant scenarios. To save weight, the early versions of the U-2 were not equipped with an ejection system or a burdensome second engine. The plane had to travel light to reach its lofty objectives, and redundancy systems would weigh it down. Nor had the designers bothered to install a long-range radio, because in case of a mechanical malfunction deep in enemy territory, no aid would be forthcoming. The U-2’s only defense was altitude; no other aircraft could fly as high. As long as the plane stayed at its ceiling of 70,000 feet, it was untouchable. But if its single J57 turbo-jet engine malfunctioned, stalled, or flamed out, as it had a nasty habit of doing, and the pilot had to dip below 40,000 feet to restart it, he would be exposed and completely helpless. The men who flew U-2s understood that if something went wrong, there were no backup systems. They themselves were not expected to survive. In fact, they were under instructions not to survive, and already five had died during training exercises.

“I was assured that the young pilots undertaking these missions were doing so with their eyes wide open,” Eisenhower later wrote, “motivated by a high degree of patriotism, a swashbuckling bravado, and certain material inducements.”

It took a special breed of person to accept the U-2’s peculiar conditions of employment. The high hazard pay—three times regular air force salary, plus bonuses—could not have been the principal motivation for volunteering into the airborne espionage service. To be sure, the money was nice. Some U-2 pilots drove Mercedes convertibles, and Jones earned more than twice the annual wage of a senior technocrat like von Braun, another Mercedes aficionado. But risk rather than reward was the primary recruiting tool. At the Lovelace Clinic near Albuquerque, where pilot prospects were sent, Bissell had devised a very elaborate psychological profile of the sort of men he sought: patriots, naturally, but people who liked living on the edge, for whom death was not a deterrent.

Bissell’s pilots had to meet one other critical criterion: they had to be exceptionally gifted airmen, because the U-2 was among the most difficult aircraft to fly. Simply positioning the plane for takeoff required great skill. Its turning radius of 300 feet was nearly ten times that of a regular fighter jet, and visibility from the cockpit was virtually nonexistent. The plane had another troublesome characteristic. At high altitude, where even the U-2’s 200-foot wingspan barely generated lift in the thin air, its 505-miles-per-hour stall speed and 510-miles-per-hour maximum speed converged in what pilots called the “coffin corner,” leaving a scant margin of error. On landing, the massive wings—three times longer than the sixty-foot plane itself—also required deft handling. To get the U-2 down safely, the pilot had to stall the plane precisely two feet off the tarmac, exactly on the center line, and keep the massive wings off the ground by flying the aircraft down the runway in perfect equilibrium. If the U-2 tilted a few feet to either side, a wing tip could slam into the concrete and sheer off or send the plane cart-wheeling. The balancing act was all the trickier as it had to be performed after nine grueling hours of unremitting stress—of working without food or drink or respite from the tension of flying over enemy territory.

At a little past 8:00 PM Washington time (6:00 AM in Lahore), Bissell’s phone finally rang. It was Allen Dulles. He and his brother had just spoken to Eisenhower. Every U-2 flight required presidential approval, and the “brothers-opposite”—Allen, affable and attractive in his tweed jacket and pipe; Foster, rigid and righteous in his somber suits—had jointly persuaded Eisenhower that mission number 4058 of Operation Soft Touch was a “Go.”

Half an hour later, Jones was lined up at the edge of the Lahore runway, pointing his U-2 into the rising sun. Ground crews popped the safety pins from the wheeled “pogo” outriggers at the end of each wing, and the pilot gunned the big Pratt and Whitney engine. As the wings gathered lift, the outriggers fell away, and Jones put the plane into a steep incline of 15,000 feet per minute. It was at this moment that the craft was most vulnerable to being photographed by KGB spies, and Jones hastened to recede from view. But he had to be careful to taper off his ascent after 35,000 feet. Boyle’s law affected the expanding gases in the fuel tanks in much the same way as it did the human body. A U-2 had exploded once when the pilot climbed too high too fast and his tanks blew up. So Jones eased off the control pedals to reduce his rate of climb. Soon the U-2 was a speck in the Pakistani sky as it continued its ascent beyond the range of telephoto lenses. At 70,000 feet, as the outside temperature dropped to 160 degrees below zero, Jones leveled the U-2. The skies above blackened and filled with stars, and over the horizon Jones could see the blue and white curvature of the earth. Beneath him, the mountain passes of the Hindu Kush unfolded like an accordion; beyond that, Afghanistan, and the endless orange plains of Soviet central Asia. He pointed the plane north and crossed into Soviet airspace.

The first U-2 mission over the Soviet Union had coincided with a goodwill visit by Nikita Khrushchev to Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s official residence in Moscow, on July 4, 1956. While Khrushchev toasted America’s 180th birthday with Ambassador Charles Bohlen, a U-2 snapped aerial photographs of the Kremlin before heading off to photograph the naval and air bases around Leningrad.

Allen Dulles had worried about the timing of the mission and “seemed somewhat startled and horrified to learn that the flight plan”—which had included a pass over Poznan, the scene of Polish rioting only a few days earlier—“had covered Moscow and Leningrad,” Bissell recalled. “Do you think that was wise the first time?” Dulles asked.

“Allen,” Bissell replied, “the first time is always the safest,” since the Soviets were not expecting the mission. But he was wrong. Bissell had presumed that because the U-2 had evaded most American radars during its test, the Soviets would not be able to pick it up either. What he didn’t realize was that the USSR had recently deployed a new generation of radar capable of tracking planes at much higher altitudes.

Khrushchev had immediately been informed of the flight and viewed the timing of the incursion as a personal affront. The way he saw it, the Americans had humiliatingly thumbed their noses at him, violating Soviet airspace even as he stood on U.S. sovereign diplomatic soil, and challenging him to do something about it. Worst of all, he had been powerless to respond. Soviet air defenses had nothing in their arsenal that could hit the U-2. MiG-19 and MiG-21 fighter jets buzzed like angry hornets under the U-2, catapulting themselves as high as possible, but their conventional engines and stubby wings couldn’t generate the necessary lift to reach it. Antiaircraft batteries sent useless barrages that also fell well short. Only the new P-30 radar had been able to track the intruder with a surprising degree of sophistication, as the diplomatic protest the USSR privately filed on July 10, 1956, indicated.

The accuracy with which Soviet radar had plotted the U-2’s course had stunned Bissell, though he took some comfort in the fact that the Russians had mistakenly identified the spy plane as a twin-engine medium bomber. At least that meant that the U-2’s secret was still safe, that the Soviets had no inkling of what they were dealing with, or how to counter it. In its protest, which was not made public, the Kremlin had purposely omitted mentioning the plane’s detour over Moscow and Leningrad. That was simply too embarrassing to admit. “What I remembered most about the U-2 flight is how reluctant Father was to send a protest note to the U.S. government,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. “All his injured pride resisted…. He thought the Americans were chortling over our impotence.”

For Khrushchev, this latest incursion had come on the heels of Curtis LeMay’s mock attack on Siberia. Only this time, the Americans had not overflown some remote corner of Russia’s empty Arctic wasteland. They had brazenly put a plane right over Red Square, the symbol of Soviet power, and the most heavily defended piece of airspace in the entire Communist bloc. It was a provocation designed to end any chance of rapprochement. “Certain reactionary circles in the United States,” the Soviets protested, in a thinly veiled swipe at LeMay and the Dulles brothers, were trying to sabotage “the improvement of relations” between the two countries. The Soviets openly blamed “renegade” elements in the U.S. Air Force, though, as John Foster Dulles had predicted, they were careful to keep their complaints quiet.

Secretary Dulles responded, disingenuously, that no U.S. “military” plane had violated Soviet airspace on July 4. Technically this was true, since the U-2 was a CIA operation. But it was also true that American military aircraft had been probing Soviet air defenses ever since the end of the Second World War. The forays, or “ferret” missions as they were known, used a series of converted bombers—initially propeller-driven RB-29s, then the bigger jet-powered RB-47s—to search for gaps in Russia’s radar coverage and to determine how quickly the Soviets could scramble interceptors in response. Invariably, American planes would only brush up against Soviet airspace, making quick dashes across the frontier. Usually “ferret” pilots skirted the twelve-mile offshore territorial limit claimed by Moscow. Very occasionally, as in the case of LeMay’s Operation Home Run, they penetrated the deeper three-mile limit set by international law. And always they fled at the first sign of an answering plane. It was a cat-and-mouse game that could at times turn deadly. (The fate of 138 U.S. airmen shot down during the border overflights remains unknown to this day because Washington never inquired as to their whereabouts, and their families would not be told for forty years. “Representations and recommendations have been made to me by intelligence authorities,” wrote one State Department official after a C-118 with nine crew members aboard was shot down over the Baltic on June 18, 1957, “that no legal action be pursued.”)

The sheer volume of ferret missions, several thousand a year in the mid-1950s, annoyed the Kremlin. But as long as the American planes stayed close to the borders, and the White House stayed silent if any of its planes were hit, the game was played within the acceptable limits of superpower rivalry. Of course, Washington might have had a different view of permissible cold-war norms if the situation had been reversed, and Soviet planes patrolled the American coastline, buzzing over New York or Los Angeles. “It would have meant war,” Khrushchev told his son.

The U-2, however, raised the intrusions to a different order of magnitude. With the maiden Independence Day flight, the United States had abandoned any pretense of respecting the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union. U-2s didn’t take tentative steps along frontiers. They flew border to border in brazen 4,000-mile north-south sweeps. Khrushchev, naturally, was livid at the sudden change of rules. To add insult to injury, the CIA repeated the July 4 overflight the very next day and followed up with four more flights over the next six days. To the Soviets, the seemingly ceaseless parade of American planes over their two largest cities was a humiliating signal that the hard-line hawks in Eisenhower’s administration now intended to harass the USSR on a weekly basis.

“The notion that we could overfly them at will must have been deeply unsettling,” Bissell acknowledged. But the information the U-2s were bringing back was worth the risk, as a jubilant July 17 CIA memo indicated. “For the first time we are really able to say that we have an understanding of what was going on in the Soviet Union on July 4, 1956,” wrote the analyst Herbert I. Miller.

The “bomber gap,” the reconnaissance flights soon showed, was bogus. There were no new armadas of Bears and Bisons lining Russian runway, just row after row of smaller shorter-range Tupolevs that could never reach American soil. But Ike couldn’t confront Senator Symington with this information; it would mean blowing the U-2’s cover.

Aside from the treasure trove of data it produced, the beauty of the U-2 lay in its deniability. As long as the Russians couldn’t produce hard physical evidence of the incursions, or were too ashamed to make a public fuss, the planes could operate with impunity. As a result, as Miller’s memo underscored, the CIA for the first time could eliminate much of the guesswork about Soviet weapons development programs and arms buildups. Craters at nuclear test sites could be photographed and measured to determine the size of the blasts. Missile launch sites could be examined for clues as to the capabilities of Russian rockets. Submarine pens could reveal the secrets of the Soviet underwater flotilla. Air base photographs could give an accurate picture of the number, strength, and battle readiness of bomber fleets. In a society so closed that it took six weeks for the CIA to get wind of Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech (despite the mass protests that it set off in Tbilisi), the best way to peer past the Iron Curtain was from above. A lone U-2 could produce infinitely more useful data than all the previous reconnaissance missions combined. What’s more, the information could be targeted, aimed at a particular site the CIA wanted to know about. And on August 28, 1957, the highest-value target in the Soviet Union was Tyura-Tam.

If the R-7 was no longer a secret, it was partly Nikita Khrushchev’s fault. He had been unable to resist trumpeting the achievement, thumbing his own nose at the Americans a little, and had ordered TASS, the official Soviet news agency, to issue a vague but suitably ominous announcement on August 26 heralding the triumphant test flight.

After the humiliations of the U-2, Khrushchev had been only too happy to rattle his own saber for a change. But even if he had not wanted the Americans and the British to tremble at news of his new superweapon, the United States would have known about it anyway. The new National Security Agency, the sister organization to the CIA for signals intelligence gathering, had encircled the Soviet Union with an electronic moat. Huge dish and phased-array radar networks in Norway, Britain, Greenland, Germany, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Japan, and Alaska intercepted Soviet communications and tracked weapons tests. An American installation in northern Iran, Tacksman 1, had been monitoring the R-7 trials from the beginning and had been able to triangulate the general vicinity of the launchpad at Tyura-Tam.

From its dish network atop a 6,800-foot peak in Iran’s Mashad mountains, the NSA had been able to follow the initial failures at Tyura-Tam on its radar screens, but the success of Korolev’s fourth attempt had caused serious consternation in military circles. The R-7’s maiden flight had coincided, almost to the day, with the fourth consecutive launch failure of the U.S. Air Force’s intermediate-range Thor missile. The American equivalent of the R-7, the three-engine Atlas ICBM, was still a year away from a full flight test. To date, the Atlas had flown only under partial power, with only two of its three engines firing. That left Wernher von Braun’s modified Redstone, a research rocket known as the Jupiter C (though it had nothing to do with the endangered Jupiter IRBM program), as the closest operational American response to the Soviets’ ICBM breakthrough. But the Jupiter C, which had covered a 1,200-mile trajectory several weeks earlier during an August 8, 1957, trial, was not a missile, and hence it was not bound by the 200-mile limit imposed on the army by Charlie Wilson. Medaris had simply chosen its now ill-fated name before Wilson’s “roles and missions” edict, as a way to gain access to overcrowded launch sites, which gave preference to military missiles over research projects, by making the test rocket sound as if it were part of the Jupiter program. In reality, it was solely a test vehicle with no deadly payload, designed to determine whether the new heat-resistant nose cone materials could withstand the pressures of high-speed atmospheric reentry.

Like the Soviets, American rocket scientists were grappling with the problem of warheads being incinerated on reentry, but, unlike Korolev, they had decided to test their thermal nose cone shield before perfecting the missiles that would carry the warhead. The Pentagon did not know that Korolev had put the cart before the horse, and that the Chief Designer did not yet have a working nose cone. The American military planners knew only that the Soviet Union claimed to have an operational ICBM, while the United States was still struggling to get a working IRBM.

This alarming imbalance was why Jones was flying over the Kazakh desert in search of Tyura-Tam. He was following the thin outlines of rail spurs, since the CIA believed that the Soviets could move their big missiles only on trains. And he was using old World War II German maps to guide him, since much of the Soviet landmass beyond the Urals was a mystery to American cartographers. His was only the fourteenth U-2 overflight into the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had twice ordered the flights stopped: first after the Kremlin had filed its initial diplomatic protest, and then again after the sixth mission in November 1956, when the pilot Francis Gary Powers had experienced electrical problems over the Caucasus with MiGs hot on his tail. The scare had sobered some U-2 enthusiasts in Washington, who feared an international incident. Despite the wealth of intelligence gleaned from the U-2s, the superpower tensions they provoked frightened Eisenhower. Put simply, they were driving Khrushchev insane with anger. “Stop sending intruders into our air space,” the Soviet leader had railed at a stunned delegation of visiting U.S. Air Force generals in the summer of 1956. “We will shoot down uninvited guests…. They are flying coffins.”

“At that moment,” recalled a Soviet participant, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Orlov, “Khrushchev noticed that a U.S. military attaché was pouring the contents of his glass under a bush. Turning to U.S. Ambassador Charles Bohlen, the Soviet leader said, ‘Here I am speaking about peace and friendship, but what does your attaché do?’ The attaché was then pressured into demonstratively drinking an enormous penalty toast, after which he quickly departed.”

Juvenile drinking antics aside, Khrushchev had been dead serious about shooting down American intruders and closing the technology gap that allowed the U-2 to range over Soviet soil with such arrogance. “Father thirsted for revenge,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. Immediately, he had ordered that development of the SU-9 supersonic high-altitude fighter jet be fast-tracked, and Soviet rocket scientists were given top priority to push ahead with the new SA-2 surface-to-air missile, which would raise the strike ceiling from 50,000 feet to 82,000 feet.

The CIA knew that it was only a matter of time before the American height advantage was lost. But after Moscow’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising, the Dulles brothers pushed Eisenhower to resume the suspended flights. They felt guilty about not having come to Hungary’s aid and wanted, perhaps, to lash out at Khrushchev—the “Butcher of Budapest,” as Vice President Nixon had taken to calling him. On the secretary of state’s advice Nixon had been dispatched to the teeming refugee camps in Austria, where over one hundred thousand Hungarians wallowed in resentment. “They blamed us for first encouraging them to revolt, and then sitting back while the Soviets cut them down,” the vice president reported on his return. That had settled it. If the flights irked the Butcher, so much the better.

The grainy black-and-white photographs of Tyura-Tam taken by E. K. Jones on August 28 were flown to Washington the following day. There, in another nondescript office that Bissell had rented—this one above a Ford repair shop at Fifth and K streets—a team of optical experts with large magnifying glasses pored over the 12,000 feet of negatives. The Tyura-Tam shots showed a deep triangular fire pit that looked like a large terraced rock quarry. This excavation absorbed some of the R-7’s considerable exhaust blast at liftoff, and its sheer magnitude had given the CIA analysts pause. Perched over the pit was the near football-field-sized launch table with its towering Tulip jaws. Once again, the proportions appeared staggering compared to American launch stands of the period. From the Tulip, a gigantic berm with wide-gauge rail tracks ran toward an imposing assembly building about a mile away. The CIA could have drawn only one conclusion from the images: the R-7 was a monster.

Once more, the U-2 had proved its worth. Only this time it had also proved Stuart Symington right. Having exposed the “bomber gap,” the Missouri senator had turned his attentions (and his presidential ambitions) increasingly toward rocketry. In early 1957 he had begun advocating increases in missile outlays, warning about Soviet advances. “I don’t ‘believe’ that the Soviets are ahead,” he said in a February appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I state that they are ahead of us.”

Nonsense, scoffed his fellow panelist Donald Quarles, puffing up his small frame in a swell of indignation to challenge the tall and imposing senator. The United States “is probably well ahead of Russia in the guided missile race,” he countered, with equal confidence.

The argument had spilled over onto the pages of national newspapers, where Symington accused the Eisenhower administration of misleading the American people. Threatening that Congress would launch a “searching inquiry,” he asserted that the air force’s missile budget needed to be doubled to keep pace with Russia. “Every day we don’t reverse our policy is a bad day for the Free World,” he thundered. By late summer, when Charlie Wilson announced his $200 million missile cuts, Symington had emerged as the administration’s leading critic on matters of national security, the Democratic Party’s preeminent cold warrior. Eisenhower, he groused, was engaging in “unilateral disarmament,” endangering the nation with his obsession for balanced budgets. The Soviets were going to overtake America, he warned, and then all those new highways Ike was pouring billions into would serve only as evacuation routes.

Unbeknownst to Symington, he had a covert ally in Richard Bissell, who understood that it was only a matter of time before the U-2’s luck ran out. The intelligence data it produced were invaluable, but the political costs were simply too high. Sooner or later a less risky means of collecting intelligence would need to be found. And Bissell already knew what that was.

The same 1954 Land report that had urged the creation of the U-2 had also made a recommendation for the development of another type of high-altitude reconnaissance craft, a satellite. The idea, at the time, had been met with skepticism by the National Security Council, owing to its technological complexity, though it was hardly revolutionary.

The notion of using the cosmos as a surveillance platform had long stirred the imagination of rocket scientists and spies on both sides of the cold war divide. As early as 1946, a West Coast military think tank, the RAND Corporation, had envisioned successors of von Braun’s V-2 rockets one day carrying cameras beyond the stratosphere. Von Braun himself had made a similar pitch to the army brass in 1954. “Gone was the folksy fellow with rolled-up sleeves and Disneyesque props,” wrote the historian William Burrows of the meeting. “He was replaced by a grim-faced individual with a dark suit who puffed on cigarettes from behind a desk. This von Braun explained that a satellite in polar orbit would pass over every place on Earth every twenty-four hours, a perfect route for robotic espionage. He noted that maps of Eurasia were five hundred yards off, and added that the error could be reduced to twenty-five yards. The implication was wasted on no one in the room: taking photographs of Earth from space not only would create an intelligence bonanza but would vastly improve targeting accuracy.”

Neither von Braun’s pitch nor Land’s recommendation to the NSC had received much traction in 1954 because American rockets were still too small and underpowered to contemplate sending up heavy spy satellites. By 1957, however, missile development had progressed sufficiently that the notion no longer seemed far-fetched. Though Bissell was working on a successor to the U-2—a new plane made entirely of titanium that could fly at 80,000 feet at a speed of 2,600 miles per hour, nearly five times faster than the U-2—he was also thinking that satellites might offer a simpler long-term solution. The SR-71 Blackbird supersonic spy jet that he was developing with Kelly Johnson might prolong America’s ability to sneak into Soviet airspace, but its invulnerability would also be only temporary. Eventually the Soviets would find a way of bringing it down, too. A satellite, on the other hand, could not be shot down.

Bissell had a problem, though. The CIA was not in charge of the satellite mission; the air force was—but the project was languishing on the shelf. Bissell was alarmed that it was not even at the blueprint stage. Worse, it apparently had received such a low security classification that articles were appearing on it in the aviation press—a death knell to any covert program. Compared to the secrecy that surrounded the U-2, it seemed to Bissell as if the air force was advertising its lack of interest in spy satellites, and in the process blowing the cover of what could potentially prove to be the intelligence community’s premier surveillance tool.

The same lackadaisical attitude plagued the navy’s quasi-civilian entry into the International Geophysical Year’s scientific satellite competition. Vanguard, as the project was known, had been chosen by Quarles over von Braun’s army proposal, sparking a furious rearguard campaign by Medaris to have the decision reversed. The navy’s effort was mired in technical difficulties, hopelessly underfunded, and badly behind schedule. The four-stage Jupiter C test rocket, on the other hand, was already reaching near-orbital velocity in its trials and could easily escape gravity if it were allowed to use a live fourth stage, instead of the dummy weighted with sand that the Pentagon ordered.

Alas, after the Nickerson scandal, ABMA had few friends in the administration. Not only were Medaris’s pleas gruffly rebuffed, but Engine Charlie spitefully ordered the general to personally inspect every Jupiter C launch to make sure the uppermost stage was a dud so that von Braun did not launch a satellite “by accident.”

With the army sidelined, the navy bogged down with crippling delays, and the air force generally uninterested, Bissell was in despair. “I knew our national effort to put any kind of a satellite into orbit was lagging badly,” he recalled. “Given my keen personal desire to implement a successor to the U-2 program, I approached Allen Dulles and urged him to take action. He gave me permission to meet with Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles to inform him that the CIA was interested in accelerating the development of a satellite. Perhaps threatened by my approach, the Pentagon added a modest sum of money to the Navy’s budget to speed up its work, on the grounds that its satellite was the most promising of the candidates for an early flight. Unfortunately, the additional funds accomplished little.”

There was another reason why Bissell began pushing Quarles, who had just been promoted from assistant secretary to deputy secretary of defense, to start taking the IGY satellite effort more seriously. A legal question was nagging CIA attorneys, one that threatened to scuttle the future of any orbiting surveillance system: Who had the territorial rights to outer space? Did sovereign airspace extend beyond the stratosphere? There was no legal precedent for a satellite circumnavigating the globe, snapping photographs of foreign countries. Would it violate international law, like the U-2?

The sooner a satellite was sent into orbit, the quicker a precedent would be set that would govern the legality of all future launches. In that regard, a purely scientific satellite, such as the Naval Research Center’s entry into the civilian IGY competition, was the perfect foil for establishing the open, international nature of outer space that would make extraterrestrial spying lawful.

Legal issues aside, there was also the question of national prestige. One of the CIA’s principal tasks was to engage the Soviet Union in psychological warfare, and Bissell worried that if the Communists were first in space, they would score a significant victory over the capitalist democracies of the West in the battle for the hearts and minds of the developing, postcolonial Third World.

Bissell was not the only one concerned about the propaganda value of a Soviet space milestone. The nuclear physicist I. I. Rabi, a future Nobel laureate, wrote to Eisenhower pleading for greater resources for the American IGY satellite “in view of the competition we might face” from Soviet science. “It was unfortunate,” recalled James Killian, the author of the initial capabilities report recommending increasing both missile and reconnaissance spending, “that this advice did not produce any significant undertakings by Eisenhower.”

Wernher von Braun, for his part, bypassed the reluctant administration altogether, taking his calls for greater action directly to what he thought might be a more sympathetic audience: the Democratic Congress. Employing the same tactic that Korolev had used to such effect on Khrushchev, he warned a Senate subcommittee that the Soviet Union was in the advanced stages of developing a satellite. But far from taking the bait, Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana almost burst out laughing. “Ellender said that we must be out of our minds,” recalled General James M. Gavin. “He had just come from a visit to the Soviet Union, and after seeing the ancient automobiles, and very few of them on the streets, was convinced we were entirely wrong.”

“The Soviets,” the senator scoffed, “couldn’t possibly launch a satellite.”

And yet, after the R-7’s successful test flight, the official Soviet press became uncharacteristically voluble on the subject of satellites. Sergei Korolev himself made a rare public appearance on September 17 to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Tsiolkowsky, Russia’s first rocket scientist and space visionary. Speaking in the ornate Hall of Columns in Moscow, Korolev told a packed house of the Soviet Union’s most senior academics of the R-7’s triumph and promised that “in the nearest future, the USSR will send a satellite into space.” The speech was reprinted in the following day’s edition of Pravda under the pseudonym S. Sergiev. Pravda also ran a story by Dr. A. N. Nesmeyanov, the president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which boasted, “The creation and launching of the Soviet artificial satellite for scientific purposes during the International Geophysical Year will play an exceptional role in unifying the efforts of scientists of various countries in the struggle to conquer the forces of nature.”

Radio magazine in Moscow went a step farther, providing detailed instructions for amateur radio enthusiasts to receive the frequencies on which the future Soviet satellite would broadcast. Another trade publication, Astronomer’s Circular, advised its readers, “The Astronomical Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences requests all astronomical organizations, all astronomers of the Soviet Union, and all members of the All-Union Astronomical and Geodetic Society to participate actively in preparations for the visual observation of artificial satellites.”

The message from Moscow was loud and clear: a Soviet satellite would soon be orbiting the earth, and ordinary citizens would be able to see and hear it.

The warning signals did not fall completely on deaf ears in America. The New York Times started researching a story about an impending Soviet launch. The RAND Corporation also carefully clipped all the Soviet press briefs and forwarded them to the Pentagon with an appended note concluding that the Soviets must be serious. But in Washington, no one had time for talk of satellites. The country was in the throes of a looming crisis that had begun with the opening of the school year and was quickly escalating into a major challenge to President Eisenhower’s authority.

Like Khrushchev during the R-7’s string of failures, Dwight Eisenhower was preoccupied in the waning weeks of September 1957 by unfolding events that had nothing to do with rockets or the conquest of space, and everything to do with cleaning up a political mess that was largely of his own making.

The trouble had started with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which invalidated the “separate but equal” racial guidelines that had governed segregated schools. The decision had sparked a political rebellion in the heavily Democratic South, where nineteen senators and seventy-seven congressmen issued a defiant proclamation in March 1956, condemning the Court and its ruling. Only Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the majority leader from Texas, had refused to add their signatures to the “Southern Manifesto.”

At the White House, Vice President Nixon had reacted furiously to this paean to segregation, advocating a strong response. There were not only constitutional issues at stake, but moral implications as well, and Nixon believed the administration could not stand idly by while the South thumbed its nose at the Supreme Court. Ike’s inner circle, though, had different concerns. The 1956 election was just around the corner, and Eisenhower had been making considerable inroads with voters in the South. The time was not right to rock the boat. Already Nixon’s more liberal stance on civil rights was causing problems in the South, and while Ike decided in the end not to drop him from the ticket, tension remained between the president and the vice president. The Democrats focused their ire on Nixon rather than on the popular Eisenhower. “It was hard not to feel that I was being set up,” Nixon later reflected, noting his “disillusionment with the way Eisenhower was handling the affair.”

The election confirmed both Eisenhower’s high standing with the electorate and Nixon’s lowly position in the administration’s hierarchy. Ike clobbered Stevenson, but the Democrats easily carried both Houses, a sign that the vote had been more about Ike’s personality than a partisan endorsement of the Republicans. Following the landslide victory, Eisenhower sent Nixon a belated note that must have only added to the vice president’s growing sense of resentment. “Dear Dick,” the president wrote in late December, well over a month after the election. “I find that while I have thanked what seems to be thousands of people from Maine to California for their help in the political campaign, I have never expressed my appreciation to you.”

The new year brought renewed calls for action on civil rights, as African-American leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. developed larger followings. Nixon lobbied hard for the White House to introduce legislation that would update the nation’s ineffectual civil rights laws and in the process drive a wedge between the Democratic Party’s more liberal northern wing and the reactionary factions in the South. But once more Eisenhower wavered, thinking the time not right, and the initiative languished. Into this void stepped Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Like Symington, Johnson was maneuvering for the 1960 presidential nomination and searching for politically promising causes. As majority leader, LBJ outranked Symington and was a far more seasoned and skilled legislator. But while the media hailed Symington as patrician and formidable, Johnson was dismissed as preening and pompous. Symington was the blue-blooded Yale man; Johnson, the graduate of a provincial Texas teacher’s college with the uncouth manners of a shady oil tycoon. “He flashes gold cuff links, fiddles with the gold band of his gold wristwatch, toys with a tiny gold pill box, tinkers with a gold desk ornament,” Time magazine noted with evident distaste. “His LBJ brand appears everywhere, on his shirts, his handkerchiefs, his personal jewelry, in his wife’s initials, in his daughters’ initials…. Lyndon Johnson would rather be caught dead than in a suit costing less than $200.”

Symington was portrayed by the press as polished and statesmanlike, a leader immersed in the grave concerns of national security. Johnson, on the other hand, served hamburger patties shaped like the state of Texas at his Johnson City ranch, urging guests to “eat the panhandle first.” Hardly presidential material.

Despite his outlandish public image, Johnson’s position on civil rights was relatively moderate. And it was through this violently divisive issue that he saw a chance to make his mark.

The 1957 Civil Rights Act that he almost single-handedly wheeled through a reluctant Congress was at once a testament to his immense talents as a backroom negotiator and one of the most cynical compromises in modern American politics. “I’m going to have to bring up the nigger bill again,” Johnson would privately apologize to southern senators, all the while pushing and cajoling them to give ground. They did, but they also extracted many concessions that watered down the spirit and letter of the proposed law. The final version served only to encourage southern Democrats to redouble their efforts to fight integration.

Throughout the process Eisenhower had sat conspicuously silent. On the few occasions when he weighed in on race relations, his statements were sufficiently contradictory and middle-of-the-road that each side simply chose to hear what it wanted to hear. Privately, he expressed his feelings more clearly. “Southern whites,” he told Chief Justice Earl Warren, “are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school with some big overgrown Negro.”

Many southern Democrats saw Eisenhower’s hedging as further license to defy the Supreme Court. “What he had not done was provide leadership, either moral or political,” remarked the Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose. “What he wanted—for the problem to go away—he could not have.”

On September 4, 1957, the problem exploded. In Little Rock, Arkansas, nine black students attempted to register for classes at the all-white Central High School. A seething white mob forced them to retreat and nearly lynched one of the nine, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford. Governor Orval E. Faubus sided with the mob and called out the National Guard to prevent the black teens from registering.

Ike refused to dignify the situation by getting involved and made a determined show of sticking to his routine by going forward with a scheduled vacation to Newport, Rhode Island. Two weeks later, Eisenhower was still playing golf in Newport, trying to maintain a public facade of leisurely unconcern, while Governor Faubus brazenly continued to defy the highest law of the land. Finally, on September 20, the president summoned the rebellious governor to Newport to plead with him to follow a federal court injunction not to interfere with Little Rock’s integration. “I got the impression at the time,” Faubus later said of the meeting, “that he was attempting to recall just what he was supposed to say to me, as if he were trying to remember instructions on a subject on which he was not completely assured in his own mind.”

Faubus made a vague, and as it turned out short-lived, promise to stand down, and on September 23, the nine black students were spirited into Central High School under police guard through a side door, as the crowd outside chanted, “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate.”

With tensions rising, and the threat of violence increasing, the nine black students were summoned to the principal’s office. A few were quietly crying but sat numbly, tugging nervously at the plaid skirts and pressed trousers their parents had purchased for the new school year. They were all excellent students, chosen by the NAACP to break Little Rock’s color barrier because of their good grades and character. They watched as worried-looking officials streamed in and out of the principal’s office. From down one of the halls came the sound of glass crashing.

From inside the principal’s office, the students could hear the alarmed officials through the partially opened door. “We’re trapped,” said one frantic voice. “Good Lord, you’re right,” said another. “We may have to let them have one of the kids so we can distract them long enough to get the others out.”

“Let one of those kids hang?” shouted another voice. “How’s that gonna look? Niggers or not, they’re children, and we got a job to do.”

Soon, the door to the principal’s office was flung open, and a tall, dark-haired man addressed the huddled teenagers. “I’m Gene Smith, Assistant Chief of the Little Rock Police Department,” he said in a calm, kind tone. His had been the voice urging that all the children be saved. “It’s time for you to leave today,” he announced, leading them to an underground garage. “Come with me.”

Little Rock’s experiment with school integration had lasted less than three hours. “The colored children [were] removed to their homes for safety purposes,” Mayor Woodrow W. Mann informed Eisenhower in an urgent telegram. “The mob that gathered was no spontaneous assembly. It was agitated, aroused, and assembled by a concerted plan… [which] leads to the inevitable conclusion that Governor Faubus was cognizant of what was going to take place.”

Eisenhower was furious at Faubus’s duplicitous double-cross. As the journalist David Halberstam later observed, “A man who had been a five-star general did not look kindly on frontal challenges by junior officers. After vacillating for so long, he came down hard, seeing the issue not as a question of integration as much as one of insurrection.”

That same afternoon, the president ordered one thousand paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. It was the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops were deployed in the South. “Troops not to enforce integration but to prevent opposition to an order of a court,” Eisenhower noted to himself on his personal stationery, along with doodles of an airplane, sundry checkmarks, scribbles, and several illegible musings.

By early October, the situation had been brought under control. But the resolution came at a high price for Eisenhower. “A weak President who fiddled along ineffectually until a personal affront drives him to unexpectedly drastic action” was how the former secretary of state Dean Acheson described Eisenhower in a letter to Harry Truman. “A Little Rock with Moscow,” Acheson added, “and SAC in the place of the paratroopers could blow us all apart.”

The Democrats, like Acheson, saw that Little Rock had badly dented Eisenhower’s seemingly invulnerable image as a strong and decisive leader. What they didn’t realize was that an even greater crisis of confidence loomed just days away. And as Acheson had feared, this time it would be the Russians who would test Eisenhower’s mettle.