Fifties (101 page)

Step by step, Johnson argued away the doubts of others. At such high altitudes might the pilot explode or pass out? Johnson said he would invent a pressurized suit to protect the pilot. Wouldn’t the fuel evaporate quickly at that height? Johnson was confident a successful fuel could be created. Wouldn’t the jet engines fail? Wait and see, he suggested. He was absolutely sure it could be done. The real problem was that the plane needed to stay in the air for perhaps ten hours at a time. This demanded immense amounts of fuel, which in turn created a huge burden of weight. It became, therefore, in the words of one of its early pilots, a young man named Francis Gary Powers, a hybrid, “a jet with the body of a glider.” The final product was light, made of titanium and other lightweight metals. It could stay in the air for eleven hours, or 4,750 miles. The only thing ordinary about it was its name; fighters were designated by the letter
F,
bombers had the prefix
B;
but for reasons of secrecy this was called utility plane number two, or as it entered history, the U-2.

For plane aficionados it was a thing of beauty. Its lines were those of a jet, except they were wildly exaggerated; it was so low-slung
that when it sat on the runway, its nose was at the height of a man. The fuselage was forty feet long, the wingspan eighty feet. In landing, the pilots had to be extremely careful, for it balanced more like a bicycle than a tricycle. In order to meet Washington’s specifications, much had to be sacrificed, and in the case of the spy plane, as Francis Gary noted, “it was strength.” “Each piece of structure,” he wrote, “was a little thinner than a pilot would have liked. Where there was usually extra support, such as joints and junctures, in the U-2 there was none.” It had, Powers said, “a beautiful symmetry all its own but [it was] not built to last.” Some of the pilots talked at first about whether it was the world’s first disposable plane, a sort of aeronautical Kleenex.

But it could fly at 70,000 feet (soon 80,000) and its cameras could capture the tiniest of objects on the ground some fourteen miles below. Land had created a camera that could swing from horizon to horizon and cover an arc of 750 miles. Most remarkable of all, Kelly Johnson and his people built the prototype from start to finish in only eighty-eight days. The pilots loved it instantly. Every day they were able to break the existing records for altitude: The only problem, Powers later noted, was that they could not boast about it.

Even Charlie Wilson, the great doubter of all things scientific and experimental, was an enthusiast. Generally, Wilson had no interest in the new science of weaponry. He was dubious about missiles and moon shots (he did not need to know if the moon was made of cheese, he liked to say) and he was not worried, as some of the science people around Eisenhower were, about Soviet missile developments. “You’ll never convince me that the Russians are ten feet tall,” he liked to say when anyone worried aloud about Russian missile progress. But Kelly Johnson took him to the training ground in Nevada and let him watch one of the planes in action. He was put on a radio phone with a pilot who had already been in the air for some eight hours and assured Wilson that he could stay aloft another hour and a half. With that, Wilson came aboard. As they decided to go from prototype to production, the cost of building some thirty planes was placed at $35 million—a bit bulky for the CIA’s budget, Allen Dulles noted. Wilson volunteered to carry a significant part of the costs at Defense, though; money was elaborately laundered so there would be no financial tracks. When Johnson sent in his first two vouchers, the checks, for $1,256,000, were sent not to Lockheed but to Johnson personally at his Encino home.

The pilots had to be very good, but they were not to be flashy and colorful, like the great fighter jockeys of the past; rather they
were men of endurance who worked in the shadows, the more anonymous the better. Gary Powers was typical of the pilots recruited for the program. He was not an ace, had not flown in Korea, and it took him more than two years to earn his officer’s wings.

He was twenty-six when he was approached with an offer that would more than triple his salary as an Air Force first lieutenant. He was the son of an Appalachian miner who worked as a shoe repairman at night to make enough money to send his one son to a small religious college. Oliver Powers had made one vow: His son would never work in a mine. It was the son’s idea to become a pilot instead of the doctor his father wanted him to be. He married Barbara Gay Moore when she was eighteen, the prettiest girl around Turner Air Force Base, in Albany, Georgia. A graduate of a local business college for girls, she was the daughter of the cashier at the PX.

Powers was not political or questioning, and he had no doubts about the mission as it was explained. But because of its secret nature, there was little he could tell his family about this exciting new assignment. Just before he went overseas, his father took him aside and said, “I’ve figured out what you’re doing.” “What do you mean?” Powers said. “I’ve told you what I’m doing.” (There was a cover story about flying high-altitude weather reconnaissance.) “No, I’ve figured it out,” his father said. “You’re working for the FBI.” Powers loved that his plane was his own, a single-seater. The hard part was the pressurization suit: “Once on,” he noted, “it felt exactly like a too-tight tie over a badly shrunk collar.” Because you couldn’t go to the bathroom in it, the pilots could eat little food and drink no coffee while flying.

The suit was so heavy that it made them sweat heavily, and at the end of a long flight, they would wring the water out of their long johns. The job was, as much as anything else, about endurance. Because of the high altitude, before each flight they had to put on their suits and helmets and endure a two-hour denitrogenization process—in which they were given pure oxygen. It left the pilots with fierce headaches and earaches. The one tricky skill required was keeping the plane at just the right speed. At maximum altitude, if you went too slowly the plane stalled, and if you went too quickly, it began to buffet and become unmanageable. There was an automatic pilot, but it was considered unreliable.

In September 1956, Powers made his first flight, along the Soviet border, and by November of that year he was flying deep into Soviet territory. There was an ejector seat in the plane, but Powers, like the other pilots, was wary of it. It was, he wrote, like “sitting on a loaded
shotgun.” Not only were the pilots uncertain the device would work as designed, they did not entirely trust their sponsors; they suspected that the CIA might have designed it to blow them up so there would be no trace in case of a mishap. Though in fact it was not designed to blow them up, the pilots were well advised to be nervous. The last thing in the world the Agency wanted was that a U-2 pilot be shot down and then survive. Indeed, responding to questions from Eisenhower, Allen Dulles assured the President that a pilot could not survive a crash.

There had been some hope on the part of planners that the planes would fly above Soviet radar, but that proved wrong. From the beginning the Soviets were able to track the flights and they were furious both with the American violation of their airspace and at their own impotence, for they were powerless to shoot the planes down. On July 10, 1957, the Soviets made a formal protest, which contained a rather accurate description of what the U-2 had done and where it had gone. The State Department flatly denied it. John Foster Dulles himself wrote a letter saying that no
military
plane had violated Soviet space. He called his brother Allen and read it to him, and Allen Dulles told him, “Fine-perfect-good luck!” At the same time the Soviet officials could not go public with what they knew about the U-2 flights, for they could not admit to their own people that they were powerless in the face of such audacious American violations.

The photos from the first flights stunned Eisenhower. Not only could the U-2 take a clear photograph of a parking lot fourteen miles down, but you could even, he said, see “the lines marking the parking areas for individual cars.” In terms of intelligence work, it was a breakthrough of gigantic proportion. The photos were better, fuller, and more accurate than anything they had ever seen before. “Photography,” said Ray Cline, a senior CIA official, “became to the fifties what code breaking was to the forties.” Now Ike could know what the Russians were up to in terms of bomber and missile construction. That ability would allow him to make informed choices about the American defense budget and not get caught up in a useless and unnecessary military buildup.

“I was able to get a look at every blade of grass in the Soviet Union,” Allen Dulles boasted later, after it was all over. But the general public did not know it. The U-2 was a classic invention of the secret government and pointed up the problems of a two-tiered government in general. The intelligence provided by the U-2 was crucial information for the President as he formulated foreign policy,
but he could never reveal it to the voters. Thus, at a moment when the U-2 was proving just how limited the Soviet military build up was, there was no public appreciation of it.

Indeed, one of the first things the U-2 proved was that there was no bomber gap, as some critics of the administration had claimed. There had been a nervousness since Russia’s Aviation Day in 1955, when a squadron of Bison bombers had flown over the parade, followed by several other squadrons. The U-2 revealed that what the Soviets had almost surely done that day was flown the same few squadrons in repeated sorties. As for the missile gap, the U-2 showed that though the Soviets were working on their missiles, they had yet to launch an ICBM.

By the summer of 1956, von Braun was absolutely certain that the Soviets were planning to launch a satellite. Von Braun was completely confident that he and his colleagues could do it, too, if they could only get the go-ahead from Washington. But if von Braun dreamed of men in space, his nemesis, Charlie Wilson, dreamed of orderly figures and balanced budgets and of tidy weapons systems that he already understood. In early 1956 Wilson had arrived in Huntsville to look over the Army rocket program, and he had seemed a great deal less interested in that than in the old farmhouse near the base that officials had turned into a guesthouse. How much had this cost? Why had they painted these logs? (The logs, Major General John Medaris, the local commander, noted, were cedar logs and had not been painted.) Wilson clearly believed that Medaris and his rocket scientists were living the high life. From then on there was not, as Medaris hoped, greater interest in what von Braun and his team were doing, but merely more intense harassment by Army controllers. We had, Medaris believed quite rightly, the greatest space engineers and scientists in the world and we were doing almost nothing with them; to pay so little attention to the work of someone like von Braun was almost sinful.

For most of the decade, von Braun and his colleagues worked on the most important American rocket of the decade—the Redstone. It was not unlike the old V-2, only larger and more powerful—fifty-six feet long, and seventy inches in diameter. If it was more a hybrid than thoroughbred, that was a reflection that its architects were working with less money and fewer resources than they should have. Still, it was a rocket that von Braun and his people were proud of: It could, von Braun believed, readily launch the first of several of
his dream projects—an earth satellite—by 1956. A report he prepared in 1954, entitled “A Minimum Satellite Vehicle,” requested only $100,000 for the satellite program, pointing out, “It is only logical to assume that other countries could do the same.
It would be a blow to U.S. Prestige if we did not do it first
” (italics in the original).

Suddenly now, with the International Geophysical Year coming up, there was renewed interest in the missile program. The Americans planned to launch a satellite as part of it. Nor were they alone. The Soviets were beginning to talk ever more confidently about a satellite as well. For the race into space was now on. The Soviets, weak in other areas of modern weaponry, were working at a fever pitch and the Soviet leadership understood, as the more confident American leadership did not, the psychological nature of the race. Asked in 1954 whether he worried over whether the Russians might win the race to place a satellite in orbit, Charlie Wilson said, “I wouldn’t care if they did.”

But now Eisenhower understood the real value of getting a satellite up: photo reconnaissance. Predictably, the various branches of the military began to jockey for the honor of launching the satellite, even though there was no doubt that von Braun and his Army team were far ahead of everyone else. The Navy offered its Viking project—a generous description was that it was in the experimental stage. But for reasons that were absurd to the detached observer, a civilian team under the auspices of the Secretary of Defense chose the Navy. Thus did the United States pin its hopes, as historian Walter McDougall noted, “on a slim experimental first-stage rocket and three entirely new upper stages, expected to coax a grapefruit-sized satellite to orbital velocity before the end of 1958.” “In retrospect,” added McDougall, “the decision seems disastrous.” Dr. Homer Stewart, the head of the committee and a physicist at Caltech, told von Braun immediately after the vote: “We have pulled a real boner.” Von Braun was absolutely appalled by the decision.

The Army people protested bitterly, but to no avail. If anything, von Braun’s superiors set out to hinder him. He launched his Jupiter C on September 20, 1956. It was to be a four-stage rocket, but the fourth stage, to von Braun’s bitter disappointment, could not, under orders, be a live satellite. The Army, wary that von Braun might pull some sort of trick, made sure that the fourth stage was filled with sand. The launch was a stunning success. It reached a record altitude of 682 miles and a speed of 13,000 miles per hour, which probably would have been sufficient to hurl a satellite into space. The next
morning von Braun confided, “We knew with a little bit of luck we could put a satellite in space. Unfortunately, no one asked us to do it.”