Bodö, Norway, was marked on my maps as the destination of my May 1 flight. Who would have met me there?
A ground crew.
Were they from Incirlik?
I didn’t know. All I was told was that a crew would be waiting.
Had I ever been to Bodö before?
Yes, in 1958.
Possibly telling them this was a mistake, an unnecessary admission. However, it had been a regular trip, with passports, and clearance through customs, and if their intelligence had the resources we had been told they had, I felt sure they could probably find out.
How long was I at Bodö?
About two or three weeks.
Had I made any flights from there?
No, I replied. I was about to explain that this was due to bad weather but—as would happen far more often than I would have imagined—they interrupted, jumping to their own conclusions.
If I hadn’t made any flights, then I must have been there for another reason. And the only possible reason was that I had been sent there to study the landing field in preparation for my May 1, 1960, landing!
It was a ridiculous assumption. How long do you need to study a landing field? If you have a radio, and the operator tells you the field is clear, you land. And even if it were of some benefit to study it in advance—two years? Everything about it could change.
This was really establishing premeditation. I tried to set them straight, but didn’t try too hard, not wanting them to examine too closely the related and quite basic fallacy in my own claim that this was my first overflight.
I had stuck to this, through repeated questioning, although, to me at least, its weakness was all too apparent.
If I had arrived in Incirlik in 1956, and hadn’t made my first overflight until 1960, it certainly appeared someone was wasting the taxpayers’ money.
At least this was the way I was afraid the Russians would look at it. The irony of this was that there were some pilots on the program—in the group which transferred from Japan late in 1957—who had never made a single flight over Russia. Why, I never knew, but some were never assigned overflights.
To make the story more believable, I had stressed the “eavesdropping”missions along the border. Though vague as to exactly when these occurred, or how many there had been—as best I could remember, I told them, I had made one or two in 1956, maybe six to eight in 1957, ten to fifteen each in 1958 and 1959, and several in 1960—I had tried to indicate that they were my primary job. It would have helped make my one overflight story more convincing had I been able to mention the atomic-sampling missions, but, unsure as to whether the Russians knew of these, and not expert enough myself to gauge their importance, I didn’t dare risk it.
Their tendency to jump to conclusions also caused them to fall into still another error regarding Bodö, one I made no effort to correct.
In going through the wreckage of the plane, they had discovered, in the cockpit, a large black cloth.
Explain this, they said.
I told them, truthfully, that Colonel Shelton had handed it to me just before I took off and had said to give it to the ground crew at Bodö.
Then this flag was to be used as a sort of password, they interrupted, a way to prove your identity!
Tired from the long questioning, I noted, somewhat sarcastically, that under the circumstances, having a U-2 strapped to my back, it hardly seemed necessary to prove my identity.
But they had already made up their minds. And, in a moment of whimsy, I decided that if they wanted to go on believing it, I’d let them do so, although it was their own conclusion, not mine.
Actually the “mysterious black flag” did have a specific purpose. There was a series of camera windows on the underside of the aircraft. When a U-2 was outside the hangar, where someone might see it, we put metal covers over them. Colonel Shelton hadn’t been sure the crew which had been sent to Bodö (every member of which I knew quite well) had remembered to take the covers along and so had given me the cloth and a roll of tape to give them.
It was a tiny little deception. But for some reason, every time it was brought up it gave me a special inner satisfaction, knowing how wrong they could be.
The deceptions were by no means one-sided. I fell into more than a few traps myself. In one of the early interrogations I had noticed one of the majors examining a sheaf of papers. One, which was sticking out, was obviously my flight log.
“Tell me what all these symbols mean on your flight log,” he said.
Thinking he was trying to test my truthfulness, since all the symbols were standard flying abbreviations—ETA, ATA, etc.—I tried to recall, item by item, what had been on the log.
Only some days later did I chance to see the flight log again, out of the sheaf, and discover that the bottom half was missing, apparently destroyed in the crash.
There was nothing on it they couldn’t have surmised from my maps.
But knowing I had been tricked made me much less complacent.
Ironically, the times they seemed most convinced I was lying, I was telling the truth.
They refused to believe the CIA hadn’t provided me with a list of names, addresses, and letter drops to be used to contact the underground in Russia.
They were convinced I must have made short practice flights over the Soviet Union prior to May 1, although my reply—if we were going to take the risks, then why not do the real thing?—seemed self-evident.
They refused to believe this had been my first parachute jump.
Their own pilots made actual jumps in training; we must do likewise.
And there were some surprises.
“Are you a good boxer?”
Puzzled, I replied that I wasn’t a boxer.
“Then how did you get a black eye?”
Up to this time I hadn’t known I had one. Apparently I had blacked it in the crash. Not having seen a mirror, I hadn’t realized.
The absence of mirrors was, of course, intentional. You get into the habit of seeing your face each morning. Whether you look well or ill, young or maybe just a trifle older, helps shape your day.
Without that reflection, you begin to lose a little of your sense of identity.
It’s amazing how much you miss a simple thing like a mirror.
There were other psychological tricks. The unbarred window in the interrogation room was one. It was always there, offering the tantalizing possibility of escape, even if only a seven-story plunge to the courtyard. Yet, no sooner would the man in front of it step away than another man would replace him, as if to say, much more effectively than in words: For you there is no escape.
Little things. No mirrors. An unbarred window. But they got to you.
“Were you nervous about your earlier flights over Russia?”
“I told you, this was my first such flight. And, yes, I was nervous.”
“Even if this was your first flight, surely the pilots talked among themselves, discussed their experiences, mentioned what they had seen?”
“No, we had been ordered never to discuss our flights. And we obeyed orders.”
Again and again they returned to the question, as if hammering on a locked door, knowing that if they could succeed in opening it a treasure trove awaited them on the other side.
They wouldn’t give up. Neither would I.
In law, ignorance is no excuse.
In interrogation, it can be a godsend.
Time after time my safest refuge was the simple phrase “I don’t know.”
Using it, I could deny knowing who in Washington authorized the U-2 overflights; in what manner the flight orders were transmitted to Incirlik; what happened to the intelligence data once a flight returned; how many U-2s there were and where based.