The Company man dispatched to welcome Powers to Norway, Stan Beerli, the chief of the operations section, expected to see him early in the evening, Bodo time. He assumed his phone was tapped and he was being watched. Like every operative in the field, he was provided a cover story and a way to communicate with the home office in code. When Powers arrived safely, Beerli was instructed to call a certain man in Oslo and tell him they had a great party the previous night.14
After flying into the thin, cold air of the stratosphere, Frank was no longer sweating in his pressure suit but he felt his pulse quicken. He always felt a bit uneasy crossing into the USSR. Nine hours was a long time to be in the air, nearly all of it over enemy territory, and the pilot realized he had never been more vulnerable.
Because his sextant—a device used to measure distance based on the angular width between two objects—had been set for a 6 a.m. departure, rendering all of the values off by nearly a half hour, Frank would have to rely heavily on his compass and clock to navigate. For about the first 90 minutes, he encountered heavy cloud cover, which made it more difficult to stay on course.
About the time the sky below turned into a blanket of blue, he saw something in the distance: the contrail of a single-engine jet aircraft, headed in the opposite direction, at supersonic speed. Soon he saw another contrail, heading toward him, at supersonic speed. He assumed it was the same plane, having turned around to follow him.
“I was sure now they were tracking me on radar,” he said, relieved by the enormous distance, which reflected the jet’s inability to approach the U-2’s altitude.15 “If this was the best they could do, I had nothing to worry about.”
The scramble to deal with the invader eventually reached the Kremlin. It was still early morning Moscow time when Premier Khrushchev’s telephone rang.
When Rodion Malinovsky, the Soviet defense minister, told him about another American spy plane thundering through the skies and headed toward Sverdlovsk, he flashed back to the “white hot fury” he had experienced during the previous overflight.16
After much internal debate, particularly with Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko, who recommended a formal protest and even prepared a preliminary draft to send to the American ambassador, Khrushchev decided to remain quiet. In explaining his rationale to the Presidium of the Central Committee, he said, “What’s the sense of [protesting]? The Americans [are] acting this way to emphasize our powerlessness…. [Protesting] only encourages their arrogance. What we have to do is shoot those planes down!”17
Three weeks later, after forcing an internal investigation into the various failures that he believed had crippled the Soviet response, Khrushchev told Malinovsky: “You must do your very best! Give it everything you’ve got and bring that plane down!”
After telling his leader that a new SA-2 battery was stationed along the plane’s apparent route, Malinovsky said, “We have every possibility of shooting the plane down if our anti-aircraft people aren’t gawking at the crows!”18
After switching on the camera while flying over the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, the launch site for Soviet space shots which had been confirmed and extensively photographed in previous U-2 missions, Powers worked through a slight course correction and proceeded north, eventually getting a nice view of the snow-capped Ural Mountains, the geographic dividing line between Europe and Asia, to his left. Passing various landmarks, he made notations for his debriefing. When his autopilot malfunctioned—a problem considered significant enough to consider aborting a mission—he switched it off and began flying the plane manually. The choice to head back or proceed was his, but since he was more than 1,300 miles into Soviet territory, he made the fateful decision to keep going. He had gone too far to turn back now.19
Almost four hours into the flight, just southeast of Sverdlovsk, while recording figures in his flight log, he felt a thump. A violent shockwave reverberated through the aircraft as a bright-orange flash lit up his world.
“My God,” he said to himself. “I’ve had it now.”20
Project Aquatone had already endured a string of mishaps claiming several lives.
At the Ranch on August 31, 1956, CIA pilot Frank Grace crashed and died during a nighttime launch, after becoming disoriented in the dark.21 “He was seen using [a] flashlight in cockpit prior to take-off,” Johnson noted in his journal.22 “A definite no-no.”
On April 4, 1957, Lockheed test pilot Bob Sieker lost control of the U-2 prototype at a high altitude.23 He tried to make it back to base but crashed in the desert, dying from wounds sustained while parachuting to the ground. The subsequent investigation determined that Sieker had experienced a flame-out and that his protective faceplate had blown off his mask, causing him to be “in a bad way from hypoxia.”24
By pushing so far into the distant skies, toward a multitude of colliding dangers, the team behind the so-called Dragon Lady wrestled with various problems related to oxygen, including a strict adherence to the “pre-breathing” regimen, and experimenting with various changes to the life-support system. They eventually added an ejection seat, which increased weight but helped keep several pilots alive after high-altitude jumps.
Without a trainer or a simulator, catastrophic emergencies were accepted as the price of developing a cutting-edge aircraft. Some pilots managed to land wounded planes or bail out successfully. Others paid the ultimate price.
“It was a dangerous time,” said Tony Bevacqua, who worked as an instructor pilot at Laughlin. “You had a new aircraft and new pilots trying to learn how to fly it. Sometimes things went wrong. The U-2 wasn’t very tolerant of certain mistakes.”
The carnage was not limited to the U-2 pilots. It took a large team of Lockheed personnel, contractors, and spooks to bring Aquatone to life, necessitating a steady procession of C-54 transports between March Air Force Base, Burbank, and the Ranch. Many of the civilians lived in Southern California and commuted daily or weekly. During inclement weather on November 17, 1955, one of the flights failed to clear Mt. Charleston, near Las Vegas. “A very stupid weather crash,” Johnson said.25 All fourteen project employees were lost—including Lockheed engineers Rod Kreimendahl and Dock Hruda—along with all five members of the flight crew. The CIA quickly dispatched a team to secure any top secret documents among the remains and concocted a cover story to protect the secrecy of the U-2 program.26
Losing a U-2 over the Soviet Union was the nightmare scenario, and Francis Gary Powers was not dreaming.
Pulling tight on the throttle with his left hand while holding the wheel steady with his right, Powers checked his instruments. Everything looked normal. Then the wing tipped and the nose dropped. Suddenly realizing he had lost control of the aircraft, he felt a violent shudder, which jostled him from side to side in his seat. He believed the wings had broken off.27
With what remained of his craft spinning out of control, Kelly Johnson’s once-powerful machine was now overpowered by immutable gravity, and Powers reached for the self-destruct button, which worked on a 70-second delay timer, and prepared to eject. Then he changed his mind, pulling his finger back. Slammed forward by the enormous g-forces, in a suit that had inflated when the cabin lost pressurization, he immediately reached a rather-disheartening conclusion: If he ejected from this awkward position, the impact of his legs on the canopy rail would sever both of his legs, because they were trapped underneath the front of the cockpit.