Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [69]
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.
According