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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