Bridge of Spies by Giles Whittell

to be drawn into the most audacious espionage extravaganza since the nineteenth-century showdown between the British and Russian empires known as the Great Game. It would make his whole life a secret, then turn it inside out and shake it until there was nothing left in it that wasn’t public. It would take him to places no son of a Virginia coal miner had ever been, soaring over the mountain ranges where the British and Russian empires had confronted each other with brass telescopes and Enfield revolvers nearly a century earlier.
    At that time the engine of history was Russia’s search for natural frontiers. In 1956 it was the Soviet Union’s unbending resolve to keep them shut.
    Anyone brave enough, even now, to hike north up the Afghan-Pakistan border from the Khyber Pass will notice a striking change in the built environment at about thirty-six degrees north and seventy-two east. As the border swings to the east, Tajikistan comes into viewacross the Wakhan Corridor. And unlike the unguarded line between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Tajik frontier is marked with a ten-foot barbed-wire fence. It is a holdover from Soviet times that the current Tajik government values highly. (It even outsources patrol duties to Russian frontier troops who trudge its entire length 365 days a year in fake fur hats against the bitter cold of the Pamirs, with authentic AK-47s slung over their shoulders.) The Tajik fence is only a few hundred miles long, but it is part of an epic feat of rudimentary self-defense that delineates the former Soviet border along six thousand miles of wild terrain from the Caspian to the Pacific.
    Between that fence and the North Pole, in 1956, lay 8.6 million square miles of denied territory—nearly three times the area of the lower forty-eight U.S. states. In this vastness a foreigner could travel only under the strictest supervision of the KGB and its subsidiaries, if at all. North of the fence lay forests that took seven days to cross by train and three-thousand-mile rivers debouching under pack ice into the Arctic Ocean. There were whole mountain ranges never sullied by a human foot. There was the great water-filled gash in the earth’s crust known as Lake Baikal, the endless land ocean of the steppe, and the terrible frozen emptiness of the taiga. And there were launchpads, test sites, and closed nuclear cities devoted entirely to the design and manufacture of the instruments of Armageddon. This much the CIA knew from cautious reconnaissance flights along the edges of Soviet airspace and a small cadre of defectors and informants. But it was not enough.
    In August 1953 an earth-shattering explosion about one hundred miles west of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan marked the Soviet Union’s arrival in the age of the superbomb—the H-bomb. The Americans had already detonated one. It vaporized Eniwetok atoll near Bikini and produced a mushroom cloud twenty-five miles high, filmed in glorious orange Technicolor for the president. They called it Ivy Mike. The Russians called theirs a layer cake, or
sloika:
it was based on Andrei Sakharov’s “first idea,” to pile fission and fusion fuel layer on layer in search of the biggest bang in history. The result was not a true hydrogen bomb by some purists’ definition, but it was entirely homemade and a respectable thirty times more powerful than the one that killed 140,000 people at Hiroshima.
    In 1954 the Soviets reverted to type and copied the American H-bombdesign. Yield: 1.6 megatons, or one hundred Hiroshimas. The arms race was picking up speed, and the steppe was starting to betray the cost with giant craters and concentric scorch marks. (Deformed fetuses would come later, collected by doctors in Semipalatinsk and stored secretly in jars.)
    Not only the steppe suffered. A thousand miles to the north, off the island of Novaya Zemlya, the Soviet navy had loaded a nuclear warhead onto a torpedo and fired it into a fleet of more than thirty ships crewed by five