Bridge of Spies by Giles Whittell Page A

hundred sheep and goats. The animals died swiftly, and the destroyer closest to the blast sank without trace. In due course word of the new northern test site seeped out, and its skyline of frigid mountains floating on white cloud served as the target of General Jack D. Ripper’s 843rd bomb wing, flown into oblivion in
Dr. Strangelove
.
    In the film it is President “Dmitri,” interrupted in the course of a loud musical diversion, who provides the terrifying unpredictability at the eastern end of the hotline. In reality it was Nikita Khrushchev—showman, warrior, and Soviet premier, constantly trying not to be outflanked by his more hawkish colleagues in the politburo.
    In November 1956 Khrushchev hosted a reception in Moscow for the visiting Polish prime minister. Weeks earlier, he had ordered Soviet tanks to crush the Hungarian uprising in Budapest. Western condemnation was still running at full flow, and Western diplomats invited to the reception were being careful not to seem too grateful to their hosts. Emboldened by vodka, Khrushchev struck a pose in the middle of the room, called for silence, and offered those capitalists present an impromptu harangue.
    “We are Bolsheviks!” he began. “If you don’t like us, don’t accept our invitations, and don’t invite us to come to see you! Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” In Russian:
Myi vas pokhoronim!
Those three words—four in translation—were pure bluster; a delusional socioeconomic forecast based on the Marxist adage that the proletariat is the undertaker of the bourgeoisie. But the speaker was one of two men in the world who could launch a nuclear cataclysm. His words were widely misinterpreted to suggest burial under mountains of radioactive rubble. More than any other single threat they seemed to confirm that Khrushchev was out to escalate and win the thermonuclear arms race. But could he?
    There was only one way to find out. Aerial photography from unmanned balloons had been tried, but they only took pictures of where the wind sent them, and they often came down in Russia. In 1953 the Royal Air Force (RAF) flew a stripped-down B-57 bomber over a new missile test range near the Volga delta, but it landed in Iran pockmarked with bullet holes and returned few useful photographs. The result was a National Intelligence Estimate in 1954 that had no intelligence on the test range or on missile production or numbers and therefore gave no estimate. No one in the American intelligence community thought the answer was more spies. The only serious suggestion was a new spy plane. As General Philip Strong told his boss, Robert Amory, chief intelligence gatherer at the CIA: “We’ve just got to get upstairs.”
    Initially the air force insisted on being in charge. It invited designs for a new reconnaissance plane in 1953 and backed a beautiful but flimsy twin-engined idea from one of Kelly Johnson’s rivals. It was called the Bell X-16 and never flew. Then the charismatic inventor and entrepreneur Edwin “Din” Land, millionaire inventor of the Polaroid camera, called on Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, and urged him to take control. In a letter following up their discussion, he pressed home the argument that the time was ripe for a wholesale reinvention of the spying game.
    “I am not sure that we have made it clear that we feel there are many reasons why this activity is appropriate for the CIA,” he wrote. “We told you that this seems to us the kind of action and technique that is right for the contemporary version of the CIA; a modern and scientific way for an Agency that is always supposed to be looking, to do its looking.”
    Land headed a top secret panel within a semisecret commission appointed by President Eisenhower to solve the most pressing national security problem of the age—how to prevent a nuclear Pearl Harbor. He was the Thomas Edison of his time: a promiscuous inventor and a natural entrepreneur whose