Bridge of Spies by Giles Whittell Page B

stake in the Polaroid Corporation made him a multibillionaire in twenty-first-century terms and whose immaculate dark eyebrows made him look a little like Cary Grant. He appended to his letter to Dulles a summary of the case for aerial reconnaissance that managed to be both concise and splendidly pompous: “During a period in which Russia has free access to the geography of all our bases and major nuclear facilities, as well as to our entirely militaryand civilian economy, we have no corresponding knowledge about Russia.… Unfortunately it is the US, the more mature, more civilized, and more responsible country that must bear the burden of not knowing what is happening [there].”
    Land believed that the mature, civilized, responsible way of bearing this burden was straight out of
Popular Mechanics:
“a jet-powered glider,” “an extraordinary and unorthodox vehicle” that his good friend Kelly Johnson at the Lockheed Corporation had already designed and offered to build in total secrecy to fly over the Soviet Union at seventy thousand feet and photograph in minute detail on each clear-weather mission a strip of Russia two hundred miles wide and 2,500 miles long.
    The “Lockheed super glider,” Land went on, would fly “well out of reach of present Russian interception and high enough to have a good chance of avoiding detection.” But even if it were detected, he averred quite wrongly, it would be “so obviously unarmed and devoid of military usefulness, that it would minimize affront to the Russians.”
    For an inventor, Land had an impressive grasp of the military-strategic balance. He was also a terrific salesman. The clock was ticking, he said: Russian fighters and surface-to-air missiles were flying ever higher, meaning that “the opportunity for safe overflight may last only a few years.… We therefore recommend immediate action through special channels in CIA in procuring the Lockheed glider and in establishing the CIA taskforce. No proposal or program that we have seen in intelligence planning can so quickly bring so much vital information at so little risk and at so little cost.”
    The letter was sent on November 5, 1954. Two days later a B-29 (combat ceiling 36,000 feet) was shot down over the Sea of Japan while photographing a Soviet base in the Kuril Islands. On November 24, at 8:15 a.m., Eisenhower sat behind his desk in the Oval Office as his most senior military and intelligence planners, including Dulles, his number two at the CIA, and a somewhat grudging General Nathan Twining of the air force, filed in and made the case for the U-2. By 8:30 a.m. they were filing out again. At four that afternoon a call was placed from the Pentagon to Kelly Johnson in his windowless Burbank office. He could go ahead and build his glider.
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    In the love story of Frank and Barbara Powers, both principals would have looked at home on an eight-by-ten-foot movie poster. He was the fighter pilot with the dreamy eyes who blushed deep red when introduced to Barbara at the air force cafeteria where her mother worked the night shift. She was the eighteen-year-old secretary who called in there most evenings on her way home from work. They fell hard for each other despite her reputation for trouble among his friends and fellow fliers. Or maybe because of it.
    They were married in the spring of 1955, and the first night of their new life, at least, was happy. “Lordy, but how that handsome Ridge Runner of mine could make love!” Barbara would write. (She always gave him credit for his performance in bed, even when she gave him credit for nothing else.) Disappointment set in early. Nine months after a blissful honeymoon in the Bahamas, her husband came home to tell her he was leaving the air force—the next day. For the time being he was also leaving her. He would be gone for three years but could not say where or why; only that he would still be flying.
    Both would later plead their cases in the divorce