Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

The reporters were as confused as ExComm members had been.

“There are two messages, then?”

“That is right.”

“What did the last one say?”

“We can’t give you that.”

“Do you think the two replies will go to Moscow this afternoon?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

On the sidewalk outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, demonstrators were shouting slogans for and against the blockade. Cuban exiles and college students marched up and down in the crisp autumn air chanting: “Invade Cuba, Attack the Reds.” A half-dozen American Nazis with swastika arm-bands carried signs demanding an immediate invasion. Peace activists waved signs proclaiming NO MORE WARS.

General Power was on the golf course on Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, when news arrived that a U-2 pilot on an air-sampling mission to the North Pole had gone missing. Tracking data intercepted from Soviet air defenses indicated that the spy plane was over Soviet territory, and that at least six Soviet MiGs had been scrambled to shoot Maultsby down. As CINCSAC rushed back to his office, he passed by a large billboard emblazoned with the Orwellian slogan: “Peace is our Profession.”

Nobody at SAC headquarters had paid much attention to the air-sampling missions. One of Power’s subordinates called the commander of Maultsby’s unit, the 4080th Strategic Wing, to find out “what the hell you are doing with a U-2 over Russia.”

“You’d better ask someone else because I have my hands full down here,” replied Colonel John Des Portes, who was more worried about the already overdue Major Anderson. “I don’t know of a U-2 being over Russia.”

Back in his command post, Power found SAC intelligence officers plotting Maultsby’s flight path on a giant screen, along with the tracks of the Soviet MiGs. The Americans were in effect looking over the shoulders of Soviet military flight controllers as they followed the missing U-2 over Chukotka. The security-conscious Soviets were unable to use a very strong encryption for their air defense net, as the information had to be made available in real time to tracking stations all over the country. The data from high-frequency radio transmissions skipped off the ionosphere and was then picked up by American listening posts thousands of miles away.

Power was in a quandary. The ability to “read the mail” of the Soviet air defenses was a jealously guarded national secret. If SAC commanders alerted Maultsby to the magnitude of his navigational blunder, they risked tipping the Soviets to a prized intelligence technique. They had to devise a way of steering Maultsby back to Alaska without revealing how they knew his precise location. An additional complication was that the Kremlin was likely to interpret the penetration of Soviet airspace as a highly provocative act. There was a risk that Soviet leaders would view a U-2 overflight as a reconnaissance mission prior to an all-out attack.

The intelligence officers needed special clearance from the National Security Agency to share their knowledge about what had happened to Maultsby with his operations commander in Alaska. Permission was soon obtained—on condition that nothing be done or said that would compromise the source of the information. Navigators on the Duck Butt air rescue plane and at Eielson were already attempting to steer Maultsby back to Alaska on the basis of astronomical observations.

Lieutenant Fred Okimoto was the navigator who had plotted Maultsby’s flight to the North Pole. After sending Maultsby on his way at midnight Alaska time, he had retired to bed in the officers’ quarters at Eielson. He was woken a few hours later by the operations commander, Lieutenant Colonel Forrest Wilson, with the news that the U-2 was missing. “We have a problem,” said Wilson, in his usual low-key manner.

The two men walked through the predawn darkness to the U-2 hangar. They went upstairs to the small office where the mission had been planned. Okimoto went over all his calculations again, checking for mistakes. Everything seemed in order. There were occasional squawks from the high-frequency sideband radio channel that Duck Butt was using to contact Maultsby. Navigational charts and almanacs were spread out all over the office. The fact that the U-2 pilot reported seeing the Belt of Orion off the nose of his plane suggested that he was flying south. The top priority was to get him headed in an easterly direction.

Looking out the window, the navigator noticed a faint red glow on the horizon toward the east. The sun was beginning to rise in central Alaska. This gave him an idea. He got on the radio, and asked Maultsby if he could see the sun coming up.

“Negative,” came the clipped reply.

The inescapable conclusion was that Maultsby was hundreds of miles west of Alaska, over Soviet territory. The solution was to get him to swing around to the left, until Orion was off the tip of his right wing. Then he would be heading home.

Frightened and exhausted, Maultsby was still getting strange calls over his sideband radio. This time, the unfamiliar voice told him to turn right thirty-five degrees, a course that would have taken him deeper into the Soviet Union. The pilot challenged him, using a code that “only a legit operator would know.” There was no response.

The transmissions from Alaska were getting weaker by the minute. The last instruction Maultsby was able to hear was “Turn left, fifteen degrees.”

Maultsby knew he did not have much fuel left, certainly not enough to get back to Alaska. He would probably have to attempt an emergency landing. The transmissions from the unknown source were still strong, but he ignored them. Instead, he selected the emergency channel and shouted: “MAY DAY! MAY DAY! MAY DAY!”

After yelling frantically for help, he picked up a radio station off the nose of the aircraft, playing what sounded like Russian folk music. The strains of balalaikas, accordions, and Slavic voices came in “loud and clear.”

Maultsby finally figured out where he was.

Hearing the Russian music over the radio, Maultsby was panicked by the thought of becoming “another Gary Powers.” Powers had been shot down over Siberia in 1960 while on a U-2 reconnaissance mission over Soviet nuclear sites. He had parachuted safely to the ground, only to be promptly captured by baffled Russian peasants. After a show trial in Moscow, he spent twenty-one months in prison. The U-2 incident was a huge embarrassment to the United States, and particularly to President Eisenhower. Wrongly assuming that Powers could not have survived the shootdown, Eisenhower authorized a statement claiming that his U-2 had gone down over eastern Turkey “while engaged in a high-altitude weather research mission.” A succession of U.S. government statements on the incident were soon exposed as bald-faced lies by a jubilant Khrushchev.

Maultsby knew what life was like inside a Communist prison. His thoughts went back to a January day ten years earlier when he took off for his seventeenth combat mission over North Korea. He had had a 1,000-pound bomb load beneath each wing of his F-80 Shooting Star, ready to drop on Chinese troop reinforcements at Kunri, an important railroad center. An enemy shell crashed into his fuselage just behind him as he attempted to dive-bomb the railroad line. Diving to earth, out of control, he had just enough time to release the two bombs and yank his ejection seat handle. The pilot chute opened automatically, and he floated down to earth, with jet fighters screaming overhead and bombs exploding around him. He fell into the snow, slipped out of his parachute harness, and tried to run. He did not get very far. He soon found himself looking up into “the muzzles of a dozen rifles, all held by Chinese soldiers.”