Spy in the Sky Transcript

DAVID McCULLOUGH, Host: Good evening and welcome to The American Experience. I'm David McCullough.

History never stands still. There's no stopping the clock, and now it seems the clock rolls faster than ever. Events over which the whole world once held its breath -- events of only yesterday, as history goes -- seem strangely remote. Consider the cold war. Who talks anymore of the terrible fear, the awful uncertainties of that time when the Red Army occupied Eastern Europe, when we Americans used the words ''enemy'' and ''Soviet Union'' interchangeably, and what was not known about the Russians behind their Iron Curtain was somehow more unsettling even than what was known?

Our story is about one of the signal events of the cold war -- the whole U-2 affair. The time is the mid-1950's. America and its allies have already been to the brink of a third world war over the blockade of Berlin, and the Russians, we know, now have the hydrogen bomb as well as long-range bombers. How many such planes they have, how far advanced they might be in the development of intercontinental missiles we did not know.

This was the climate in which extremely difficult decisions had to be made by the American commander-in-chief, President Eisenhower, who was greatly concerned about the Soviet menace, but also about the danger of destroying American's economic strength by unnecessary spending for costly weapons systems. What he didn't have -- and what he needed desperately -- was reliable information, and the clock was ticking. And so, behind the scenes, an amazing secret venture was launched. ''Spy in the Sky,'' by producer Linda Garmon.

NARRATOR: On May 1, 1960, a mysterious American plane stood ready for a secret mission over the Soviet Union. Its pilot was thirty-year-old Francis Gary Powers, one of a handful of young men flying for the CIA. From the day the pilots were recruited, the project had been the stuff of spy novels.

BOB ERICSON, U-2 Pilot: When I first got in the room, before they start talking, they went over and turned the water faucet on in the bathroom, turned the radio up -- the volume of the radio pretty high, and that was in case that somebody might be bugging the room. And, boy, these guys were really sneaky, you know -- top, top spies.

HERVEY STOCKMAN, U-2 Pilot: He said, ''We've got a program. It will offer you all the things that a young fighter pilot likes -- excitement, cheap thrills, some money, and a fine thing for the country,'' and I couldn't resist that.

NARRATOR: This was the U-2 spy plane, a machine that soared at the edge of space. It had been flying missions for four years when Gary Powers embarked on the longest and most daring one. But as the whole world soon discovered, the plane never reached its destination.

LINCOLN WHITE: It appears that, endeavoring to obtain information now concealed behind the Iron Curtain, a flight over Soviet territory was probably undertaken by an unarmed civilian U-2 plane.

NARRATOR: This is the story of what led up to that fateful flight during some of the most dangerous days of the cold war.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: It's Operation Alert during 1955. With the White House in the background, Washington is one of scores of cities in the nation's greatest air-raid drill.

NARRATOR: In the nineteen fifties Washington was afraid of a nuclear Pearl Harbor.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: The chief executive heads for a secret retreat, the first time the government has abandoned the capitol since it was burned in the war of 1812.

NARRATOR: Soviet bombs could now be delivered clear across the ocean.

DAVID HALBERSTAM, Author, ''The Fifties'': In terms of national security, it was a very, difficult time. I mean, we've been allowed to be isolationist because we have the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. Suddenly, they have shrunk to ponds, and there is fear, paranoia, and it's made worse by the fact that the Soviets are totalitarian.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: And here's the hidden center of government, a tent city with a radius of three hundred miles of Washington.

NARRATOR: military advisers have informed President Dwight D. Eisenhower that the nation was in maximum danger.

Pres. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: We are here to determine whether or not the government is prepared, in time of emergency, to continue the functions of government.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: That's how tense and uneasy we were. We were engaged in this titanic struggle with a potential enemy and adversary that lived in secrecy, and about which we did not know, and therefore we were triggering paranoia in them as they were triggering it in us.

NARRATOR: Soviet society was so secretive even the Moscow phone book was classified. What little information the West could glean was hard to interpret. A dramatic example came during May Day celebrations in Red Square when the Russians introduced a new and menacing bomber, the Bison. The plane was built to carry a nuclear weapon all the way to America. Mixed in with the rooftop crowds were observers from the United States.

DINO A. BRUGIONI, CIA Photo Interpreter 1948-1982: The Russians knew that we had people on the roofs of the U.S. embassy, photographing their planes. One day a plane would come by and it would have the number, say, twelve, and then the next day a plane would come with nineteen, and then another day twenty-five. And so the Air Force was quick to say, ''Well, they have at least twenty-five airplanes.''

NARRATOR: Intelligence experts raised the possibility that the Russian were staging a cold war bluff, repainting numbers on the same few planes, but the U.S. Air Force saw evidence of a dangerous bomber gap.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Moscow skies are filled with the first public display of Russia's newest combat aircraft, startling western observers with their quantity and quality -- a shock to the complacent, a spur to the alert.

DONALD WELZENBACH, CIA Historian: The Air Force contended that the Soviets were building many more bombers than we were building, and they wanted more money to build more bombers. Eisenhower never really trusted the Air Force. He always thought they overstated their case.

NARRATOR: Eisenhower found reports of Soviet strength full of speculation and rumor. Responding with a massive American build-up, he believed, would be like striking a match in a tinderbox.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: At a certain point, more weapons don't make you secure. They make you less secure, because they trigger a response upon your adversary, and so you get this thing of -- and you're becoming less secure all the time, and he knew that.

NARRATOR: Ike, the victorious general of World War II, believed there was only one way to reduce tensions in the cold war: to separate the real threat from the bluff. He needed to know precisely what cards the enemy held in its hands. There were ongoing attempts to see behind the Iron Curtain. The Air Force was using bombers rigged with cameras to photograph military targets. Many of the planes were unarmed.

DONALD WELZENBACH: Now, the Soviets, when they looked at this, they saw a silhouette of a bomber. They didn't know that it just had a camera in it. It looked like a threat.

NARRATOR: Russian fighters attacked. In this secret air war, nearly one hundred Americans disappeared.

DONALD WELZENBACH: These overflights threatened to start a war, and that's exactly what Eisenhower did not want to do, so we needed a new strategy for collecting intelligence.

NARRATOR: The Air Force put out the word for a new spy plane, one that could fly higher than any other, so high it could go undetected. The man who could meet the challenge was working in the dusty desert of California, the place where airplanes were born. He was chief engineer of the F-104, soon to be the world's fastest plane. He was Clarence Kelly Johnson, a living legend at Lockheed. Johnson's philosophy for airplane design was ''K, I, S, S,'' for ''Keep It Simple, Stupid.''

JOHN RAMSEY, Lockheed: Kelly was one of the most hated individuals outside of his own domain that I ever knew, because he was great. He was good. He got what he wanted, such as engineers, technicians, shop workers -- hand-picked -- and when he got what he wanted, he went to work with it.

NARRATOR: Johnson had a knack for unconventional design. He gave the F-104 bizarre-looking wings with razor-thin edges so the plane could fly twice the speed of sound. When Johnson heard about the plan to build a new spy plane, he proposed a quick fix: ''I'd take the F-104 and give it wings like a tent.'' Stripped down to a shockingly light weight, the plane was designed to fly behind the reach of Soviet defense, but the Air Force rejected Johnson's plan.

DONALD WELZENBACH: The Air Force was really institutionally incapable of building Kelly Johnson's proposed airplane because it believed that every aircraft it built had to be combat-ready, and this required armor-plating, guns, wheels, everything that made the plane too heavy to fly high enough to avoid interdiction.

NARRATOR: But for Eisenhower's purpose, Kelly Johnson's proposed plane would be perfect. A military plane with guns and armor would be too provocative.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: He knew there were dangers in it -- he did not want an Air Force person flying it -- and he knew that he was doing something that, if it were done to him, would drive the American people up the wall. I mean, if we knew that the Russians were circling overhead, photographing us, we would -- and that's an act of war.

NARRATOR: Eisenhower decided the new spy project could best be handled by a civilian agency, the CIA. There a rising star was put in charge -- Richard Bissell. An economist who said he took to covert operations like a duck to water, Bissell would lead the agency in a new direction away from the old-fashioned spy craft towards high-tech espionage. Kelly Johnson would get to build his big-winged bird after all. The Air Force would help, but in an operation code-named Project Aquatone, Kelly's team would be working for the ''spooks.''

TONY LeVIER, Lockheed Test Pilot: Kelly called me into his office, and those typical little squinty eyes of his. He said, ''Tony, you want to fly my new airplane?'' And I said, ''Well, what's it like? What is it?'' He says, ''I can't tell you.''

JOHN RAMSEY: ''It's just like divorcing your wife -- you're not going to talk to her. You're not going to talk to anybody, because what we're going to do is one of the most secret things that's ever been done in this country.''

TONY LeVIER: ''Don't tell your wife, don't tell your mother.'' He wouldn't have told God if God didn't need to know.

NARRATOR: ''Be quick, be quiet, be on time,'' Johnson barked at his team. He had promised Bissell to roll out a new plane in eight months, one that would fly higher than seventy thousand feet and farther than three thousand miles. The cold war clock was ticking.

CONELRAD ANNOUNCER: This is a ConelRad drill. By order of the Federal Communications Commission, all standard radio and television stations in the United States are off the air in the first daytime test of the ConelRad system of emergency broadcasting.

NARRATOR: In a top-secret facility called the ''skunk works'' -- off-limits to most employees at Lockheed -- Johnson's team set up shop.

HENRY COMBS, U-2 Project Engineer: Baldwin, who was our chief design type, began to make the drawing that would show where everything went. And he put in the fuselage successfully, but when he put six-hundred-square-foot of wing on, it just ran right off the end of the board.

NARRATOR: The total wingspan was eighty feet. It would have to carry the weight of the whole aircraft, but still be very, very light.

DONALD WELZENBACH: Kelly's airplane was more closely allied to a sail plane than it was to an airplane. It was just as fragile as sail planes. In fact, he used the same technology. He bolted the wings onto a very lightweight fuselage.

TONY LeVIER: And if you left the power on and didn't climb, you'd go up to a speed, and wings would just -- pffft, blow off.

NARRATOR: The fuselage was fifty feet long and built of wafer-thin aluminum. One day on the assembly floor, a worker accidentally banged his toolbox against the airplane, causing a four-inch dent.

ROBERT MURPHY, U-2 Flight Test Mechanic: The common joke was it was made out of Reynolds Wrap.

BOB ERICSON: You picked the wing up and it bent, and -- and holy smokes, you know, this thing is built out of toilet paper.

ROBERT MURPHY: Anybody can design an airplane strong enough, but it takes a real designer to design one that's just strong enough.

NARRATOR: ''I'd trade my grandma for a lighter plane,'' Johnson had told his team. Every pound shed from the U-2 would send it another foot higher and away from the enemy.

CONELRAD ANNOUNCER: Remember to keep your battery radio and your standard radio in good condition so that in case of enemy attack, you can get vital civil defense information and instructions.

NARRATOR: As the U-2 was nearing completion, an American president was meeting face-to-face with Soviet leaders for the first time since World War II. Eisenhower came to Geneva in July 1955, hoping to reduce tensions between Russia and the United States. Ike proposed an unprecedented plan that would allow both countries to use aerial photography openly and legally to keep tabs on each other's military installation.

Pres. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: I think that I would allow these planes -- properly inspected peaceful planes -- to fly over any particular area of either country that they wanted to.

NARRATOR: If the Russians accepted, the plan would spare Ike the need to violate Soviet air space with the U-2.

Gen. ANDREW J. GOODPASTER, Aide to President Eisenhower; I always thought that Eisenhower had the deepest understanding of what the impact would be -- worldwide and in the United States -- if one of these aircraft were lost, were shot down.

NARRATOR: The Soviets rejected the plan. ''I'll give it one shot,'' Eisenhower had said during the meeting. ''Then, if they don't accept it, we'll fly the U-2.'' Sections of the first U-2 arrived at a secret test site in Nevada. Kelly Johnson called it ''Paradise Ranch.''

ROBERT MURPHY: I mean, this place was really remote. There wasn't a lot of looky-loo government people out watching.

ROBERT T. KLINGER, U-2 Flight Test Engineer: We just worked, worked, worked to get that airplane ready.

HENRY COMBS: When they trust you, you don't dare let them down.

NARRATOR: On August 1, 1955, U-2 Number One was rolled out for its first big test.

TONY LeVIER: The first taxi test was due north. I crawled in the airplane, buckled in as though I was going to fly it -- it was flyable, but only taxiing. Kelly said, ''Take it up to fifty.'' Well, that was fifty knots, so I did. And then, when it came to stopping it, the damn brakes weren't any good, and I coasted for about two miles north.

ROBERT MURPHY: And we're driving this Willys pickup truck, chasing Tony across the dry lake.

TONY LeVIER: They caught up with me, and I told them what had happened, and the brakes are no good. And Kelly said, ''Well, you got to burn them in.'' This was one of the procedures in the old days. You'd get the brakes real hot, and then they'd start to work pretty good. And we turned the airplane, and Kelly said, ''Let's take it back to the barn. Take it up to seventy.'' So I ran it up to seventy, chopped the power -- pulled the throttle back in idle.

ROBERT MURPHY: And all of a sudden he's in the air.

ROBERT KLINGER: And the attitude was terrible, and I was afraid that the airplane was going to crash on the left wing. And essentially that's what it did.

TONY LeVIER: I kicked up a big pile of dust, and they said Kelly almost fainted.

ROBERT MURPHY: He didn't even slow down. He went right into that cloud of dust -- he couldn't see anything. Fortunately, when we come out the other side, the airplane was sitting there, and the tires were on fire.

TONY LeVIER: Kelly was pretty irate, and said, ''What happened?'' And I explained right off the bat. I said, ''I took it up to seventy, and I didn't realize it at all, and this damn thing took off, and I absolutely did not know it.''

NARRATOR: The U-2 seemed to have a will of its own, but the team pushed on. Kelly had promised the CIA to get the plane in the air in eight months. He had less than a week to go, but there were unresolved problems with the landing gear. The team had invented pogo sticks that would support the wings during takeoff, then drop away. That left the U-2 with only two sets of wheels -- half the weight of conventional gear, but tricky to land on. ''Nose first,'' said Kelly Johnson, but Tony LeVier disagreed.

TONY LeVIER: I went to the Air Force pilots that flew the B-47 jet bomber, which had the same kind of a gear, and I asked them, ''How do you land this airplane?'' And they said, ''You land it two-point -- front and rear wheel. You never land it on the nose wheel.'' And they made the point.

HENRY COMBS: Tony LeVier is almost as an opinionated as Kelly is in how something ought to be done.

TONY LeVIER: Well, we argued about it, and he wouldn't yield, and I wouldn't yield.

HENRY COMBS: Kelly knows how to fly, and Tony knows how he's going to fly it.

NARRATOR: The take-off was over before anyone knew it. The plane seemed to climb as if it were standing on its tail.

HENRY COMBS: The airplane loved to fly. The nickname was ''Angel,'' and that was because that's what it wanted to do. It headed for the stratosphere when it took off.

NARRATOR: Kelly Johnson followed the ''Angel'' in a chase plane. His outlandish design had worked. Now the trick was to get the plane down.

TONY LeVIER: Then it started to darken and it started to rain, and I came down and tried to put this thing on the nose wheel, like Kelly wanted, ever so gently. And the moment that airplane touched the ground, it started to go into a porpoise. And this thing would go like this and then like that. Well, and an airplane can bounce itself to pieces, so I gunned it and straightened it out and went around and made another approach.

And, of course, Kelly's on the horn and wondered, ''What's the matter?'' And I said, ''Well, it started to porpoise on me. I'm putting it down just as gently as I dare.'' And I tried it a second time, and the damn thing did the same thing.

HENRY COMBS: There was a time during that episode of landing attempts that we were not all sure that we were going to succeed.

TONY LeVIER: And now Kelly is getting a little bit jittery, and he said, ''Put it down on the belly, put it down on the belly.'' And I said, ''I'll do it my way before I do that.'' And I went around and came around and came down just like I wanted to, and it went on perfect, and I'm down and safe. But even then, it tended to bounce a little bit.

NARRATOR: From then on, Johnson said, it was ''drive, drive, drive.'' It was time to build the rest of the fleet and recruit the men who would fly the actual missions. Twenty-nine pilots soon arrived at the ranch. They had resigned from the Air Force to disguise their military backgrounds. The CIA called this ''sheep-dipping.'' One of them was a fighter pilot from Virginia, Francis Gary Powers. There was only one thing wrong with flying higher than any other man had ever flown, he said. ''You couldn't brag about it.''

The pilots in the CIA's secret air force quickly discovered that there were still kinks in the plane. Engines failed in mid-air. Oil leaked onto the windshield. With the date for the first mission looming, the team attacked each problem Kelly Johnson-style.

ROBERT MURPHY: We weren't grounded for two weeks, waiting for some genius to figure out what to do or to make the parts. We had a flight, and it landed. There were minor problems, and it had to do with the air flow past the tail pipe -- exhausting out and around between the tail pipe and the fuselage. And Kelly turned to me and told me to cut a half-inch off the back end of the airplane while he stood there and watched me. And I cut the half-inch off the back end of the airplane, and said, ''Okay, take off, and let's try it again.'' I mean --

NARRATOR: Soon the ranch was buzzing with practice missions, rehearsals for flights over the Soviet Union.

HERVEY STOCKMAN: They would put us on one-hundred-percent oxygen, and we would do what they call ''pre-breathing.'' You need to get the nitrogen out of your system, to avoid what is referred to amongst divers as ''the bends.''

ROBERT MURPHY: When a guy made a max-power take-off, it was like standing under Niagara Falls, you know, for a few minutes, and -- and it kept going RRRRRRRRRR -- crackle -- a real crackle noise.

NARRATOR: Pilots would have to observe radio silence. They would be on their own for up to ten hours, navigating toward targets with maps sitting on their legs.

BOB ERICSON: In those days, we were setting altitude records every day. The view from up there -- the sky turns a dark, dark blue. You look straight down, and it would just be just like normal daylight, but you looked at the horizon or up at the sky, and a lot of times you could even pick stars out. And you looked straight ahead, you can see the curvature of the earth.

NARRATOR: From thirteen miles high, the U-2 camera captured a view of the earth unlike any other. It could bring into focus objects as small as two and one-half feet across, and take a series of photographs along a flight path three thousand miles long.

DINO A. BRUGIONI: It was a panoramic camera, and it would fire in seven different positions -- first, vertically, then fire, fire, fire, and then come back and would repeat it. We would photograph a swathe from Washington to Phoenix, Arizona.

NARRATOR: Each mission would carry a strip of film a mile long. This presented a challenge. If the film ran through the camera in a conventional way -- from one side to the other -- it would be impossible to keep the weight of the airplane balanced throughout the mission.

DONALD WELZENBACH: They undertook to solve this by using two rolls of film that were counter-rotating. So there was one roll at the back and another roll at the front, and each one came across and took a picture, so that picture number one was on the front of the rear roll, and on the front of the front roll, and they would by this way, and you'd keep taking these -- these pictures, one, two, three, four. And then later on, after they were developed, you could put them together. It's really great.

DINO A. BRUGIONI: Some of these were brought to Eisenhower's attention. We actually flew one mission over his farm. Not only could he see his prized cattle, but he also -- he could see the feeding troughs. And then they had added a new addition to his house, and we had the photograph of the new addition.,

Gen. ANDREW J. GOODPASTER: My recollection is that Eisenhower said, ''This is close to incredible.'' The idea that, from sixty thousand feet or more, you could see that kind of detail, you could achieve that kind of resolution was really awesome.

NARRATOR: June 1956 -- Air Force Chief of Staff Nathan Twining arrived in Moscow for a state visit. Congress had just been warned that Russia's long-range bomber force would be twice as big as America's by the end of the decade. Invited to Soviet Aviation Day, Twining saw a chance to assess these estimates for himself --

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Massed helicopters lead the way, followed by light planes flown by men and women of the Civil Air Defense. Higher up, massed planes spell out ''Glory to the Soviet Union.''

NARRATOR: -- but the Russians didn't reveal a thing.

Gen. NATHAN TWINING, U.S. Air Force: As one famous observer has previously stated, there are no experts on the Soviet Union, only varying degrees of ignorance.

NARRATOR: For Eisenhower, the time had come for the U-2 to fly. The CIA launched the first mission over the Soviet Union from an Air Force base in Wiesbaden, Germany. Few at the base had any idea the phantom plane was even there.

HERVEY STOCKMAN: There was no drama, no drumbeats or fanfare. There's none of this flying, taxiing out like World War II with your Spitfire canopy back and a white scarf. You're buttoned into this baby.

NARRATOR: On July 4, 1956, the U-2 crossed into enemy territory for the first time.

HERVEY STOCKMAN: I knew what I was there for. I knew we had good reason to be there, but there's enough Christian spirit in me that I -- I'd be a liar if I didn't say that I did feel -- just for a moment there, you know -- ''This is another guy's air.''

NARRATOR: At Minsk, Stockman turned north toward Leningrad. He looked through his drift site -- a sort of inverted periscope. Suddenly he spotted something that wasn't supposed to be there. Soviet fighters had been dispatched to attack him. He had been picked up on Russian radar.

HERVEY STOCKMAN: You know, they're small on that viewer, and ''What am I seeing there?'' And sure enough, they were MIGs. They were trying to snap up and tap me. And we'd been told -- and I believed Kelly Johnson one hundred percent -- ''For a couple of years, gang, they're not going to be able to touch you,'' and they weren't -- they weren't --

NARRATOR: MIGs could not reach the high-flying U-2, but the spy plane was no longer a secret. As the U-2 flew over his country for the first time, Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev stood, of all places, at the American ambassador's residence in Moscow.

SERGEI KHRUSHCHEV, Son of Nikita Khrushchev: My father could not understand why [the] Americans did it in the Fourth of July, because it was [the] second time in our post-war history when all the Soviet leaderships [sic] went to the American embassy to the -- your Independence Day.

DONALD WELZENBACH: The Soviets sent a protest note to the U.S. government, and they protested an over flight of Soviet territory by a twin-engine U.S. bomber. Well, we responded to that note, and we denied that a twin-engine U.S. bomber had overflown the Soviet Union. We did -- said nothing about the fact that a single-engine plane had overflown them.

SERGEI KHRUSHCHEV: What will be the American feeling of your President [and] ordinary people if [a] Soviet plane will fly over your territory and then we [are] told that, ''It is nothing''? Then he told [me], ''I am imagining they [are] laughing at the State Department and White House -- no shooting, only showing them that we -- we could do nothing. We have [to] sit silent and wait until we really can do this.''

NARRATOR: Back at the Skunk Works, Kelly Johnson broke the news to members of his team. Ike got his first picture postcard of the Soviet Union, but Russian radar had spotted the U-2 on its very first mission.

DONALD WELZENBACH: And one of the little-known facts that came out of World War II is that we gave the Soviet Union all of our radars, and they used them, and we knew the problems that were endemic to these radars. Now, what surprised us was that the Soviets had built their own radar by this time and, lo and behold, they saw us.

NARRATOR: The U-2's large flat wings were like circus spotlights on Russian radar. The plane would have to be made less visible. The team embarked on the ''Dirty Bird'' project -- covering the plane's belly with a metallic grid and special paint to absorb radar waves.

DONALD WELZENBACH: That did attenuate the signals, but it also caused the engine to heat up, and as the engine heated up, it caused the hydraulic pumps to fail.

NARRATOR: One day in April 1957, test pilot Bob Sieker took one of the Dirty Birds to seventy-two thousand feet. He radioed that he was experiencing rapid heat build-up. Suddenly his engine quit.

DONALD WELZENBACH: He had to bail out, because the plane stopped functioning, and in those days there were no ejection seats. He climbed out of the aircraft and was hit by the tailplane and killed.

ROBERT T. KLINGER: The airplane had come down from altitude in a flat spin, and hit the ground pretty flat. It was pretty intact. The wings just folded forward like that, not a great distance, and Bob's body was there. They said you could see him laying there.

NARRATOR: It took three days for the Skunk Works team to locate the wreckage. There would be nine more fatal accidents during test flights and training, all before Americans learned that the U-2 had been flying at all. In Washington, film from the first missions was delivered to a building that housed an oil dealer, and above it a secret lab. Inside, CIA photo interpreters poured over miles of film. A half-dozen missions would be run during the first year, yielding an intelligence bonanza -- military secrets of the Soviet Union.

DINO A. BRUGIONI: We thought we were going to see camouflaging, concealment, and deception activity. Much to our surprise, it was wide open.

NARRATOR: The biggest surprise in picture after picture was that the Soviets had built only a fraction of the bombers that had been predicted.

DINO A. BRUGIONI: Within several months, we could positively produce facts that the bomber gap didn't exist, and so here was an organization in a ramshackle building -- only about one hundred of us -- and we solved the main problem facing President Eisenhower. And we could go to the President and say, ''Mr. President, the bomber gap doesn't exist.''

NARRATOR: Early in his presidency, Eisenhower had said the cost of a modern bomber was a brick school in more than thirty cities. Now he had the intelligence he needed to fight against a costly and dangerous arms race. In Washington, anxieties over the bomber gap disappeared, but the calm was short-lived. It was soon replaced by a national panic over the Russian satellite, Sputnik.

RUSSIAN ANNOUNCER: This is Radio Moscow.

Sen. LYNDON B. JOHNSON: There's something new in the heavens.

MAN: We should have been the first ones to have it, if there's such a thing.

WOMAN: We fear this.

AMERICAN ANNOUNCER: The first artificial satellite in the world.

DONALD WELZENBACH: The launching of the first Sputnik in October 1957 stirred up a hornet's nest in the United States. The Congress immediately seized upon the idea that there was a ''missile gap.''

NARRATOR: Americans believed that if the Russians could boost a satellite into space, they could now send a missile carrying nuclear weapons all the way to the United States. Senate Democrats went on the attack.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: In Washington's historic Senate Caucus Room, a sweeping probe of the U.S. missiles program.

Gen. ANDREW J. GOODPASTER: There had been a lot of political attacks criticizing Eisenhower for not responding with crash programs to meet the build-up that was alleged to be occurring on the other side.

NARRATOR: Now the U-2 would search for evidence of long-range missiles, but in a country as vast as the Soviet Union, there was no way to know for certain where the Russians might be hiding them. To gauge Soviet missile strength, Eisenhower pinned hopes on a new technology, a spy satellite. It would cover more territory than the U-2 and, after Sputnik, no one could object to overflights from space. But the program was off to a painfully slow start.

Gen. ANDREW J. GOODPASTER: There were a lot of failures, but he was very steadfast. He said, ''We're going to stick with this.'' He was convinced that it was going to be successful, and he saw it as necessary, because he thought the time of the U-2 was bound to run out.

NARRATOR: At the Skunk Works, Kelly Johnson learned that U-2 pilots were also getting nervous. Intelligence reports indicated that the Russian SAM's -- or surface-to-air missiles -- might soon be able to reach their U-2.

BOB ERICSON: I thought that, ''Hey, they're going to push this thing right to the bitter end. They'll lose one, and that'll end the whole program.'' And that's the way I kind of accepted that, that hopefully it will not be me.

NARRATOR: Eisenhower grew increasingly reluctant to provoke the Russians with U-2 flights. Instead he wanted to improve relations. In the fall of 1959, he got his chance.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Russia's first family -- wife, two daughters and a son -- are in the party of Nikita S. Khrushchev, the sixty-five-year-old Soviet premier who becomes the first head of a Kremlin government to visit the United States.

NARRATOR: Khrushchev had come to America. His trip marked the beginning of détente.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Her husband wears a black suit with three decorations.

NARRATOR: There were plans for a summit in Paris to discuss a nuclear test ban treaty. There was even talk of the Eisenhowers visiting Moscow afterwards.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: And the two of them do very well together. Eisenhower is invited by Khrushchev to come to the Soviet Union, bring his family. He says, you know, ''We're going to bring more Eisenhowers than you've ever seen.'' I mean, this is a huge success.

NARRATOR: But as the two leaders arrived at the President's weekend getaway for private talks, the one subject not yet covered was the U-2.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Author, ''Mayday: The U-2 Affair'': Eisenhower figured that if Khrushchev was going to complain about the U-2, this was going to be the time.

SERGEI KHRUSHCHEV: He didn't want to talk about the U-2, and he told me at that time that, ''It will show our weakness. How I can talk [sic] with American president -- about what? And he will tell -- he will answer me, 'It was not our plane. Did you saw [sic] the -- the American flag or something else?'''

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Khrushchev said not a word about the U-2, and from this Eisenhower took away the thought that, ''Perhaps Khrushchev has come to the same point of view that we have,'' which is that the U-2 flights are really being sent out of peaceful intentions to try to keep down the arms race, and Khrushchev, who has the same goal, is going to look the other way.

SERGEI KHRUSHCHEV: Americans saw that it was accepted, and for Russians, they are waiting until they can shoot it.

NARRATOR: Ike approved a new U-2 mission, setting aside any objections he may have had. The CIA had pressed for it, believing it had located the first long-range operational missile base in northern Russia. To reach the site, the U-2 would be sent on the longest mission ever. The pilot would be Francis Gary Powers.

DONALD WELZENBACH: Gary Powers was confronted with the first mission that we'd ever attempted to fly from one border to another border in a straight line. All other flights were generally circular in nature -- they'd go in one place and come out another place, so that the Soviets didn't really know where we were going.

NARRATOR: Taking off from Peshawar, Pakistan, Powers would fly over the Sputnik launch pad at Tyura Tam, defense installations at Sverdlovsk, and then the prize -- the long-range missile site under construction near the town of Plesetsk.

DONALD WELZENBACH: And the Air Force is saying that the Soviets had hundreds of these missiles, and yet we hadn't seen any up to this point. And so it was important that we go and get a picture of that so we could see what it looked like, because then, once we saw that, we could go and look at all the other photographs we had and decide whether or not there were others.

NARRATOR: Eisenhower had approved the operation with one condition, that it be flown by April 25, 1960, but bad weather kept the U-2 grounded.

Gen. ANDREW J. GOODPASTER: Eisenhower then said the flight could be flown after the 1st of May, because it was getting too close to the planned summit meeting.

NARRATOR: April 28th -- the plane was on the runway in Pakistan. Mission scrubbed. April 29th -- scrubbed again.

BOB ERICSON: And the weather is bad over the target sites, so they cancel the mission and they had to ferry the aircraft back to Turkey. And after doing that about three or four times -- the Russians were smart people. They can look at the weather and say, ''Hey, tomorrow's going to be a good day. This guy is going to come tomorrow.''

NARRATOR: On May 1, 1960, Russians gathered for one of their most honored holidays. It was the last possible day for the U-2 mission before the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit. The weather was clear, but the six A.M. launch time had come and gone.

BOB ERICSON: And Frank is now sitting in the aircraft, and over there in the summertime, it is hot, hot, hot. He's in the cockpit -- no shade. I took my shirt off, and I was trying to hold it over him, and sweat was just running down his face. He was wringing wet.

NARRATOR: Powers waited. When the ''go'' signal came, there was a breakdown in security. The message had been relayed in part over an open telephone line -- strictly against regulations.

DONALD WELZENBACH: Gary Powers left Peshawar on a mission which, four years before, Eisenhower had predicted would fail. If you fly in a straight line long enough, they're going to get you, and on this day, this was to be the fate of Gary Powers.

NARRATOR: In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev learned that the U-2 had once again invaded Soviet airspace. He was furious that the plane had been sent on a national holiday.

SERGEI KHRUSHCHEV: I ask him, ''Will they shoot them at that time?'' And he told [me], ''Why, it is a stupid question. If they will can [sic], they will do this.''

NARRATOR: Power's first target was the Tyura Tam launch pad, usually heavily defended. It was nearly abandoned for the May Day holiday.

SERGEI KHRUSHCHEV: Two other divisions -- it was -- Powers was lucky, because he just flew between them. And after that, he flew to Sverdlovsk, and they waited.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: This year's parade through Red Square is a three and one-half-hour affair, with emphasis on peaceful co-existence.

Gen. ANDREW J. GOODPASTER: I called Eisenhower when we got word that the plane was overdue and had to be assumed to be lost, and I think that's the time when I told him that, ''The winds may blow.''

NARRATOR: Kelly Johnson received a call at home well after midnight. At the Skunk Works the next morning, he assembled members of his team. ''We got nailed over Sverdlovsk,'' he said, ''That's that. We're dead.'' Eisenhower approved a cover story -- the plane was conducting weather research and the pilot had strayed off-course.

DINO A. BRUGIONI: It was just preposterous that he was on a weather mission and got lost. We knew that he was halfway through his mission, and that he would have a large roll of film, and this film was not flammable.

NARRATOR: The film was recovered by the Russians, and before a packed house of the Supreme Soviet, Nikita Khrushchev waved large aerial photographs, ridiculing the American cover story. Khrushchev had an even bigger bombshell to drop: the pilot had been taken alive and was known to have been flying missions for the CIA. Americans had been caught red-handed, and the international press flashed the news. On the eve of the East-West summit, Khrushchev's trust in Eisenhower had been betrayed.

SERGEI KHRUSHCHEV: For Russians and for my father, it was the sign that Americans don't want [to] really negotiate the political questions. They try to show their military strengths, and they want to show their fist.

NARRATOR: Khrushchev went to the Paris summit, but only long enough to denounce the United States for spying. Eisenhower's hopes for a test-ban treaty and for détente were shattered.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: When it was over, they shot down not just Francis Gary Powers, they -- they shot down the Eisenhower trip to Moscow -- all those Eisenhowers, more Eisenhowers than any Russian had ever seen. They shot down what he hoped would be the beginning of a peace process, his legacy to his country.

NARRATOR: Three months later, the Soviets brought Gary Powers to trial for espionage.

FRANCIS GARY POWERS, Downed U-2 Pilot: On the morning of May the 1st.

NARRATOR: While the court debated his fate, Americans debated his actions.

RUSSIAN COURT INTERPRETER: ''Who gave you these instructions?''

NARRATOR: Many believed he had been ordered to commit suicide, rather than be taken prisoner, but that story was not true.

FRANCIS GARY POWERS: I plead with the court to judge me not as an enemy, but as a human being.

NARRATOR: Gary Powers was sentenced to ten years in prison. The very same day, the CIA recovered film from the first of a series of successful spy satellites. One satellite mission covered more Soviet territory than all the U-2 flights put together.

DONALD WELZENBACH: The upshot of all this was that there really wasn't a missile gap, and it did put everyone's mind at ease, but Gary Powers had to pay the price for that.

NARRATOR: Powers was released from prison after seventeen months, exchanged for a Russian spy. His flight ended missions over the Soviet Union, but the U-2 continued to fly. It discovered missiles in Cuba in 1962, and it was still in the skies during the Gulf War. The U-2's designer, Kelly Johnson, ran the Skunk Works until 1975. A CIA chief called him ''one of the greatest spies of all time.''

CREDITS

Written, Produced & Directed by LINDA GARMON

Associate Producer BETH TIERNEY

Editor BILL LATTANZI

Narrator ROY SCHEIDER

Music SHELDON MIROWITZ

Cinematographers TOM HURWITZ

BOYD ESTUS, MIKE COLES, JERI SOPANEN

Based on:

Mayday, by Michael Beschloss

Skunk Works, by Ben Rich & Leo Janos

Additional Material From: Dragon Lady, by Chris Pocock

Consultants CHRIS POCOCK, MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, LEO JANOS, PETER GORIN, JAY MILLER,
VICTOR McELHENY, JOHN PRADOS, ALBERT WHEELON, ALAN BRINKLEY, Gen. LEO GEARY

Sound Design GEOF THURBER, GREG McCLEARY

Sound Mix RICHARD BOCK

Stills Animation BERLE CHERNEY, VISUAL PRODUCTIONS

Animation SCHWARTZ/GIUNTA PRODUCTION COMPANY

Special Thanks To:
John Turner, Skunk Works
Garfield Thomas, Skunk Works
Martin Knutson, NASA Ames
John Arvesen, NASA Ames
William J. McTighe, Wheeler Group
Alison White, NOVA
Jeff Greene, Green Otter Productions
George Tarrab, Tyler Camera Systems

Operations Coordinator KEVIN MASON

Production Accommodations courtesy of
Airtel Plaza of Van Nuys, California
San Jose Holiday Inn

Interview Locations:
Building 82, Skunk Works, Burbank, California
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California
Robert Treat Paine Estate, Waltham, Massachusetts
Woodrow Wilson House, Washington, D.C.

Sound Recordists MICHAEL BOYLE, JOHN CAMERON,
JOHN DILDINE, DAN GLEICH, JOHN OSBORNE, BRUCE PERLMAN

Assistant Camera RICHARD COMRIE, ANNE-MARIE FENDRICK,
ROGER HAYDOCK, TOM INSKEEP, MICHAEL KREBS, PAUL S. MARBURY,
REBEKAH MICHAELS, STEPHANIE RYAN

Gaffers SPENCER COMMONS, JOSH SPRING, MARK TREMBATH

Assistant Editors KATY MOSTOLLER, BERNICE K. SCHNEIDER

Archival Researchers KARY MOSTOLLER, MASHA OLENEVA, HELEN WEISS,
JEANETTE WOODS, KAREN WYATT, JOAN YOSHIWARA

Location Scouts COOPER PRODUCTIONS, D'ANN HANRAHAN, SANDRA MEDOF

Aerial Shoot HELINET AVIATION SERVICE,
TYLER CAMERA SYSTEMS, CROWWBOW HELICOPTER

Helicopter Pilot DAVID GIBB

Additional Research CHRISTEN A. KACZOROWSKI, MICHELLE MONTI

Interns KWABENA KYEI-ABOAGYE, Jr., KERRY ZUCKER

Film Archives:
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
Archive Films
British Broadcasting Corporation
Belarus Film Archive
CBS News Archives
Central Intelligence Agency
Central State Archives of Documentary Films & Photographs
Energy Productions
Dwight D. Eisenhower Library
Educational & Television Films, Ltd.
Fox Movietonews, Inc.
Gosteleradio
Green Otter Productions
Grinberg Libraries, Inc.
M-V Studios
National Air and Space Museum
National Archives
Novosti
NBC News Archives
Paramount Pictures
Radio Yesteryear
UCLA Film and Television Archive
Video Cosmos

Photo Archives:
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
Central Intelligence Agency
Los Angeles Times
NASA Ames Research Center
National Park Service
The New York Times
UPI/Bettmann Archive, Inc.
USIA

Additional Photo Sources:
Ed Baldwin
Anne Bissell
Dino A. Brugioni
Jay Miller
Chris Pocock
Mrs. Francis Gary Powers

Narration Record RMR STUDIO

Colorist BRIAN LOVERY

MEDALLION PFA FILM & VIDEO

On-line Editor PAUL DEAKIN

MEDALLION PFA FILM & VIDEO

For THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE:

Post-production Supervisor FRANK CAPRIA

Post-production Assistants MAUREEN BARDEN,

REBECCA BARNES

Field Production LARRY LeCAIN,

BOB McCAUSLAND, CHAS NORTON

Series Designers ALISON KENNEDY,

CHRIS PULLMAN

Title Animation SALVATORE RACITI, Wave, Inc.

On-Line Editors DAN WATSON, DOUG MARTIN

Series Theme CHARLES KUSKIN

Series Theme Adaptation MICHAEL BACON

Unit Manager MARI LOU GRANGER

Project Administration NANCY FARRELL,

HELEN R. RUSSELL, ANN SCOTT

Publicity DAPHNE B. NOYES, JOHANNA BAKER

Coordinating Producer SUSAN MOTTAU

Series Editor JOSEPH TOVARES

Senior Producer MARGARET DRAIN

Executive Producer JUDY CRICHTON

Series Host DAVID McCULLOUGH

Transcripts Journal Graphics, Inc.

THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
is a production of WGBH/Boston.

Major funding for this series is provided by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Additional funding provided by
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and public television viewers.

Corporate funding is provided by
Scott's Miracle-Gro Products, Inc. and
American Express.