Because the Oxcart would fly five times as fast as the U-2, the Agency needed a lot more restricted airspace at Area 51. Flying at speeds of 2,200 miles per hour, an Oxcart pilot would need a 186-mile swath just to make a U-turn. This meant an additional 38,400 acres of land around the base were withdrawn from public access, allowing the Federal Aviation Administration to extend the restricted airspace from a 50-square-mile box to 440 square miles. FAA employees were instructed not to ask questions about anything flying above forty thousand feet. The same was true at NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
While the base was being readied for delivery of the twelve aircraft, pole testing continued on the lake bed at Area 51. All the while, the CIA feared the Russians were watching from space. Across the world, at NII-88, Sergei Korolev had designed a Soviet spy satellite called Object D, but the CIA did not know what exactly it was capable of. Also under way was a follow-on espionage platform called Zenit, a modified version of the Vostok spacecraft that had been equipped with cameras to photograph American military installations from space. The Russians took great delight in rubbing what they learned in the face of the State Department. Once, using diplomatic channels, they passed a simple sketch of the exact shape of Lockheed’s top secret airplane to the CIA, whose employees were baffled as to how the enemy could have known such a thing, in view of the fact that operations personnel had been very careful to avoid the orbiting Soviet snoopers. Was there a double agent among them? The CIA, ever paranoid about KGB infiltration, worried in private that there could be a spy inside Area 51. Lovick finally figured it out: the Russians were using infrared satellites. In the desert heat, which could reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, the mock-up of the aircraft left a heat signature as it sat on the tarmac while technicians were waiting to hoist it up on the test pole. The sketch reflected that.
While the Russians watched from space, the CIA continued to monitor and translate the Soviets’ reaction to its aerial reconnaissance program. Memos from Soviet chief marshal of artillery S. Varentsov revealed the Russians’ growing furor over the speed at which the United States was advancing its spy planes. Varentsov lamented that the Russians’ own program had barely moved beyond technology from World War II. On the one hand, this was positive news for the CIA. In the world of overhead espionage, the Russians had been forced into a defensive posture. But it was also a double-edged sword. The Soviets couldn’t advance their aerial reconnaissance program because so much of their efforts went into advancing surface-to-air missile technology. If the capitalist foes were going to continue to fly over Mother Russia, Nikita Khrushchev was hell-bent on shooting them down.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cat and Mouse Becomes Downfall
Francis Gary Powers never slept well the night before a mission flight. When his 2:00 a.m. wake-up call came on May 1, 1960, Powers felt particularly anxious. His flight had already been postponed twice. It was sweltering hot in the ancient city of Peshawar, Pakistan, and Powers had spent the night on a cot in an aircraft hangar inside the CIA’s secret facility there. Between the intense heat and the noise, sleep had been sporadic. The false starts had added a layer of uncertainty into the mix. Gary Powers got out of bed and took a shower. May was the hottest month in Pakistan. It was before 5:00 a.m. and yet the sun was already up, cooking the air. After only a few minutes, Powers would be drenched in sweat again. He dressed and ate his breakfast, all the while thinking about the radical mission that lay ahead. The Agency had never attempted to fly all the way across the Soviet Union before, from the southern border near Pakistan to the northern border near the Arctic Circle. From there, Powers would fly his U-2 to a secret CIA base in Norway and land. No Agency pilot had ever taken off and landed at two different bases in a U-2.