The president was trapped. Were he to deny knowing what his “militarists” were up to, he would appear uninformed by his own military. Were he to admit that he had in fact personally authorized Powers’s flight, it would become clear he’d lied earlier when he claimed the downed airplane had been conducting weather research, not espionage. So despondent was the commander in chief about his untenable position that when he walked into the Oval Office two days later, he told his secretary Ann Whitman, “I would like to resign.” Spying on Russia and defying Soviet airspace was one thing; lying about it after being caught red-handed made the president look like a liar in the eyes of the world. In 1960, American presidents were expected to be truth tellers; there was no public precedent for lying.
Khrushchev demanded an apology from his nemesis. Eisenhower wouldn’t bow. Apologizing would only open Pandora’s box. There were too many overflights to make them transparent. There had been at least twenty-four U-2 flights over Russia and hundreds more bomber overflights by General LeMay. To reveal the dangerous game of cat and mouse that had been going on in secret—at a time when thermonuclear weapons on both sides were ready to fly—would likely shock and frighten people more than having a president who lied. A national poll revealed that more than half of adult Americans believed they were more likely to die in a thermonuclear war with the Russians than of old age. So Eisenhower made the decision to keep the focus on Gary Powers’s flight only and admit that he personally had authorized it. This was “the first time any nation had publicly admitted it was engaged in espionage,” noted Eisenhower’s lead U-2 photo interpreter at the time, Dino Brugioni.
Khrushchev could play the game too. And he did so by making a dangerous, offensive move. By the summer of 1960, he had authorized a Soviet military base to be set up in Cuba. The island, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, was in America’s backyard. Khrushchev’s plan was to put nuclear warheads in striking distance of Washington, DC. In this way, Soviet missiles could be launched from Havana and obliterate the nation’s capital in just twenty-five minutes’ time. Khrushchev was showing Eisenhower that he could play cat and mouse too.
Immediately after Gary Powers had been shot down in his U-2 and picked up by the Soviets, he was flown from Sverdlovsk to Moscow, where he was put in a cell inside Lubyanka Prison, which doubled as headquarters for the KGB. There, his interrogation began. Powers had already decided on a tactic. He’d tell the Russians the truth, but “with definite limitation.” The KGB wanted to know about Area 51. Where had he trained to fly the U-2? Powers was asked. According to Powers’s memoir, he told the KGB that training took place at a base on the West Coast called Watertown. Powers wrote that the Soviets believed Watertown was located in Arizona and that they produced a map of the state, asking him to mark Watertown’s exact location. Whether the Soviets were playing a game with Powers or whether he was telling his readers the truth but “with definite limitation” remains unclear. Either way, trial transcripts from August of 1960, declassified by the CIA in 1985, revealed that the Soviets knew exactly where Watertown was and that it was located inside the Nevada Test Site. During Powers’s trial, Soviet procurator-general Rudenko asked his comrade judges if they were familiar with “the deposition of the accused Powers which he gave in the preliminary investigations and here in court on the preparations for flights in the U-2 aircraft at the Las Vegas firing range (poligon) in the Nevada desert,” and then he fingered the base as being used by the CIA for “the training in the use of special reconnaissance aircraft.” Not before the publication of this book has it been understood that the KGB clearly knew about Area 51 during the Powers trial.
Further, the trial revealed that the Soviets also had a much clearer picture of the inner workings of the American military-industrial complex and its defense-contracting system than the CIA had previously known. Rudenko was able to name “Lockheed company” as the manufacturer of the U-2. He argued that the existence of the “Las Vegas firing range,” aka Area 51, and the Lockheed spy plane exemplified what he called a “criminal conspiracy” between “a major American capitalist company, an espionage and reconnaissance center, and the military of America.” In his speech to the USSR International Affairs Committee, Rudenko had correctly identified the three players in the triangle of Area 51: defense contractors, the intelligence community, and the Pentagon.