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A Chilling Presence

Review: 'A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA’s Secret War' by Monte Reel

6th August 1960: The remains of the U-2 spy plane flown by American pilot Francis Gary Powers, which was shot down over Soviet airspace / Getty Images
May 5, 2018

Who could doubt that the best thing America has experienced since the Second World War is the collapse of the Soviet empire? Victory in the Cold War finished off the deep threat of international communism backed by major military power. It freed the United States from entanglement in proxy wars with the Soviet Union, and it released from the national consciousness the high tension of possible global thermonuclear war. "The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this," George H.W. Bush would later write. "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War."

Unfortunately, there is also a case to be made that one of the worst things America has experienced since the Second World War is the aftermath of that victory. The past 20-odd years have been odd years indeed. Without the threat of the Soviets, national seriousness seemed to fade, as we transitioned from a president who would declare, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" to a president who would discuss his underwear at a public press conference. By the early 2000s, intellectual endorsement of socialism had somehow made it back into the mainstream. Without as great a need for military spending, the national debt exploded. Without a major enemy abroad, we made our own at home.

On both the left and right, the lack of purpose set free peculiar impulses. Living in what is—by any objective measure of life expectancy, income, peacefulness, and calories available to eat—the greatest moment in the history of the world, we nonetheless began to feel an enervating anxiety. The constraints of nature came to seem arbitrary and oppressive. Lacking much beyond the horizon of immediate politics, we invested those politics with the fervor of religion, declaring those who disagree with us not just mistaken but actually evil. The decline in the apocalyptic threat of superpower war was met with the elevation of nearly every feeling into a sense that the apocalypse was closing in.

As of this year, the Berlin Wall has been down longer than it was up, but the Cold War continues to influence us. The only difference is that where once it shaped us by its presence, it now defines us by its absence, as we are battered by one attempt after another to elevate some social issue into the moral equivalent of war. The moral equivalent of the Cold War.

Every year sees a new set of history books about at the long struggle of the West against the Soviets. The most readable thus far in 2018 is A Brotherhood of Spies, the new look at the U-2 incident, the 1960 downing of an American spy plane. Written by the journalist Monte Reel, the book is a fast-moving account of the Americans who conceived and carried out the flights over the Soviet Union. While there isn't really much new to say about the famous capture of an American pilot, Reel manages to bring to life both the single-minded idea and the messy application of the CIA's effort to use American technology in place of human agents to gather information on the Soviet threat.

What makes A Brotherhood of Spies especially interesting, however, is the way it careens from side to side as it races through its story. The Cold War was unnecessary and awful—and we should look back fondly on the certainty it provided. The United States and the Soviet Union were monstrous twins, immoral equivalents—and we should be glad that the evil empire of the Soviets was defeated. The CIA was a vile joke—and we should appreciate the spy agency's efforts to defeat Stalin's successors.

As Reel notes, the U-2 program was an astonishing technological achievement, far enough ahead of its time that the system is still in use, the cameras able to take extraordinarily detailed photographs while the planes flew well above the range of the Soviets' intercept fighters. Unfortunately for Gary Powers, the U-2 planes did not prove to fly above the range of the Russians' surface-to-air missiles. A flight in April 1960 had been spotted by Soviet radar, and the military was on alert for any subsequent incursion into Russian air-space. Barrages of missiles greeted Powers's return on the first of May, and the U-2 was shot down over the Urals. Powers bailed out and was captured, refusing to use the suicide poison he had been provided (for which some, notably James Bond-creator Ian Fleming, charged him with cowardice).

The Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, then deliberately whipsawed the Americans, announcing the destruction of the plane but not the capture of Powers, tempting President Eisenhower's administration into concocting a cover story of a weather plane that had inadvertently crossed into Russia when its pilot was rendered unconscious by the failure of his oxygen mask. Once the Americans were committed to the story, Khrushchev revealed that Powers was in fact alive, held in a Soviet prison awaiting trial as a spy.

The incident ruined a planned summit meeting between the Americans and Russians. Eisenhower was left depressed, and Khrushchev would later say that his failure to get major concessions such as an American apology for the incident weakened his power in the USSR and left him vulnerable to the opponents who would oust him from the government in 1964. Powers was returned to the United States in 1962, in exchange for Rudolf Abel, a Russian spy the FBI had captured in New York.

A Brotherhood of Spies tells this history by focusing on the development of the U-2. Four people, Reel insists, were instrumental in establishing the events of May 1, 1960—the brotherhood of his title. He looks at the pilot, Gary Powers, naturally, down through his subsequent life as pilot of a news helicopter, and he rightly takes up Richard Bissell, the CIA officer determined to put the agency on a path of superior technology.

But Reel adds two other figures to the common account. He relates the efforts of Kelly Johnson, the Lockheed engineering manager who brought together the design of the U-2 plane’s elements. And—in the most fascinating portion of the book, he follows the work of Edwin Land, from the Polaroid Corporation, who may have been the greatest talent ever to work on the invention of optics and camera technology.

A Brotherhood of Spies is a good read, but, like all books these days about the era, it leaves a strange taste in the reader's mouth. Are we to celebrate the Cold War? Denounce it? Reject those who fought the war? Praise those who gave their lives to the struggle? The presence of the Cold War defined us in one way. The absence of the Cold War defines us in another. And never can we quite treat it as simply the past.

Published under: Book reviews