JUST AS HE was finally getting acclimated to the searing heat of Del Rio, Texas, Chuck Maultsby received orders to replace another U-2 pilot at the spy program’s operating location at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. The Soviet Union was preparing to test its most powerful nuclear weapon, a hydrogen bomb with a yield of fifty-seven megatons—1,570 times the combined energy of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.
Maultsby’s mission, sponsored by the Defense Atomic Support Agency, was to determine the quantity of radioactive material released into the atmosphere following a nuclear explosion such as the Soviet test conducted in Mityushikha Bay north of the Arctic Circle. Heat from that megablast caused third-degree burns more than one hundred kilometers away from ground zero.
Maultsby flew eleven missions over a three-month period beginning in late summer 1961. Temperatures in Alaska were cooler than in Texas, but he never got used to the perpetual sunlight. He had a difficult time sleeping between missions, and the night terrors from his time as a POW came creeping back. Maultsby had kept his posttraumatic stress disorder under wraps, and it did not affect his performance. He was always cool in the cockpit. During those quiet moments alone in his barracks, however, his past returned to haunt him.1
He found solace in the letters his wife, Jeanne, wrote him each week. The past few months had been trying ones for his family. Maultsby was grieving the recent passing of his aunt Inez, the only true parent he had known since his mother’s death when he was a child. After the funeral, Maultsby brought his uncle Louie to Laughlin Air Force Base to live with them, which proved a disaster from the start. Louie drank away his days, and military police escorted him home numerous times. When he got in trouble for impersonating a senior CIA agent, that was the last straw. Family or not, Uncle Louie was sent packing home to Virginia.
RUDY ANDERSON’S WIFE, Jane, loved her husband, but she hated his job, or at least the secrecy surrounding it. His missions were always classified, so he could not discuss them with her.
“This was the one thing that would drive my mother nuts,” recalled James Anderson, the couple’s second son. “She was always worried because what he did on a good day carried risks for misadventures.”
When Anderson flew missions that required his absence for any length of time, he always found a way to call her. Since every aspect of his job was classified, he and Jane spoke in their own special code. Anderson never broke rules by sharing secret information with her, but he told her indirectly that all was going well and that he would return to her and the boys soon.
The couple spoke by phone one evening in early March 1962 while Anderson was flying missions out of Edwards Air Force Base in California. Their conversation went the usual way. He told Jane that he was fine and that he loved and missed her and the kids. Hearing her husband’s voice on the telephone always comforted Jane. She did not know where he was or what he was doing, but at least she knew he was safe. Jane could put her worries to rest and focus on running their small household and raising two little boys.
The next day a big dark automobile drove slowly through the base. It had official air force markings, and the wives warned each other about it. There was only one reason for such a car to be on base—to deliver the terrible news that an airman was dead. Many of the wives were outside hanging clothes when the big car motored by. Each held her breath and prayed the vehicle would not stop in front of her residence. The wives watched as it continued on to Arantz Street, where it pulled to the curb outside the Andersons’ home. Two air force notification officers stepped out of the vehicle, walked slowly to the front door, and knocked. Jane approached the front door and stood at the entrance of her home with her arms folded.
“Mrs. Rudolf Anderson?” one of the men asked.
Jane nodded.
“We are sorry to inform you that your husband was killed in a training accident on March 1st.”
Jane paused and processed the words slowly.
“I am sorry but you are seriously mistaken,” she replied.
The notification officers looked at her and then each other.
“No ma’am, unfortunately we are quite sure of this.”
“He’s not dead,” Jane said.
The officers thought she was hysterical. There was no way to know how a family member would react on learning about the death of an airman—sometimes with anger and screaming, other times with stunned silence or denial.
“What date did you say the pilot was killed?” she asked.
“March 1st.”
“Well that’s a couple days ago,” Jane said. “I just spoke with my husband last night and he is very much alive.”2
It was the officers’ turn to react with disbelief. They made several phone calls to check and recheck their information. Finally, the officers learned they had made a grave mistake. Jane felt no elation with the confirmation as she had known both in her heart and in her head that Rudy was alive. Instead, she felt a wave of dread wash over her with the realization that another woman would learn she had become a widow that day.
That woman was the wife of Captain John Campbell, a U-2 pilot killed when his plane crashed during aerial refueling training near Edwards Air Force Base. The flight plan filed with the Federal Aviation Administration showed the pilot as Anderson rather than Campbell. Training can be as difficult and every bit as dangerous as combat or surveillance missions. During a night refueling maneuver, Campbell and his spy plane somehow entered the slipstream of a Boeing KC-105 Stratotanker, and the U-2 started tumbling toward Earth, with Campbell unable to regain control. He tried to eject—his altitude was low enough that he didn’t need oxygen—but something went horribly wrong. When the plane was later found crumpled on the ground, Campbell was dead inside. Apparently he had tried to escape up to the last second because he had manually opened the canopy, and his body was halfway out of the cockpit.
BY THIS TIME, imprisoned U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers had returned to the United States, exchanged for convicted Soviet spy Rudolph Abel. Powers was debriefed extensively as many in the intelligence community remained skeptical of his actions. The CIA and Senate Armed Services Select Committee put him under investigation, and after eight days of hearings, both groups determined that Powers had followed orders and acted appropriately during and after the shoot-down. The CIA even awarded him an Intelligence Star, but that honor remained confidential. But one man whose star had dimmed at the CIA was its longtime director Allen Dulles. President Kennedy laid the blame for the Bay of Pigs debacle at Dulles’s feet and immediately began work to reorganize the spy agency. Dulles was forced out in favor of John McCone, a Republican millionaire from California who had served under President Harry Truman as undersecretary of the air force and under Dwight Eisenhower as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The new director was considered more cautious and less of a risk taker than his predecessor. Dick Bissell was also pushed out. JFK offered him the directorship of a new science and technology department, but he turned it down and instead went to work for a Pentagon think tank. Once a certified superstar within the ranks of America’s intelligence community and a self-proclaimed “man-eating shark,” Bissell left the CIA a beaten and defeated man.
He could not know at the time that the U-2 program he had fought for, built, and cultivated for nearly a decade was about to take center stage in a game of global brinksmanship that would bring the world’s two superpowers to the edge of nuclear war.