SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Robert McNamara was at the Pentagon conferring with the Joint Chiefs of Staff when alerted in the early afternoon that a U-2 collecting radioactive samples near the North Pole had gone off course and might be somewhere over the Soviet Union. That message, alarming enough in and of itself, ended with the frightening news that “Russian fighters scrambled, ours too.”1
McNamara reportedly shouted, “This means war with the Soviet Union!”2
Strategic Air Command (SAC) then told the secretary of defense that another U-2 had launched to continue the air samplings over the North Pole. McNamara immediately ordered that the plane return to base—he didn’t need any other incidents occurring with Chuck Maultsby’s flight still in question. Next, he called the State Department to tell Dean Rusk, fearing the Soviets might interpret the trespassing aircraft as the vanguard of an all-out attack. But there was no hotline to Russia to explain what was happening, and at that moment only the US authorities knew the incursion was an accident. The Soviets could only guess.
Rusk immediately called Roger Hilsman, head of the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Office. Hilsman had just arrived at the White House to deliver a draft response to Nikita Khrushchev’s most recent letter. Hilsman raced to the Oval Office.
President John F. Kennedy had just completed a light swim in the White House pool and was in his living quarters when the phone rang at 1:45 p.m. McNamara was on the other end of the line and alerted Kennedy to the Maultsby situation. Hilsman then knocked on the door and, after being let in, delivered the same message. He expected Kennedy to erupt in anger. Instead, the president gave a weary and sarcastic laugh, saying, “Some son-of-a-bitch never gets the word.”3 He had issued clear orders for all the military to be extra careful and make no moves that Moscow could view as provocative unless the orders came directly from the president.
Maybe the president didn’t lose his temper because a couple days earlier another incident could have complicated the crisis. JFK’s mother, Rose Kennedy, had written to Khrushchev to ask him to autograph some of his books and send them to her. When the president found out, he called his mother and demanded, “What in the world are you doing?!” Mrs. Kennedy answered that she was performing her customary Christmas shopping whereby she would give her children books signed by heads of state, and this year it was the Soviet premier’s turn. JFK responded, “The Russians won’t assume this is innocent. They’ll give it some interpretation. Now I have to get my CIA people speculating on what the interpretation might be! The strengths, the weaknesses, the contingencies!”4
MCNAMARA AND THE Joint Chiefs got more bad news later that afternoon: the Soviet ship Grozny was still steaming toward the blockade and showed no signs of slowing down. From McNamara’s perspective it looked like things were spinning out of control. There was more bad news to come.
CHUCK MAULTSBY, STILL lost somewhere near the Soviet border, continued gliding rather than using his engine. His activated pressure suit was uncomfortable, but now he felt an additional distress—this one from his bladder. He couldn’t unzip his pressure suit without boiling his own blood. He would simply have to hold it or relieve himself inside the suit. About this time he started to see a faint red glow in the distance: the sun was coming up ahead of him. His first bit of good fortune—he knew he was heading east, away from the Soviet Union.
The altitude of the U-2 was steadily dropping, and when it reached 25,000 feet, Chuck pondered a new problem: clouds. They would obstruct his view, and he’d soon be low enough that he could slam into a mountain. He made another snap decision: he’d eject shortly after descending lower than 20,000 feet if he couldn’t see what was ahead of him. He hoped that if and when the time came to bail out, he’d have emerged from Soviet airspace and might have a slim chance of survival. Beneath his seat was a survival pack containing flares, a compass, matches, chemicals (for starting a fire with damp wood), extra clothes, a first aid kit, water, and food. The pack also contained a single-shot short-barreled rifle: a Henry AR-7 that was collapsible, impact-resistant, water-resistant, and, most importantly for a U-2 survival pack, lightweight at 3.5 pounds. However, the rifle was small caliber, and while it might bag Chuck a seagull, it wasn’t going to stop a polar bear, and it was no match for Soviet military weapons. The survival pack did not contain a cyanide pill or the poison needle. Both had been phased out for U-2 pilots after the Gary Powers incident.
When he descended below 25,000 feet, his suit started deflating, and he felt gratitude for small favors. The clouds broke and it was light enough to see the snow-covered terrain below, but there were no landmarks to steer by, just endless frozen tundra. He thought that if he had to bail out here, he stood little chance of being found before he froze to death.
Suddenly the sight of two fighter jets jolted Maultsby out of contemplation about parachuting into the frozen wasteland. The US Air Force F-102s had come up behind him, each on a different side of his aircraft, flying right off his wing. (The MiGs must have peeled off when Maultsby left Soviet airspace, frustrated that they could not climb the additional 15,000 feet to take out the spy plane.)
Finally found by friendly aircraft and now presumably over US airspace, Chuck still had a big problem. Where could he land? His plane was slowly going down.
He turned on his battery power and, using the emergency channel on his radio, called out to the pilots flying alongside him. One of the fighter jet pilots answered, “Welcome home. We’ve been following you for the past fifteen minutes.”
To stay with Chuck, the F-102s had to cut back on their airspeed to a level so slow they risked stalling out. One of the pilots explained to Maultsby that they had passed a tiny airfield about twenty miles back.
Chuck responded that he’d make a left turn and that the pilot on that side should move out of the way. The fighter pilot did so and said, “I’ll look for that airstrip.” He didn’t tell Maultsby the strip was simply packed gravel, but even so, it was vastly better than the ice chunks and frozen humps covering the tundra.
The jet led Chuck to the airstrip. The U-2 was now just below 15,000 feet and gliding at 160 knots. He scanned the earth below and could make out a few shacks and a radar station but no airstrip.
Fortunately, via his radio, he was able to contact the radar station. The radar operator explained that the runway paralleled the patch of land bordering the sea.
The U-2 had now glided down to 12,000 feet, and Maultsby banked the plane so that it circled above the tiny airstrip. Then he asked the radar operator where the south threshold of the landing strip was, knowing he’d need all the space possible. The man replied that he would go outside and park a truck on it. Chuck tried to tell him to park fifty feet off to the side, not on the runway, but the man had already left the building and was moving the truck. He then saw the man park, jump out, and wave his arms. The U-2 pilot felt like screaming, “Good… now I see where the threshold is, now move the damn truck!”
When he dipped below 10,000 feet, Maultsby restarted the aircraft’s lone engine, the Pratt and Whitney J-57, which allowed him to lower the landing gear. Now he needed to know wind direction, but there was no wind sock, and the man on the ground was still in the truck with no radio. He simply had to hope there was no significant crosswind.
At 5,000 feet, Maultsby put potential buffeting by crosswinds and the possibility of hitting the truck at the beginning of the tiny strip out of his mind. He had no control over these factors, and he had to focus all his attention on making the best landing of his life. He’d made it this far—he had evaded Soviet fighter planes over enemy territory and managed to stay in the air despite major fuel problems—and now his freedom and survival were finally in sight.
When he descended below 1,000 feet, he started a gentle left turn out to sea and continued to align himself with the narrow airstrip. The accompanying F-102 pilot became nervous that Chuck was going so slow he was about to crash and shouted, “Bail out! Bail out!”
There was no time to explain to the fighter pilot how unusual the U-2 was, so Maultsby, nervous but now in complete control, simply snapped, “Hush,” over the radio.
Even after lowering the aircraft’s flaps, he was coming in too fast and made an instinctive decision. He shut the engine down. He would try to land “deadstick.”
Now he was coming up on the truck but still going much too rapidly. He had to do something, or he could be killed on impact. Just fifteen feet above the truck, Chuck decided he had little choice but to activate his drag chute while furiously manipulating the rudder back and forth—anything to slow the plane. If not, he would careen right off the end of the short runway, and the lightweight aircraft might flip or break apart.
He barely felt the wheels touch down as they gathered snow in front of them. Whether the snow helped or not, Chuck nailed his landing and later said it was his best touchdown ever. After rolling just two hundred feet, the aircraft came to a stop.
Maultsby sat stock-still, letting his heart rate return to normal as he stared straight ahead into the white void. Waves of weariness washed over him. Then a knock on the outside of the aircraft prompted Chuck to unfasten his seat belt and shoulder harness, open the canopy, and remove his faceplate. He sucked in bitter-cold air, but it was fresh—fresh Alaskan, not Russian, air.
Smiling in at him was a large bearded man who said, “Welcome to Kotzebue.”5 Maultsby responded, “You don’t know how glad I am to be here!”
Chuck tried to climb out of the aircraft, but his legs wouldn’t move—numb from sitting for an astounding ten hours and twenty-five minutes while airborne, the longest flight ever made by a pilot in a U-2. The bearded giant, whom he called “Grizzly,” placed his hands under Chuck’s armpits, hoisted him out of his seat, and helped him down to the frozen ground.
Above him, the two F-102s buzzed low, rocking their wings before departing toward the east. Maultsby knew that if they hadn’t pointed him to the airfield, he probably wouldn’t be alive.
By now a small crowd had gathered around the weary U-2 pilot. The group comprised of Eskimos who lived in the shacks by the airfield and personnel from the radar station. Grizzly helped the pilot take off his helmet, and before anyone could start asking questions, Chuck struggled to his feet and shuffled to the other side of the aircraft, where he finally relieved his bladder.
About twenty people were now waiting for Maultsby to finish so they could learn what had happened, but an urgent message came over the radio of Grizzly’s truck saying that a C-54 needed to make an emergency landing on this very airstrip. The bearded man quickly took a rope out of his truck, tied it around the tail of the U-2, and towed it off the landing strip, just in time for the C-54 to come barreling down the runway. It turned out to be the very rescue plane and Duck Butt crew that had tried so valiantly to stay with the lost U-2 and direct Chuck back to the United States.
Grizzly drove Maultsby over to the C-54 so the pilot could thank the rescue team. However, the reunion was short-lived. Over the radio came an order for Chuck to call the commander of Eielson Air Force Base immediately. From a secure phone in the radar building, Chuck briefly told the commander what had happened, then asked if anyone had told Jeanne, his wife, that he had been overdue and lost. Maultsby learned that no one had, and he was relieved that she was spared the worry. Then the commander informed Chuck that while his wife might have been oblivious to his predicament, SAC and the White House were not. It was not hard for him to guess how they must have been feeling.
The commander ended the call by saying he was flying to the radar station in a C-47. He explained that he was bringing extra fuel so that he could fly the U-2 back to Eielson, and Chuck should plan on returning to Eielson with the crew of the C-47.
While Maultsby waited at the radar station, the radar commander showed him his flight path on a huge plotting screen. He had traced the entire flight on the map. Chuck wondered why, if the radar had clearly tracked his directional mistake, someone hadn’t radioed him immediately and got him back on the correct path. But then his attention shifted to six small “curly Q” marks on the map. They appeared during the portion of his flight when he abruptly changed direction after hearing the Russian radio station. “What are those?” Chuck asked.
“Those little curly Q’s,” said the radar commander, “represent the six MiGs that were nipping up trying to shoot you down.”
Maultsby realized just how close he had come to being blown to pieces. Had his fuel petered out earlier, he would have started the slow descent over Russian airspace, and the MiGs would have had an easy target.
The U-2 pilot felt his legs go weak and stumbled over to a chair. The radar commander followed him and said he knew Chuck was wondering why no one had radioed him when his flight was on the wrong path. “There is a good reason,” said the commander, “why we couldn’t help you. I can’t tell you, but maybe the higher-ups will.”
WHEN KHRUSHCHEV LEARNED that a US aircraft had entered Soviet airspace, he wondered, quite logically, what the hell was going on. Why would the United States, at the height of the crisis, send a spy plane over Soviet airspace? In a cable to President Kennedy, he asked, “How should we regard this? What is this: a provocation? One of your planes violates our frontier during this anxious time we are both experiencing, when everything has been put into combat readiness. Is it not a fact than an intruding American plane could easily be taken for a nuclear bomber, which might put us to a fateful step and all the more so since the U.S. Government and Pentagon long ago declared that you are maintaining a continuous nuclear bomber patrol?”6