OVER THE TOWN of Camagüey, Cuba, Rudy Anderson made a slight adjustment, altering course a bit more toward the southeast until he reached Manzanillo, where he made a hard turn to the east. He flew over the town of Guantánamo, just north of the US naval base there, his cameras recording Soviet military on the ground. This was an especially sensitive area as it housed the troops and weapons to attack the US naval base if the Americans launched the invasion. Among the weapons were tactical nuclear missiles that could reach the US troops at Guantánamo.
Once past Guantánamo, Anderson made a slight adjustment to the east-northeast and continued to Jamal (just south of Baracoa). He was now close to the easternmost tip of Cuba. Over Jamal he made a wide U-turn (now heading west-northwest). Anderson had covered approximately 70 percent of his prearranged miles over Cuba. While he could be thankful that he was now flying in the direction of home, he would also be hyperalert because he was in the region where Jerry McIlmoyle reported the near miss by two surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Clouds were building below Rudy, but not enough to make him abort the rest of his mission.
GENERALS LEONID GARBUZ and Stepan Grechko agreed they had the authority to decide whether to fire the SAMs. They felt an invasion was imminent, and the reports of large numbers of Crusaders buzzing the island, with the Cubans responding with antiaircraft fire only, added to their apprehension. They were in communication with Colonel Grigory Danilevich at a command outpost in Camagüey, which also had target 33 on its radar screen. The two generals wanted to be sure the Camagüey men were tracking the same target on their monitor. Danilevich later said the anxiety was enormous, as was the uncertainty of action: “It [authorization for use of SAMs] was not a clear one. Where there is such great tension between two superpowers, why should there also not be confusion at the Division level?”1
The generals had watched target 33 come down from the north, turn toward the east, and now make yet another turn that would take the spy plane over additional military installations before heading to safety over the ocean. The spy plane appeared as a light dot on a huge screen, five meters high by ten meters wide, called a firing chart.2 The dot moved across the screen, and the two generals worried the plane would escape back to the United States with its intelligence. The men made another call to General Issa Pliyev, but again he could not be located.3
If the two lower-ranking generals were to act, they must do so immediately. Time was running out. The men felt Pliyev would agree with them; the general had repeatedly asked Moscow for permission to shoot down spy planes but had not received the go-ahead. This time Garbuz and Grechko believed invasion was imminent, and they had the authority. Grechko announced, “Well, let’s take responsibility ourselves.”4
They gave the order to destroy target 33.
AT THE SOVIET air defense installation at Banes, the on-site officers received their instructions and readied their surface-to-air missiles. They had been training for this moment since the day they began assembling the SAMs in a secret spot beyond the prying eyes of the civilians of Banes. Now, thirteen days since the Americans had discovered them, they would have the chance to shoot down one of these spy planes flying at the edge of space. They had failed in their first attempt two days earlier, with the near miss of McIlmoyle, and this time they planned on getting it right. On a radar screen inside a van, they watched target 33 approach.5
At approximately the same time the Russians were painting Anderson’s flight path, the Cubans were continuing to fire on the Crusaders. Antiaircraft artillerymen were spraying the sky with flak, hoping to send at least one of the invading aircraft cartwheeling to Earth.
NEAR MAYARI, ANDERSON made a slight turn to the north-northeast for one last group of photos over the Banes area. Knowing he would be heading for his home base in a matter of moments, he might have let his thoughts briefly turn to his family. His wife, Jane, had been in the dark as to his latest deployment to McCoy, but after John F. Kennedy’s TV speech, she knew Rudy was making daring overflights of Cuba. Being the wife of a U-2 pilot was stressful in a number of ways, but earlier that year Jane had experienced being falsely informed of her husband’s death when the air force bungled the next-of-kin notification. Every mission Rudy flew after that snafu was just a little harder for Jane to endure. And his thoughts might have turned to his young boys, Tripp and James, and the hope that, now that the crisis was public, they might soon be able to visit him at McCoy with Jane. They were the major reason he volunteered for as many missions as possible. He was keeping them safe, keeping them free.
Rudy Anderson had risked it all on six different flights over Cuba. He was proud of his and his fellow U-2 pilots’ contribution to keeping the United States safe from nuclear attack.
THE RUSSIANS AT the Banes SAM site had their missiles trained on target 33. They were ready to fire, worried that if the orders did not come soon, the spy plane would “be out of the hitting zone.”6 Then over the radio came the command: “Target 33 is to be destroyed.”
Two missiles were launched, at least one of them by Lieutenant Alexy Raypenko, a member of the Soviet Antiaircraft Rocket Unit.7 He later said, “A task is a task, and you have to do it well. I just happened to be at the end of the chain.”8
AT 11:19 A.M. eastern standard time Rudy Anderson must have felt a terrible jolt, much the same way Gary Powers had.
One of the two SAMs exploded close to Rudy’s aircraft, but it was not a direct hit, which would have blown the plane into a hundred pieces. Instead, shrapnel from the SAM killed the Dragon Lady—and Rudy. We will never know for sure what happened in his final seconds. Did his plane’s missile-detection device turn red? Did he have time to make a series of turns to try to elude the oncoming missile? Did he feel the thump of shrapnel hitting the plane and see the orange glow of the bursting SAM, as Gary Powers had, or did he black out as the second shrapnel came through the plane and into his body?
When small pieces of shrapnel pierced the upper part of his flight suit, decompression would have followed. He might have remained conscious for a few seconds until he passed out from loss of oxygen or as his blood boiled as the pressure suit deflated. If he was conscious for a few seconds, he apparently had no time or was simply unable to activate the destruct switch and then eject from the aircraft. If he did have three or four seconds before blacking out, Anderson probably struggled to control the crippled plane, and the last thing he saw before dying was likely blue sky spinning above him.
The plane started to plunge, not stopping until crashing just outside the village of Veguitas, near Banes. Rudy had been just thirty kilometers from reaching international waters and safety.
WHEN THE STRICKEN plane hit the ground, both villagers and military personnel ran to the crash site. They found the smoldering ruins of the strange-looking aircraft, and inside the cockpit, still strapped to his seat, was the pilot Rudy Anderson. Dead.
At some point in the plane’s spinning descent, its tail and wings were torn off. But considering that Anderson’s flimsy U-2 fell to Earth from thirteen miles up, it is odd that the plane’s body was mostly intact after impact. In fact, the fuselage was barely crumpled, the words “US Air Force” still clearly legible on its side.9 It looked more like a plane after a crash landing than after an out-of-control free fall. But because of the U-2’s configuration and light weight, it usually did not plunge to Earth when shot but came spinning down slowly, like a leaf falling from a tree.
Word spread from the crash site that an American plane had been brought down, and soon Cuban radio was “boasting of a great victory over the Yankee Imperialists.”10
BACK IN THE United States, Strategic Air Command knew almost immediately that something was amiss with Rudy’s mission. SAC technicians could monitor the flight paths of their U-2s mile by mile, and when Anderson’s flight dropped from the screen, and Rudy didn’t send the secret radio signal that all U-2 pilots routinely transmitted when leaving Cuban airspace, they most definitely knew that an accident or missile strike had forced the U-2 down.
STEVE HEYSER AND Jerry McIlmoyle didn’t need a tracking system to alert them that something terrible had happened. The two pilots had just finished playing a round of golf with fellow airman Buddy Brown and were sitting in the clubhouse. They could always tell when a U-2 was landing by the unique whine it made, and now, in the early afternoon, when Rudy was scheduled to return, that sound was missing. Minutes went by, and the men knew for sure their friend and fellow pilot was overdue. They left the clubhouse in silence and soon found operations officer Tony Martinez, who confirmed Anderson was overdue but had no additional information.
Jerry’s mind started racing through scenarios. If forced to make an emergency landing, Rudy would have announced it over the radio and ditched into the ocean, where other aircraft or navy ships would find him. And if he had ejected over Cuba, the beacon in his seat pack would have activated, and SAC would know exactly where he was.
There had been no Mayday and no beacon signal, and Jerry had to face the reality of what he feared from the moment Rudy was overdue. SAMs, just like the two that had almost killed him two days earlier, had found their mark this time.
Jerry couldn’t help but wonder about the photos he had shot of the exploding SAMs behind his plane. Why did the SAC commanders say there was nothing on the film when Jerry was certain he had captured the starbursts? If the true results of Jerry’s images had been made known, would Rudy have flown? Would this Saturday flight have even been scheduled?
Jerry would never know, nor did he speculate. Two plausible reasons for quashing Jerry’s report and film evidence, however, had nothing to do with pilot safety. Perhaps SAC and the Pentagon feared that if they shared them, President Kennedy or the secretary of defense would ground the U-2s at this most crucial juncture. SAC might logically have determined that the U-2 missions took priority over the pilots’ lives—particularly because the massive air strikes were tentatively scheduled for Monday and the spy planes gathered intelligence about where to focus them. Or, perhaps SAC commander Curtis LeMay wanted the Soviets to take down one of his planes to open the door for retaliatory strikes and possibly a full air attack on all of Cuba. No hard evidence supports this theory, but LeMay’s call for military action and frustration over the lack of it are well documented. And the question of why McIlmoyle’s brush with the SAMs was hushed up has never been answered.
RECONNAISSANCE PLANES PATROLLING just off the island’s shore reported that they did not spot Major Anderson’s U-2 on their radar, nor did they see it crash. They searched the ocean but found no debris. Pilots in Crusaders risked their own lives flying directly over Banes in hopes of finding the downed aircraft. Some hoped that Anderson might have bailed out and was hiding in the jungle, ready to shoot off a flare if friendly aircraft appeared. These pilots located neither the pilot nor the wreckage. SAC labeled Rudy missing in action, but almost no one held out hope that he had somehow parachuted safely to the ground. Robert McNamara was informed but for some unknown reason held off telling the president, perhaps hoping for a miracle.
General LeMay immediately ordered his F-100 fighter jet pilots at Homestead Air Force Base to be briefed and prepare for attack flights to Cuba. They carried air-to-surface rockets, called Zunis, which would obliterate the SAM sites, killing both Soviet and Cuban defenders.11 Launch awaited only the president’s final approval.