Spies: Chapters 4–6

William Harvey was an "American James Bond," in the words of Edward Lansdale—himself one of the most storied CIA operatives of the Cold War.

His rough, loudmouthed ways belied a serious, hard-charging approach to life—and to espionage.

From this modest, cramped perch, Harvey conjured up big plans for the CIA's secret war against the communist enemy.

Over seventy million cubic meters of rubble left over from the war still marred the city's landscape.

Bill Harvey's CIA, once a haphazard agency with a handful of offices in Washington, DC, was now adding more and more recruits and was quickly assembling a worldwide network of "stations," from Hong Kong to Cairo.

The information they contained was out of date—hardly the fresh intelligence on Soviet activities that President Eisenhower clamored for.

Three times a week, his team packed up huge quantities of taped voice reels and secreted them by aircraft from Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin to London, where they were then driven to a secure CIA location to be transcribed and analyzed.

Operation Gold suddenly inundated the CIA and the White House with daily updates of everything from the names of thousands of key Soviet officers to the location of Soviet air force bases in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the location and size of the Soviet navy's Baltic Fleet, which patrolled the North Atlantic.

Peering through their night-vision equipment, they saw teams of men digging holes. They quickly alerted Harvey that something was amiss.

Despite its being unmasked by the Soviets, Operation Gold secured Harvey's reputation inside the CIA as one of its wiliest and smartest operatives.

It finally seemed as if the CIA could breach the Iron Curtain.

Bill Harvey spent the next three years in Berlin building BOB into a formidable base of operations for America's secret campaign against Russia.

Bill Harvey's successor as the head of BOB, David Murphy, was eager to bring SNIPER "in from the cold" and figure out whether he was the real thing—and to see what more he might divulge.

The switchboard lit up at five thirty PM: SNIPER was on his way. "The excitement at BOB was palpable,” one participant recalled.

"For an instant in time I was free and alone in the dark night," he recalled, "poised between two worlds, belonging to neither."

As he walked by a shop in East Berlin one day, the East German spy chief Markus Wolf overheard a woman complaining that "they can launch the Sputnik, but you can't get a green vegetable in the middle of summer. That's socialism for you."

The East German government referred to the structure as the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart"; it was bordered by minefields and a no-man's-land known as the "death strip."

"It was a cruel assumption," President Eisenhower said, "but I was assured that the young pilots undertaking these missions were doing so with their eyes open and motivated by a high degree of patriotism, a swashbuckling bravado, and certain material inducement."

"It was a cruel assumption," President Eisenhower said, "but I was assured that the young pilots undertaking these missions were doing so with their eyes open and motivated by a high degree of patriotism, a swashbuckling bravado, and certain material inducement."

According to Richard Bissell, pilots were "exhorted but not ordered" to use the pin if they were ever captured on Soviet soil.

With powerful jet engines and a wingspan longer than its fuselage, the spy plane was "part jet, part glider," according to Powers.

In exchange for lives of secrecy and danger, this small group of men got a chance at real adventure—and, as an added incentive, paychecks that were more than double what they earned as Air Force pilots.

If the new "space race" made Americans fear that they were falling behind the Soviets, a new arms race—involving intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs—added a terrifying new dimension to the Cold War.

Enraged by the incursion—coming as it did on the heels of what seemed like a warmer relationship with Eisenhower and the United States—Khrushchev ordered his air defenses to try to shoot the plane down.

As he reached for the eject button, Powers realized that the plane's centrifugal force was pressing the lower half of his body into the cockpit.

With a sudden flourish, he produced the poisoned pin Powers had removed from the silver dollar.

He aimed to tell the truth, selectively, while subjected to a seemingly endless barrage of questions...

A British reporter covering the trial marveled at "this crew-cut, diffident, simple, rather polite man, surrounded by the entire apparatus of Soviet law."

Powers had simply wanted to stay alive and make it home; now his own countrymen were chiding him for not committing suicide.

In London and Paris in the ensuing months, they could keep their eyes open for KGB trails and interview the Russian spy at length.

He placed an economic embargo on Cuba, one that prevented any US citizen or company from doing business on the island.

Khrushchev viewed a new alliance with Cuba as a chance to extend Soviet influence to America's backyard; Fidel Castro welcomed the chance to bolster his defenses against his aggressive American neighbor.

At this key moment, as analysts scrutinized the U-2 photographs of Soviet bases in Cuba, one of the secret documents handed over by Penkovsky earlier that year took on a special significance.

The message was then hand-delivered to the offices of the Soviet Russia (SR) division, which could be accessed only by CIA staff with special clearance. (Other, less sensitive messages traveled via a pneumatic tube system that could reach everywhere within the 1.4 million-square-foot building.)

After Penkovsky's arrest and execution, the CIA learned that his capture was no mere fluke: KGB counterespionage teams had conducted a massive surveillance operation over several months, setting up three separate observation posts near HERO's apartment.