A Brotherhood of Spies
The U-2 and the CIA's Secret War
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
A thrilling dramatic narrative of the top-secret Cold War-era spy plane operation that transformed the CIA and brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of disaster
On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union just weeks before a peace summit between the two nations. The CIA concocted a cover story for President Eisenhower to deliver, assuring him that no one could have survived a fall from that altitude. And even if pilot Francis Gary Powers had survived, he had been supplied with a poison pin with which to commit suicide.
But against all odds, Powers emerged from the wreckage and was seized by the KGB. He confessed to espionage charges, revealing to the world that Eisenhower had just lied to the American people--and to the Soviet Premier. Infuriated, Nikita Khrushchev slammed the door on a rare opening in Cold War relations.
In A Brotherhood of Spies, award-winning journalist Monte Reel reveals how the U-2 spy program, principally devised by four men working in secret, upended the Cold War and carved a new mission for the CIA. This secret fraternity, made up of Edwin Land, best known as the inventor of instant photography and the head of Polaroid Corporation; Kelly Johnson, a hard-charging taskmaster from Lockheed; Richard Bissell, the secretive and ambitious spymaster; and ace Air Force flyer Powers, set out to replace yesterday's fallible human spies with tomorrow's undetectable eye in the sky. Their clandestine successes and all-too-public failures make this brilliantly reported account a true-life thriller with the highest stakes and tragic repercussions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This gripping work of narrative nonfiction tells the extraordinary story of the U-2 the ultralightweight high-altitude spy plane that was the CIA's "first technological development project" and the 1960 U-2 crash in the Soviet Union that made public the U.S.'s first peacetime espionage program. The plot revolves around four characters: Edwin Land, the "brilliant scientist," inventor, and corporate leader of Polaroid who threw himself into clandestine work; Clarence Johnson, the "fiery engineer" behind the U-2's unconventional design; Richard Bissell, the "bookish bureaucrat" tasked with overseeing the covert project; and Francis Powers, the U-2 pilot who was shot down and captured in the Soviet Union. Drawing on interviews, declassified documents, and secondary sources, Reel (Between Man and Beast) captures the secrecy involved in developing the plane (including hiding an emergency-landed prototype from the occupants of a military base), the wrangling between the old covert operations guard and the innovators from outside of espionage, and the international scandal engendered by the revelation that the U.S. had given up its former aversion to peacetime spying. Along the way, Reel seamlessly integrates other related narrative threads: the birth of the military-industrial complex, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other technological innovations spurred by the U-2 project. This exemplary work provides a wholly satisfying take on a central chapter of the Cold War a dramatic story of zeal and adventure.