“Guilty.”
“How do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty on count two?”
“Guilty.”
“How do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty on count three?”
“Guilty.”
Rudolph Abel was taken to West Street jail to wait for sentencing.
Inevitably Donovan and his team put in a carefully considered submission to the Court of Appeals contending that there were aspects of law that had been ignored at the trial. On July 11, 1958 Judge Watkinson, in a written opinion, rejected the appeal. But not without praising Donovan and his team for “having represented the appellant with rare ability and in the highest tradition of their profession.”
There was one last weapon in the defence’s armoury and Donovan filed a petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court. It listed six points of law which Donovan suggested had been ignored or avoided in the trial. He asked that the Supreme Court should grant a hearing for those points to be argued. In October the Supreme Court announced that it would grant a hearing on two points. Both points covered the old original problem of the search and seizure of evidence when Abel was arrested.
In prison in Atlanta, Georgia, Abel was a model prisoner. At that time Joseph Valachi, Vito Genovese and other figures from the Mafia were also serving sentences of various lengths in the same prison. The prison Warden had no problems with Abel, who behaved like the senior officer that he was, and the Warden assumed that Abel had been trained in methods of survival in case he was captured. Both mental and physical survival.
Meanwhile, in New York, both sides filed arguments and counter-arguments. Towards the end of February Donovan presented his case and a month later the Supreme Court handed down its decision. Everybody on the defence and Abel himself were surprised by the decision. It seemed to bode well for the prisoner in Atlanta. The court ordered a re-argument and asked each side to appear on October 12.
More briefs were fired back and forth by both the government and the defence. What the Supreme Court wanted to hear were both sides’ arguments on those aspects of Constitutional protection that affected not only the present case but the future interpretation of the current law.
The law gave every citizen “the right to be secure from searches for evidence to be used in criminal proceedings.” Nine eminent judges of the Supreme Court listened to the arguments from both sides.
It was not until March 28, 1960, the following year, that the Supreme Court gave its ruling. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Rudolph Ivanovich Abel. But what surprised all concerned was that five judges had upheld the conviction but four had given dissenting opinions. And one of the four dissenters was Chief Justice Warren himself.
After two and a half years in prison in Atlanta Abel himself had changed. People who had known him for a long time said that he had become frail and sick, consumed by tension as if he had been waiting for something that he no longer expected to happen.
21
The plane stood on the tarmac of the parking bay at the airfield in Peshawar, Pakistan, half concealed in its enormous hangar. With its long body, high tail and unusually wide wings its elegance was not obvious because it was painted black. On the drawing board at Lockheed it looked like a smooth, sleek flying fish, but on the ground, in its strange livery, it looked more like a killer shark. It carried no guns, but a mass of infra-red cameras and electronics.
It could photograph a section of the earth’s surface 125 miles wide and 3,000 miles long. And photo-interpreters looking at the huge enlargements of the 40,000 paired frames could read the headlines of a newspaper taken from ten miles above the earth. It was believed to be beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated attack planes available to the Soviet Union. It was one of three identical planes used in Operation Overflight, an operation that had already been working successfully and fruitfully for almost four years.
The only unusual feature of the flight that day—May 1, 1960—was that it was the first flight which would cross the whole of the Soviet Union. Taking off from Peshawar and landing almost 4,000 miles away at Bod in Norway, it would pass over important targets that had never been photographed before.
Rumour had it that the flight was to ensure that when President Eisenhower met President Khrushchev shortly he would be fully up-to-date on Soviet military dispositions.
Inevitably, USAF intelligence officers had considered what routines should apply if a pilot was shot down or force landed in Soviet territory. The plane itself was protected by a timed destruction system. The pilots were offered a cyanide tablet and a silver dollar with a small metal loop so that it could be fastened to a key chain or a chain around the wrist or neck. If the loop was unscrewed it revealed a thin needle whose minute grooves were laced with curare, an instant killer. Taking and using either or both was entirely the pilot’s option. They were merely available. Most pilots carried neither but on that particular morning the young, crew-cut pilot when asked if he wanted the silver dollar had taken it, seeing it as a useful weapon rather than a means of committing suicide.
That morning the pilot stood at the table in the hangar with the intelligence officer as he was handed the various standard items for a flight. Shaving kit, civilian clothes, a packet of filter cigarettes, pictures of his wife, some German marks, Turkish lira, Russian roubles, gold coins, watches and rings for barter, a hundred US dollars, US postage stamps, a Defense Department ID card, a NASA certificate, instrument rating cards, US and International driving licences, a Selective Service card, a social security card, and an American flag poster that said in fourteen different languages
