Excerpted fromOne Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War,by Michael Dobbs, to be published this month by Knopf; © 2008 by the author.

The Cuban missile crisis on Saturday, October 27, 1962, reached its moment of maximum peril, but John F. Kennedy was determined not to miss his regular swim. The president usually swam twice a day, [#image: /photos/54cbfac744a199085e8917ea]just before lunch and just before dinner, often with his longtime aide Dave Powers. Kennedy’s doctors had prescribed swimming for his back, but it was also a way of relaxing. Originally built for Franklin Roosevelt, the indoor pool in the West Wing basement had recently been refurbished with a mural of a sailing scene in the Virgin Islands—a gift from the president’s father.

Returning from his midday swim, Kennedy passed by the Oval Office before heading up to the residence for lunch. The phone rang at 1:45 p.m. It was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the news he reported could hardly have been worse: an American U-2 spy plane had gone missing off Alaska and may have strayed into Soviet territory. This was more than just an unfortunate incident: the intrusion into Soviet airspace by an American military plane at the height of a nuclear showdown between the two superpowers was a dangerously provocative act.

October 27 was the day that would come to be known around the White House as “Black Saturday.” Five days had gone by since Kennedy’s televised address to the nation revealing the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, and events were spinning out of control. Earlier that day the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, had upped the ante in the diplomatic negotiations by demanding the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey. An American U-2 spy plane had been shot down over eastern Cuba. The island had been sealed off by an American blockade, and U.S. warships were challenging nuclear-armed Soviet submarines in the Caribbean.

A few minutes after McNamara’s call Roger Hilsman, the chief of intelligence at the State Department, came running up the stairs from the basement office of McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national-security adviser. Hilsman had just learned that the Soviets had scrambled MiG fighters to intercept the missing U-2, and that the U.S. Strategic Air Command (sac) was scrambling American fighters in response. After two days without sleep, Hilsman was exhausted, but he fully understood the significance of what was happening. The Soviets might well perceive the U-2 incursion as a harbinger of an American nuclear attack.

Hilsman expected a furious outburst from the president, or at least some sign of the panic he himself was beginning to feel. Instead, Kennedy responded with a short, bitter laugh.

“There’s always some son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word.”

J.F.K.’s calm exterior belied a deep frustration. His experiences in World War II, as the skipper of a P.T. boat in the South Pacific, had taught him an abiding lesson about modern warfare: a commander in chief, however well informed, however powerful, cannot possibly exercise complete control over the battlefront. Mistakes were an inevitable consequence of warfare, but in previous wars they had been easier to rectify. The paradox of the nuclear age was that American power was greater than ever before—but it could all be jeopardized by a single, fatal miscalculation.

The historian turned Kennedy aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would later describe Black Saturday as “the most dangerous moment in human history.” The Strategic Air Command had increased its readiness level to defcon 2—one step short of nuclear war—and nearly 3,000 American nuclear warheads were targeted on the Soviet Union. Fidel Castro had gone to the Soviet Embassy in Havana to urge Khrushchev to consider using nuclear weapons to “liquidate” the imperialist enemy once and for all. Unbeknownst to Kennedy, the Soviets had dispatched nuclear warheads to two missile sites in Cuba, ready to destroy American cities. And at dawn on Saturday morning, also unknown to Washington and reported here for the first time, Soviet troops had moved nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to a “firing position” 15 miles from the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay.

While it has long been known that an American U-2 blundered over the Soviet Union at the height of the crisis, the full story of this mission has never been told before. The U.S. government’s investigation into the incident remains secret. The story is reconstructed here from a handful of newly uncovered official documents, from interviews with U-2 pilots and sac command staff, and from the unpublished journals of the 36-year-old air-force captain who could have inadvertently triggered a nuclear war.

Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska Saturday, October 27, 1962; 4 a.m. E.D.T. (12 a.m. Alaska)

Charles W. Maultsby fervently wished he were somewhere else. He could have been racking up combat experience over Cuba like many of his fellow U-2 pilots. Or the brass might have sent him somewhere warm, like Australia or Hawaii, where the 4080th Strategic Wing also had operating locations. Instead, he was spending the winter in Alaska, where it was bitterly cold and you rarely saw the sun.

He had tried to get some rest before his long flight to the North Pole, but had managed only a couple of hours’ fitful sleep. Pilots had been entering and leaving the officers’ quarters all evening in their heavy snow boots, laughing and slamming doors. The more he tried to sleep, the more awake he felt. In the end, he gave up and went down to the operations building, where there was a vacant cot. He set his alarm for eight p.m. on Friday night Alaska time, four hours before takeoff.

The mission was to collect radioactive samples from the Soviet nuclear tests at Novaya Zemlya. Compared with flying a U-2 over hostile territory and taking photographs of missile sites, the assignment lacked glamour. The participants in Project Star Dust did not usually fly anywhere near the Soviet Union. Instead, they flew to some fixed point, such as the North Pole, to inspect the clouds that had drifted there from the nuclear-testing site, more than a thousand miles away. They collected the samples on special filter paper. Often there was nothing, but sometimes, when the Soviets had conducted a big test, the Geiger counters clicked away furiously.

Maultsby was used to the routine. As the pilot of a single-seater U-2, he would be on his own for nearly eight hours. He had plotted the route ahead of time with navigators. For most of the way, he would take bearings from the stars, with the help of a compass and sextant. A search-and-rescue team, known as Duck Butt, would tag along for part of the trip, but there was little they could do if something went wrong. It was impossible for them to land on an ice cap. If Maultsby had to bail out, he would be alone with the polar bears. “I wouldn’t pull the rip cord” was the advice he got.

The pre-flight ritual was always the same. After waking up from his nap, he went to the officers’ mess for a high-protein breakfast of steak and eggs. The idea was to eat something solid that would take a long time to digest, thereby avoiding trips to a nonexistent bathroom. He changed into long underwear, put on a helmet, and started his “breathing exercises,” inhaling pure oxygen for an hour and a half. It was important to expel as much nitrogen as possible from his system. If the cabin depressurized at 70,000 feet, nitrogen bubbles would form in his blood, causing him to experience the bends, like a deep-sea diver who comes to the surface too quickly.

Maultsby climbed into his flight suit. It was designed to expand automatically in response to a sudden loss of cabin pressure, forming a corset around the pilot and preventing his blood from exploding in the rarefied air.

A half-hour before takeoff, Maultsby was attached to a portable oxygen canister and transported to the U-2 in a van. He settled into the cockpit and strapped himself in. A technician hooked him up to the internal oxygen supply. The canopy closed above him. Neatly sewn into the seat cushion was a survival kit, which included flares, a machete, fishing gear, a camp stove, an inflatable life raft, mosquito repellent, and a silk banner proclaiming, in a dozen languages, i am an american.

Maultsby’s compact build—he was only five feet seven—was a plus for a U-2 pilot. The cockpit was exceptionally cramped. To build a plane capable of soaring to a height of 14 miles, the designer, Kelly Johnson, head of Lockheed’s “Skunk Works” project, had ruthlessly cut back on both the weight and size of its fuselage. He dispensed with many of the features of a modern airplane, such as conventional landing gear, hydraulic systems, and structural supports. The wings and tail were bolted onto the fuselage rather than being attached with metal sheets. If the plane was subjected to too much buffeting, the wings would fall off.

There were many other unique design features. To gain lift at high altitude, the plane needed long, narrow wings. Maultsby’s U-2 was 80 feet wide, wingtip to wingtip—nearly twice the distance from nose to tail. The sailplane-style wings and light airframe would allow the plane to glide for up to 250 miles if its single engine ever lost power.

Flying this extraordinary airplane required an elite corps of pilots. Training was carried out at “the ranch,” a remote airstrip in the Nevada desert. Also known as “Area 51,” the ranch was already becoming notorious as the site of numerous alleged U.F.O. sightings. Most likely, what people were seeing were U-2 spy planes, glinting in the sun.

At midnight Alaska time—four a.m. eastern daylight time—Maultsby roared down the runway. He was an hour out of Eielson when he flew over the last radio beacon on his way to the North Pole. It was on Barter Island, on the northern coast of Alaska. The Duck Butt navigators wished him luck and said they would “keep a light on in the window” to guide him back on his return, six hours later.

Aurora Borealis 6 a.m. E.D.T. (2 a.m. Alaska)

After 11 years in the air force, Chuck Maultsby was known to be an outstanding pilot. He had served two years with the Thunderbirds, the air-force aerobatic team, maneuvering his F-100 Super Sabre through a series of spectacular loops, rolls, and corkscrews. Prior to that, he had survived 600 days as a Chinese prisoner of war after being shot down in combat over North Korea. With his trim mustache, darkly handsome face, and amused eyes, he looked like a shorter version of the British actor David Niven.

After Barter Island, Maultsby would be relying solely on the age-old techniques of celestial navigation—the methods used by Magellan and Columbus—to keep himself oriented. Prior to his departure, navigators had prepared a stack of celestial charts for various points along his route. Maultsby kept them by his seat. When the clock indicated that he should be halfway to the North Pole, he pulled out the stiff green card that showed his assumed position and the precise alignment of the stars for this particular time of night. If he was on track, the soft orange light of Arcturus, the brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, should have been visible to the right of the plane’s nose. Another bright star, Vega, would be located slightly higher in the sky, toward the northwest. The North Star, Polaris, would be almost directly overhead, indicating that he was getting close to the North Pole. The constellation Orion, the Hunter, would be behind him, toward the south.

He tried to shoot several of the brighter stars with his sextant, but “streaks of light dancing through the sky” made it difficult. The farther north he got, “the more intense” the lights became. He had run into the phenomenon known as the aurora borealis.

In other circumstances, he might have enjoyed the spectacle, which was unlike anything he had ever seen. The dark night sky outside the cockpit was alive with flashes of orange and violet and crimson, twirling and twisting like streamers in the wind.

Dazzled by the aurora, Maultsby found it hard to distinguish one star from another. His compass was no help. In the vicinity of the North Pole, the needle would be jerked automatically downward, toward the earth’s surface, and north and south became impossibly confused. Unable to obtain a proper fix on the stars, he had only a vague idea where he was located or where he was headed. The last few fixes before reaching what he thought was the North Pole seemed “highly suspect” to him, but he stubbornly held his course.

Flying a temperamental plane like a U-2 was difficult enough at the best of times. There were so many variables to consider and calculations to make. Designed to soar to extraordinary heights, the U-2 was one of the flimsiest planes ever built. He was flying at an altitude known to U-2 pilots as “coffin corner,” where the air was so thin that it could barely support the weight of the plane, and the difference between maximum and minimum permissible speeds was a mere six knots. If he flew too fast, the aircraft would fall apart. If he flew too slow, the plane would stall, and he would nose-dive. He could not allow his eyes to stray too long from the airspeed indicator in front of him.

As he flew north, Maultsby activated a giant filter-paper mechanism to scoop up radioactive dust. He also collected air samples in bottles that would be sent away to a laboratory.

After reaching what he thought was the North Pole, Maultsby decided to execute a 90-270-degree turn, the standard procedure for reversing course. As he explained in his journals: “Turn left for 90 degrees, and then immediately reverse the turn for 270 degrees until you are heading back along your same track, only in the opposite direction.”

A sea of pack ice and snow stretched out below. It felt strange and disorienting to be flying over terrain that was pitch-dark from horizon to horizon, even as the sky was ablaze with dancing lights. According to the flight plan, Maultsby should now be on his way back to Alaska. But he was growing increasingly uncomfortable. Stars kept popping up in unexpected places. Had he strayed off course? Maultsby began to entertain the possibility that something had gone terribly wrong.

The Chukotka Peninsula 11:59 a.m. E.D.T. (7:59 a.m. Alaska)

Had Maultsby kept to his assigned flight track, he should now have been landing at Eielson Air Force Base after a seven-hour-fifty-minute round-trip. Instead he was apparently somewhere else. The northern lights had disappeared, but the stars had changed positions, and he had no idea where he was.

An hour before the scheduled landing at Eielson, Maultsby was supposed to rendezvous with the Duck Butt planes circling above Barter Island. But there had been no sign of them at the appointed time. He was unable either to reach Duck Butt or to pick up the radio beacon on Barter, though both should have been within range. He began broadcasting uncoded messages hoping someone would steer him in the right direction. Perhaps he had never reached the North Pole at all. Dazzled by the aurora borealis, he may have based his fixes on “wishful hoping” rather than accurate sightings of stars.

Suddenly, Duck Butt came on the line, over sideband radio. The pilot said he would fire flares every five minutes, starting immediately. Maultsby strained his eyes, but he could see nothing. Duck Butt fired more. Still nothing.

Duck Butt asked Maultsby to identify a star. On the horizon ahead was the familiar shape of Orion. It was easily recognizable by the three bright stars in the middle that made up Orion’s belt. A little higher up in the sky, on Orion’s right shoulder, was the large red star Betelgeuse. Farther down, on the constellation’s left foot, lay Rigel, one of the brightest stars in the sky.

“I can see Orion about 15 degrees left of the nose of the aircraft,” Maultsby radioed back.

There was a pause as navigators aboard Duck Butt and at Eielson consulted almanacs and star charts. After some hurried calculations, the Duck Butt navigator called back with an order to steer 10 degrees left.

Shortly after receiving this instruction, Maultsby got another call over his sideband radio. This time the voice was unfamiliar. Whoever it was—and the presumption must be that the Russians were trying to lure him in—used his correct call sign and told him instead to steer 30 degrees right. Within the space of a few minutes, Maultsby had received calls from two different radios, ordering him to turn in opposite directions.

Maultsby did not know it yet, but at 7:59 a.m. Alaska time he had crossed the border of the Soviet Union. He was now flying above one of the most desolate places on earth—the northern shore of the Chukotka Peninsula. Maultsby was more than a thousand miles off course.

As he crossed into Soviet airspace, at least six Soviet interceptor jets took off from two different airfields in Chukotka. Their mission was to shoot the intruder down.

Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska 12:30 p.m. E.D.T. (8:30 a.m. Alaska)

General Thomas Power, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, was on the golf course when he received the news that a U-2 pilot on an air-sampling mission to the North Pole was dangerously off course. Tracking data intercepted from Soviet air defenses indicated that the spy plane was over Soviet territory, and that Soviet MiGs had been scrambled. Power rushed back to his office at Offutt Air Force Base, passing a large billboard emblazoned with the words peace is our profession.

Despite the deepening crisis over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, nobody at sac headquarters had stopped to consider whether the air-sampling missions up north ought to be put on hold. Now one of Power’s subordinates called the commander of the 4080th Strategic Wing, Maultsby’s unit, to find out “what the hell you are doing with a U-2 over Russia.” The man he reached, Colonel John Des Portes, was unaware of what had happened to Maultsby. He had his hands full with another crisis: 71 minutes earlier, a U-2 piloted by Major Rudolf Anderson had been shot down over eastern Cuba while on a reconnaissance mission.

The loss of a U-2 over the Soviet Union would be even more disturbing than the loss of a plane over Cuba. The Kremlin was likely to interpret the penetration of Soviet airspace as a provocative and even bellicose act.

Power found sac intelligence officers plotting Maultsby’s flight path on a giant screen, along with the tracks of the Soviet MiGs. The Americans were in effect looking over the shoulders of Soviet military flight controllers as they followed the U-2 over Chukotka. The security-conscious Soviets were unable to use a very strong encryption system for their air-defense radar net, because the information had to be made available in real time to tracking stations all over the country. The data from the Soviet high-frequency radio transmissions skipped off the ionosphere and was then picked up by American listening posts thousands of miles away.

Power was in a quandary. The ability to “read the mail” of the Soviet air defenses was a jealously guarded national secret. If sac commanders openly alerted Maultsby to the magnitude of his navigational blunder, they risked tipping off the Soviets to America’s possession of a prized intelligence tool. They had to find a way to steer Maultsby back to Alaska without revealing how they could pinpoint his precise location. For the moment, sac kept the details of what it knew to itself.

But others were coming to the same conclusion by other means. Lieutenant Fred Okimoto was the navigator who had plotted Maultsby’s intended flight to the North Pole. After sending Maultsby on his way at midnight, Alaska time, he had retired to bed in the officers’ quarters at Eielson. He was awakened several hours later by the operations commander, Lieutenant Colonel Forrest Wilson, with the news that the U-2 had disappeared.

The two men walked through the pre-dawn darkness to the U-2 hangar. Okimoto went over all his calculations again, checking for mistakes. Everything seemed in order. There were occasional squawks from the sideband radio channel that Duck Butt was using to contact Maultsby. Navigational charts and almanacs were spread out all over the office. The fact that the U-2 pilot reported seeing the belt of Orion off the nose of his plane suggested that he was flying south.

Looking out the window, Okimoto noticed a faint red glow on the eastern horizon. The sun was beginning to rise in central Alaska. He got on the radio and asked Maultsby if he could see the sun coming up.

“Negative,” came the reply.

The inescapable conclusion was that Maultsby had to be hundreds of miles west of Alaska, which meant over Soviet territory. The solution was to get him to swing around to the left, until Orion was off the tip of his right wing. Then he would be heading home.

Maultsby was still getting strange calls over his sideband radio. This time, the unfamiliar voice told him to turn right 35 degrees, a course that would have taken him deeper into the Soviet Union. Maultsby challenged him, using a code that “only a legit operator would know.” There was no response.

The transmissions from Alaska were getting weaker by the minute. The last instruction Maultsby was able to hear was “Turn left, 15 degrees.”

Maultsby knew he did not have much fuel left—in all likelihood not enough to get back to Alaska. He would probably have to attempt an emergency landing. The transmissions from the unknown source were still strong, but he ignored them. Instead he selected the emergency channel and began calling, “mayday! mayday! mayday!”

Moments later he picked up the signal from an ordinary local radio station on the ground; it originated somewhere in front of him, off the nose of the aircraft. The station was playing music, and the strains of Russian balalaikas were unmistakable. For the first time, Maultsby understood where he was. He turned left until the signal was directly behind him and Orion was off his right wingtip. At last he was heading in the right direction, but as records would later show he was at this moment 300 miles inside Russian territory.

Pevek Airfield, U.S.S.R. 12:44 p.m. E.D.T. (8:44 a.m. Alaska)

The industrial town of Pevek, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, is one of the most northerly and isolated outposts in Russia. In winter, temperatures drop to 50 degrees below zero. To the Soviets, the region was of interest mainly for its rich deposits of tin and gold, as a winter refuge for the ships that patrolled the Arctic Ocean, and as a remote military station. A squadron of MiGs was stationed at an airfield by the edge of the sea.

When military radar spotted the intruder aircraft heading toward the Chukotka Peninsula, the MiGs were ordered aloft. They flew upward in sudden bursts of speed, but the intruder remained tantalizingly out of reach. Using their supersonic speed, the Soviet pilots could ascend to 60,000 feet in a matter of minutes, but they could climb no higher. That still left them 10,000 feet below the U-2. The interceptor jets kept up with the intruder for 300 miles and then turned off in a westerly direction in search of fuel.

Another group of MiGs took off from the airfield at Anadyr, on the Bering Sea. They flew north to take over the chase from the Pevek-based interceptors, and followed Maultsby as he turned toward Alaska.

The interception attempts were being tracked 3,500 miles away, in the operations center of the Strategic Air Command. By monitoring the Soviet air-defense radar net, sac intelligence officers could follow the MiGs in the same way that they had followed Maultsby’s U-2 once it entered Soviet airspace. They plotted the movements of the MiGs with little tick marks on an illuminated screen. As the MiGs turned eastward, sac asked the Alaskan Air Command to scramble a pair of F-102 fighter-interceptors to provide protection.

Earlier in the week, after the Pentagon went to a state of heightened alert, technicians had removed the conventional weapons from the F-102s stationed at Galena Air Force Station, in western Alaska, and loaded nuclear missiles onto the interceptors. This was standard procedure when the squadron moved to the condition of heightened alert. Armed with a nuclear-tipped Falcon air-to-air missile, a lone F-102 could wipe out an entire fleet of incoming Soviet bombers. In theory, nuclear weapons were to be used only on the authority of the president. In practice, an F-102 pilot had the physical ability to fire a missile by pushing a few buttons on his control panel. Because he was alone in the cockpit, no one could override such a decision.

One of the interceptor pilots was Lieutenant Leon Schmutz, a 26-year-old pilot only recently out of flight school. As he climbed into the skies to search for the U-2, he wondered what he would do if he ran into Soviet MiGs. His only means of defense was a nuclear warhead. To use such a weapon was virtually unthinkable. But to fail to respond to an attack by a Soviet fighter went against a pilot’s basic instincts.

Above the Bering Strait 1:28 p.m. E.D.T. (9:28 a.m. Alaska)

Maultsby took a quick mental inventory of his situation. The main plus was that he could no longer hear the Russian radio station. The principal minus was that his plane carried only enough fuel for nine hours and forty minutes of flight. He had been airborne for nine hours and twenty-eight minutes. He had 12 minutes of fuel remaining.

To have any hope of making it back to Alaska, Maultsby knew he would have to make full use of his plane’s extraordinary gliding capabilities.

He needed to save some fuel for an emergency, and also wanted to conserve battery power. He made a final call in the clear to announce that he was going off the air. “A sense of despair set in” as he reached out to the control panel in front of him and shut down the single Pratt & Whitney J-57 engine. The U-2 settled into a gentle glide.

By switching off the engine, Maultsby also disabled the cockpit pressurization-and-heating system. The capstans in his flight suit inflated with a whoosh to compensate for the loss of cabin pressure, preventing his blood vessels from bursting. He looked like the Michelin Man.

The Pentagon 1:41 p.m. E.D.T. (9:41 a.m. Alaska)

Robert McNamara was tired. The past two weeks had been an ordeal. He slept on a cot in the dressing room of his Pentagon office, and had managed to get home for dinner only once, on Friday evening. He rose by 6:30 a.m. and worked as late as 11 p.m. or midnight. His sleep was often interrupted by calls from the president and his senior advisers. He was losing some of his trademark sharpness and no longer dominated White House strategy meetings with his crisp analyses and multi-point options.

The defense secretary was jerked back to the here and now by an urgent message handed to him by General Curtis LeMay, the chief of staff of the air force, with whom Kennedy clashed repeatedly throughout the Cuban missile crisis. McNamara looked at the message.

“A U-2 has been lost off Alaska.”

The secretary of defense was furious: it had taken sac commanders an hour and a half to report the loss of the plane to civilian authority—to him—despite strong evidence that Maultsby had strayed over the Soviet Union. The initial reports were fragmentary. According to a declassified White House memo, the initial Pentagon report was that the pilot “got off course” after developing “gyro trouble,” and was picked up by a “high frequency direction finder” off Wrangel Island. “Then seems to have overflown, or came close to, Soviet territory. Not clear at this time exactly what cause was. Russian fighters scrambled—ours too.” By now, the reports concluded, the U-2 had almost certainly run out of fuel.

McNamara left the room to call the president.

Not long afterward he learned to his consternation that, despite all that was happening in the Soviet skies, another U-2 had been allowed to take off on an air-sampling mission to the North Pole, on the same route followed by Maultsby. What were these generals thinking? He ordered the U-2’s immediate recall, and soon halted all U-2 flights until the air force provided a full report on Maultsby’s overflight.

Kotzebue Sound, Alaska 2:25 p.m. E.D.T. (10:25 a.m. Alaska)

Worried about shutting down his engine, Maultsby had neglected to pull the cord that prevented his helmet from rising after the pressure suit inflated. The lower part of the helmet was now blocking his vision, and he was having difficulty seeing the instrument panel directly in front of him. He struggled with the helmet until he finally got it back in place.

Then the windshield fogged up. Soon condensation appeared on the faceplate of his helmet. He pushed the faceplate as close to his mouth as he could. By sticking his tongue out, he was able to lick away enough of the condensation to see his instruments.

The altimeter continued to show an altitude of 70,000 feet. Maultsby assumed that the needle had gotten stuck, but eventually realized that the aircraft was in fact still flying at that altitude, even without power. It took at least 10 minutes for the U-2 to start its slow descent. Maultsby told himself that all that remained for him to do was “keep the wings level, maintain a rate of descent for maximum range, and hope my guardian angel wasn’t taking a nap.”

The throbbing noise of the engine had given way to an otherworldly silence. The only sound that Maultsby was able to hear was his own labored breathing. His most pressing physical need after so long in the air was to relieve himself. Under normal conditions in a U-2, this involved laboriously unzipping his pressure suit, peeling away several layers of undergarments, and aiming into a bottle. A maneuver that was complicated at the best of times became virtually impossible when the pressure suit was inflated, almost filling the cockpit.

A faint glow appeared on the horizon off the nose of Maultsby’s plane. His spirits rose for the first time in hours. He now knew for certain he was heading east. He decided to hold this heading until he had descended to 20,000 feet. If there were no clouds, he would go down to 15,000 feet and look around. If there were clouds, he would try to maintain his altitude as long as possible. He did not want to crash into a mountain.

At 25,000 feet, his pressure suit started deflating. There were no clouds and no mountains in sight. By now, there was just enough light to permit Maultsby to see the ground.

Two F-102s with distinctive red paint on their tails and fuselage suddenly appeared on either wingtip. Maultsby had just enough battery power left to contact them on the emergency frequency. An American voice crackled through the ether.

“Welcome home.”

The nearest airfield was a primitive ice strip at a place called Kotzebue Sound, a military radar station just above the Arctic Circle. It was about 20 miles away. The F-102 pilots suggested that Maultsby try to land there.

Maultsby made an initial pass over Kotzebue airstrip at a height of 1,000 feet. It was on a snow-covered peninsula jutting into the sea. A truck marked the beginning of the runway. Beyond the airstrip were a few Eskimo shacks and a military radar installation. There was barely any crosswind. This was a relief, as even small gusts could blow his delicate plane off course.

He lowered his wing flaps. Everything looked good, except that he was approaching the runway with more airspeed than he wanted. As he passed 15 feet over the truck, he deployed a parachute out of the back of the plane and kicked the rudder back and forth to slow down. The U-2 “did not seem to want to stop flying, even without an engine.” It finally did the required belly flop onto the runway, skidded along the ice, and came to rest in the deep snow.

Maultsby sat trance-like in his seat, unable to think or move. He was startled by a knock on the canopy. He looked up to see “a bearded giant” wearing a government-issue parka.

He tried to climb out of the cockpit, but his legs were numb. Seeing that he was in difficulty, the man in the parka “put his hands under my armpits and gently lifted me out of the cockpit and placed me on the snow as if I had been a rag doll.” Radar-station personnel and half a dozen Eskimos gathered round. The two F-102s bid farewell by buzzing the airfield and rocking their wings, then flew off in an easterly direction.

Exactly how Maultsby came to overfly the Soviet Union, and the precise route he took on his way to and from the North Pole, would remain mysterious for many decades. Although the U.S. government admitted to a “serious navigational error” by the pilot that took him over Soviet territory, it did its best to hush up the incident. Among the official documents that have now surfaced are two charts showing Maultsby’s route over the Soviet Union. The charts turned up in unexpected places, suggesting that they may have been declassified inadvertently.

The Cuban missile crisis is an endlessly mysterious episode whose secrets will likely emerge for some time to come. Another previously undisclosed chapter was the Soviet plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Late on Friday night, a Soviet missile unit was ordered to the village of Filipinas, 15 miles from the American base. A series of foul-ups ensued—including a shoot-out between Soviet and Cuban troops over a jumbled password. While Maultsby was lost over the Chukotka Peninsula, Soviet troops were targeting their missiles on the U.S. naval base, waiting for an order from Moscow that fortunately never came.

The Maultsby incident had one salutary result: it reminded both superpower leaders of the growing risk of an accidental nuclear war. The following day, October 28, Khrushchev announced that he would withdraw his missiles from Cuba. But in a private message to Kennedy he expressed alarm at the American overflight: “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 that an intruding American plane could be easily taken for a nuclear bomber, which might push us to a fateful step?”

Khrushchev’s climbdown averted the threat of nuclear exchange. In return for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, Kennedy agreed not to invade the island, a promise that helped to ensure Fidel Castro’s grip on power down to our own time.

For his part, Maultsby was prohibited by the U.S. Air Force from ever again flying anywhere north of southern Alaska. In 1998, at age 72, he succumbed to prostate cancer, a disease that some U-2 pilots link to spending a good portion of their professional careers flying into radioactive clouds. Maultsby died in relative obscurity, celebrated mainly within the air force simply as the pilot who set the record—with this mission—for the longest-ever flight in a U-2, at 10 hours 25 minutes.

According to his written reminiscences, Maultsby went to his death angry at the air force for failing to “give me a steer” as soon as it found out that he was off course. His bosses never told him how they knew that he had penetrated Soviet territory: the fact that the National Security Agency was able to intercept the communications of Soviet air defenses remained a closely guarded intelligence secret for many decades. The former U-2 pilot was also upset with the president for referring to him as the “son of a bitch” who never got “the word.” He blamed his navigation error on the aurora borealis. “I wish that S.O.B. was sitting in my lap during that whole ordeal,” Maultsby grumbled to his wife, Jeanne. “It wasn’t a stupid mistake on my part. It was an act of nature.”

Nearly half a century later, the U.S. government has yet to provide a full explanation for Maultsby’s overflight of the Soviet Union. Robert McNamara demanded “a complete and detailed report” on what went wrong, but the report has never been made public. The official air-force history of Maultsby’s unit describes his flight as “100 percent successful.”

BuyOne Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War,by Michael Dobbs, at Amazon.com