Spy Pilot: Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 Incident, and a Controversial Cold War Legacy

^{Chapter Six} SEARCHING FOR THE TRUTH

In the summer of 1983, while approaching my freshman year at California State University at Northridge, I showed up for a rush party at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house. It immediately reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Animal House. After making my way across the overgrown lawn, past two stone lions draped with flowered leis, I walked through the front door amid the sound of blaring rock music.

The place was packed, and I was only a few feet past the door when somebody pointed me to the nearest beer keg. The mastermind of the great final exam heist at Montclair was no stranger to alcohol and loud music, but my introverted nature still made it hard for me to meet new people—I was more comfortable reading science fiction books in my room and solving logic problems than chatting up pretty girls. Nevertheless, I started walking around the house, introducing myself and striking up conversations with perfect strangers.

Moving into one room, I walked up to a member of the fraternity and extended my hand. “Hi! Gary Powers. Nice to meet you!”

His name was Jay Rose. Immediately, a bell rang. “Any relation to the U-2 pilot?”

I felt a wave of anxiety.

“Well, yeah,” I said reluctantly. “That’s my dad.”

As we started talking, I was overwhelmed with a rather ominous feeling: I can’t go anywhere without someone knowing who my dad was.

Jay Rose knew all about my father. In fact, he appeared to know more about all that history than I did, which left me with an uneasy feeling.

I was very guarded, didn’t trust people easily, and was very uncomfortable with people who knew about my dad when I didn’t know anything about them.

Growing up, my mother made me a little paranoid about people I didn’t know or what would happen if I was caught during a youthful indiscretion. After all, what if the son of Francis Gary Powers was arrested? It would be on the front page. While mom’s warnings did not stop me from living on the edge in high school, I was much more discreet in college. Mom taught me to be very careful with girls, pounding into my brain that some only want to trap a guy by getting pregnant—especially if he happens to be the son of a legendary spy. She taught me to be skeptical of whatever someone told me—especially the government—and to read between the lines of what was written in the press.

I didn’t really understand it at the time, but even though my father was dead, he was exerting a certain amount of control over my life.

When Jay made the connection between me and my world-famous father, my trained inclination was to politely retreat and find another fraternity. For various reasons, I didn’t want to be defined as “the son of…”—including the simplest of all: I didn’t know the whole truth about what had happened all those years before. No one did.

Of course, I was aware of the U-2 from an early age. The memory of walking on the plane’s wings was deeply embedded in my psyche. Among the autographed pictures decorating my childhood room—alongside football icon O. J. Simpson, actor Robert Conrad, and five-star General Omar Bradley—was one from Kelly Johnson, the designer of the U-2 and Dad’s onetime boss.

When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher was talking about the Cold War when she asked, “Does anybody know what CIA stands for?” Growing up, I had heard my father refer to the CIA many times, although he usually called it “The Agency.” I had a vague understanding of what it was, and that my father had somehow been involved with it, but I didn’t know what the letters stood for, so I didn’t try to answer the question. One of my classmates raised his hand and was able to fill in the blanks: Central Intelligence Agency.

I remember thinking, “Oh, I never knew it stood for anything.”

Hanging out on the set of the TV movie helped me understand more about the story, but I was still too young and sheltered to get beyond the basics. I guess I thought everyone’s dad had been shot down over the Soviet Union and had been exchanged for a Soviet spy.

In addition to the more universal impact of my father’s death upon my development, I was deprived of reaching the point of maturity where I could ask him pointed questions about his ordeal, which exacerbated my insecurity and introversion.

Only later would I recognize meeting Jay Rose as a turning point in my life.

The truth is, I almost decided not to join Sigma Alpha Epsilon, after meeting Jay, because I didn’t want to be known as Dad’s son.

Ultimately, I resisted the urge to run away, realizing that the same thing might happen if I joined another fraternity.

By pledging SAE, I took a small step toward conquering my fear.

One day during my sophomore year, with my curiosity mounting—and determined to be armed with the right answers when people asked me about my father—I stopped by the library and decided to look him up in the card catalogue. I didn’t know what I would find. Sure enough, there he was, firmly entrenched in the Dewey Decimal system. After some searching, I found a May 1960 issue of Time magazine featuring a picture of Dad on the cover. This was one of the many things I never knew.

What a strange moment it was, holding that magazine in my hands.

By this time, I had become very active in my fraternity. I partied, made new friends, and assumed a leadership role, eventually becoming the Eminent Archon, the SAE equivalent of chapter president, which included significant responsibilities in managing events and people. Slowly gaining confidence, I began to shed some of my emotional baggage. I learned that I could be myself. I started to feel comfortable in my own skin.

In time, I became more at ease around girls, and more conscious of my appearance, which could be seen as I started combing my hair back, wearing nicer clothes, and taking fewer risks. I began to walk a little taller than the young man who always felt out of place at Montclair.

“Gary struck me right away as someone who was very levelheaded and had a great sense of humor,” said Chris Means, who was two years behind me in the fraternity and who would become one of my closest friends. “He was the kind of guy who was very concerned with being fair to everybody [and would] always introduce you to everybody.”

Chris and the other guys could see in me an awakening sense of mission and purpose.

“I remember when I first got to know Gary and started hearing about the controversy about his father… talking to some of my [older relatives] about it,” Means said. “They had no sense that [his father] had done anything wrong. But I think Gary took the idea of the controversy to heart. He wanted to know the truth. He wanted other people to know the truth.”

The past sometimes assaulted me in unexpected ways.

One night I was out to dinner with my college girlfriend, her parents, and the headmaster of a prestigious prep school at the Jonathan Club in Santa Monica. Someone asked an intriguing question: What would you have for your last meal?

Apparently I said the wrong thing.

“A salad.”

At this, the headmaster snapped: “You, my friend, are a liar!”

Caught completely off guard, and still uncomfortable with talking back to an adult, I said nothing in response. I just let it go.

But privately I seethed at how a nice, friendly conversation had taken such a nasty turn and thought to myself, “And you, my friend, are a bad judge of character.”

That moment affected me more than I realized at the time. The guy didn’t even know me, and he was calling me a liar? The only thing I could figure was that he thought my dad had lied. So, naturally, I must be a liar? That really got under my skin. It was part of this resolve bubbling up inside me, to find out the truth about my dad.

Of course, in this, my most powerful ally was my mother. Mom always believed Dad got a raw deal out of the U-2 Incident. Her bitterness on the subject profoundly influenced me, planting the seeds for me to see my father as a victim of an injustice, which motivated my effort to learn all I could about him and his controversial flight into the history books. She encouraged me to dig and learn, even as I began to confront her over her excessive drinking.

During one family Thanksgiving at Dee’s house in Minnesota, I told mom, “You’ve turned into what Dad hated most: Barbara!”

This was a hard thing for me to say, and hard for Mom to hear.

She was stunned and hurt, and she stopped drinking for a week or two. Eventually, however, she started again. I felt powerless.

Whenever I called her on the phone—no matter the time of the day or night—I could always hear the ice cubes clinking in her glass. This was a sound I grew to dread.

Yet, even as her alcohol problem emerged as a point of tension, the search for truth and justice kept us close.

As my curiosity began to bubble up, while visiting Mom in 1986, I flashed back to the night of Dad’s wake: to a conversation with General Leo Geary while we stood next to a little bookcase in the living room.

Geary, the Air Force’s liaison officer on the U-2 project, spoke admiringly of Francis Gary Powers’s service to his country and revealed that he had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1959, along with the other CIA U-2 pilots—but that it had not been released, because of the clandestine nature of their work. “I’ll make sure we get it to you,” the general said.

For some reason, nine years later, I wondered: “Whatever happened to that medal?”

No use wondering, Mom insisted. “Call Leo,” she said.

After finding his number, I placed a fateful telephone call to the retired general’s Colorado home.

“Oh,” Geary said, before I could bring up the question of the medal. “You’re calling about the U-2 unveiling tomorrow night!”

U-2 unveiling? What U-2 unveiling?

Mom was sitting nearby, listening to my side of the conversation, learning that an exhibit of the U-2 was being dedicated at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC the following night. No one from the family of the most famous of all the U-2 pilots had been invited or even advised of the special event.

Mom was hurt, but more than anything else, she was pissed. She felt it was par for the course. It was yet another case of the Powers family being snubbed because of preconceived ideas about what Dad did or didn’t do.

After hastily making travel arrangements, Dee and I caught a flight to the East Coast several hours later, around midnight. Mom was determined for us to crash the party. It was early morning when we arrived in Washington and checked into one of the nicest hotels in DC, the Mayflower, after catching a ride from family friend Jeannie Popovich Walls.

Walking up the stairs at the Air and Space Museum that evening, I recognized Kelly Johnson, the aging icon now confined to a wheelchair. I noticed representatives from all of the government entities and contractors who played a role in the U-2, including Lockheed, the CIA, Pratt & Whitney, and Kodak. I chatted with my parents’ friends Edith “Eddie” Costello and Joe Giraudo, longtime agency spooks who served as the matron of honor and best man, respectively, for Frank and Sue’s wedding.

Someone came up to me and asked where my mother was. “She couldn’t make it on such short notice,” I said.

A few minutes later, Dee leaned in to me. “Good job with what you said. You weren’t rude to them, but you gave them an idea of what happened….”

Like my mother, I saw the situation as yet another slap at my father’s memory. No one was willing to accept responsibility. Lockheed blamed the CIA for not inviting us; the CIA blamed the Smithsonian; the Smithsonian blamed Lockheed. I was thinking, Yeah, right. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.

While shaking hands with other U-2 pilots, fighter pilots, spies, and government officials, I proudly, if tentatively, embraced my role as “son of…” This was an important passage, the start of something I did not fully understand.

I would hate to think how this story might have turned out if not for that unlikely sequence of events.

All I wanted was to procure Dad’s Distinguished Flying Cross medal. I didn’t know this trip would become the catalyst to a much broader and more ambitious quest, which would consume the better part of my life.

With new urgency, I began to follow my mounting curiosity, pestering my mother and other relatives with questions, reading whatever I could find about the U-2 Incident, and confronting a provocative question: Did Francis Gary Powers betray his country?

At the start, I didn’t know what I would find. I really didn’t. I didn’t start out trying to vindicate my father. I wanted to find out the truth of what took place so I would be able to answer the questions I was being asked, as candidly as possible. I saw it as a mystery to be solved.

Even as I tried to remain objective, determined not to let my personal feelings color any facts, it was impossible to completely neutralize the familial connection that filled my journey with such urgency. After all, I was trying to make sense of a man who shared my name, a man who had always been my hero.

What if my father really was a traitor? How would this alter the way I viewed him? How would it change me?

During my fourth year at Northridge, my grade point average plummeted. The truth is, I was focusing most of my energy on the fraternity and the Thursday-to-Sunday construction job that helped me pay the bills. School was the last thing on my mind, and I flunked out.

After receiving a letter from the dean advising me to take some time off and figure out what I was going to do with my life, I organized a gala commemorating the SAE chapter’s twentieth anniversary. Among the alumni I met that night was Vance T. Meyer, one of the fraternity’s first Eminent Archons, who was now vice president of Los Angeles–based Pardee Construction. One thing led to another and I landed a job in the human resources department at the company headquarters in Westwood.

Happy to have a job in corporate America, while living in a tiny cinderblock basement apartment in the Hollywood Hills—where the only separation between the bathroom and the adjoining room was a dilapidated swinging door, reminiscent of a Western saloon—I began to think I could work my way up the company ladder. I figured I didn’t need a college degree.

About eighteen months later, after proving myself in human resources, I applied for a job in land acquisition, which seemed like a perfect fit for a guy who aspired to become a real-estate developer. The interview went well—until the very end. “I can’t hire you,” the man said, “because you don’t have a college degree.”

I was stunned.

Disappointed but starting to feel the tug of ambition, I gave my two weeks’ notice and enrolled at nearby Cal State–Los Angeles, determining that I could combine my Northridge transcript to obtain a philosophy degree in about a year. By then, I knew it didn’t matter what the degree was in. I just needed to acquire that all-important sheepskin, so I decided to go for the easiest route. To reduce the financial burden, I moved back in with Mom, who was supportive of my finishing college but demanded I follow her rules, which caused tension.

Soon I was enrolled in a speech class, which required me to craft and deliver lectures about various topics.

There was a time when I would have recoiled at the thought of making a speech about my dad. It was not that I was ever ashamed of him or wanted to deny being his son. But I wanted to be my own person and didn’t want to deal with all that baggage, especially since I felt so inadequate concerning what happened to him. But as I started to learn more about him and felt more comfortable about the facts and controversies, my reticence started to recede. At the age of twenty-four, I was ready to take a big step in my personal development.

I talked to my teacher, who knew who Dad was, and she helped me put together a speech. I didn’t know how to give one. And she understood that this was a pretty unusual presentation I wanted to deliver.

Ignoring my butterflies, I began talking about a man who grew up in Virginia, joined the Air Force, and eventually was recruited by the CIA to fly a special aircraft. I talked about the day the plane crashed. The trial. The imprisonment. The exchange.

Bringing it in for a landing, I paused and looked out into the audience of students. “What I haven’t said about this individual yet is that this pilot is my father.”

My classmates clapped enthusiastically as I felt the greatest satisfaction of my young life. It was as if a lead weight had been lifted off of me.

Several months later, one night in November 1989, in a world being rapidly reshaped by the fall of the Berlin Wall, I happened to be watching a KNBC newscast featuring a broadcaster on loan from a Soviet news agency, named Svetlana Starodomskaya. Brainstorm.

With Glasnost and Perestroika in full swing, I called family friend Jess Marlow and arranged to meet with the Soviet reporter to pitch my idea: Wouldn’t it be great for me to travel to the Soviet Union to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the U-2 Incident on May 1, 1990? Starodomskaya loved it and immediately began pushing the visit with government officials in Moscow, while I placed a telephone call to family friend Gregg Anderson, the man who had spearheaded the effort to bury my father at Arlington.

“There’s this opportunity for me to go to Moscow… and I’d like to invite you to go with me.”

For a moment, silence filled the line.

“Oh, wow,” Anderson said. “Let me call you back.”

In 1990, travel between the United States and the Soviet Union remained relatively rare. Visas were still difficult to procure. But things were changing.

About five minutes later, Anderson called me back. He had thought it over.

“Gary, I’ll be delighted to go with you,” he said. “And I’ll pay for the trip.”

“Now, Gregg, I wasn’t asking for you to pay—”

“Gary,” he said, interrupting me in midsentence. “Stop. I’m hosting you. It’s the least I can do.”

After spending a night in London—where I was interviewed for the first time about my father, and the lingering impact of May 1, 1960, by a British newspaperman—I joined Gregg on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, noticing how the Soviet flight attendants felt no need to secure the overhead compartments or announce safety procedures.

It was surreal. I remember thinking: Wow, I’m flying the same airspace my dad flew in. I’m retracing his footsteps. It was a soul-searching moment for me.

While going through customs, I witnessed a memorable scene. I presented my passport to the Soviet attendant, who carefully looked it over and shared it with a colleague. They looked at me. They looked at the passport. They looked at each other. Then they looked back at me.

I didn’t need to speak Russian to see what was going through the minds of these young guys. It’s not every day that the namesake of an American spy comes walking through customs.

The man who picked us up at the airport drove a BMW, which looked out of place amid the vast army of Soviet-made sedans filling the streets. It was a sign of the changing times. The car did not have any hubcaps; the driver explained that they kept getting stolen.

After settling into a high-end Soviet-era hotel and sitting for a series of interviews, I went off to dinner with my sponsor and our Soviet interpreter, enjoying a nice meal at one of Moscow’s newly privatized restaurants. Eventually the interpreter pulled me out onto the dance floor. We all had fun.

Still, I could not help wondering if my room was bugged.

The next night, bored and feeling the need to connect to some ordinary Soviet citizens, I took a bottle of vodka someone had given me down to the lobby and began drinking shots with the bellmen. They didn’t speak much English, and I didn’t speak any Russian, but we tried to communicate through the language barrier. One of the bellhops eventually boiled some hot dogs, and we finished off the bottle before I stumbled back upstairs to my bed.

The next thing I knew, someone was banging on my door.

It was morning and Gregg had been knocking vigorously for a good ten minutes until he finally woke me from a deep sleep.

My head was pounding from a severe hangover. I was young and while I could hold my own drinking beer at an SAE party, I wasn’t used to drinking vodka like that.

Gregg shook his head, seeing that I was in bad shape, and told me he would stall the people downstairs until I could hurry up and get ready for our big day.

While being driven to a dacha far from the city, I was seated in the back seat next to Gregg. I felt horrible. At one point I whispered, “I’m not going to make it.” Fearing an international incident if we needed to pull over for the son of the famous spy to get sick on the side of a Moscow street, Gregg said, “Gary, got to maintain.” Eventually we ate some food, which helped the hangover, and we enjoyed a nice day in the countryside before returning to Moscow.

I desperately wanted to see the wreckage from my father’s plane. But no one seemed to know where it was. I wanted to see the Hall of Columns, but the closest we got was having someone point it out from inside a moving car.

It was an interesting time to visit Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev was opening things up, and everyone was friendly, but I got the impression that they didn’t quite know what to do with me or how to deal with my desire to learn about what happened to my father.

I especially wanted to watch the May Day parade, to experience the Communist celebration in Red Square, where Khrushchev had once learned of my father’s shoot-down. But our handlers insisted that this was impossible. Only later would we learn that Soviet officials were determined to keep us Americans as far as possible from the parade, because they were expecting a crowd of protesters, reflecting the revolution just starting to gather strength. We had our first insight that the Soviet Union would disintegrate—as happened nineteen months later—and I remember Gregg making this prediction on the plane ride home.

On the way home, we visited Berlin, where I chipped off a piece of the quickly disappearing wall. The separate nations of West Germany and East Germany were starting to talk about reunification, which many thought they would never see.

There was this euphoria on the streets, a festive atmosphere. But what I remember most is the conversation I had with a bartender, who told me about how all of their lives, he and his peers in East Germany had been told what to do. Now that the wall was down, there was no one telling them what to do. A lot of the younger generation was lost. They didn’t quite know how to handle freedom. It was going to take time for them to transition out of that communist mind-set.

While retracing my father’s footsteps across the Glienicker Bridge, I was interviewed by a camera crew from NBC News, which was placing one of the landmark events of the Cold War into context as the epic struggle between East and West ended without a shot.

I tried to imagine how Dad must have felt walking across that bridge, to finally be free.

When my grandmother Ida passed away in 1991, I caught a plane to Virginia for the funeral.

After graduating from Cal State–LA the previous year, I had moved to Mammoth Lakes, California, with a friend, taking a construction job and then transitioning into a night auditing position at the Mammoth Mountain Inn, adjacent to the ski slopes. I was able to ski more than one hundred days that season, while figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. I used that time to get my head on straight.

Once back in Pound, I experienced a rather-unsettling realization: My Virginia relatives felt like strangers.

If I was going to get to know all about my father and try to understand him, I needed to spend more time with my family.

Since I was already thinking about graduate school, I eventually enrolled at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, which allowed me to visit my relatives. I got to know Aunt Jan, who lived in suburban DC, and frequently made the six-hour drive to Pound, where the Powers clan was surprised by my sudden interest.

“We didn’t know what to think of him at first,” recalled Aunt Joan with a laugh. “He wasn’t accustomed to us or our ways.”

The road to my past always reminded me of a rollercoaster. Carefully steering my way along the narrow, curvy, bumpy country road in southwestern Virginia, plotting a course for the isolated hollow where my father’s story began, I was headed for a place of shadows and ghosts. My father’s. And my own.

Sometimes I flashed back to that miserable trip to the Pound in 1978. I remembered how empty the place felt without my father. But time slowly changed me, allowing me to put that painful memory in perspective.

By the early 1990s, my trips to the old hometown no longer felt obligatory. Each time I arrived to a warm welcome and set up camp in Joan and Walton’s or Jack and Jean’s spare bedroom, I felt a bit closer to my father and the world that shaped him.

“It didn’t take us long to figure out what a fine young man Gary is,” Joan said. “He was making a real serious effort to get to know all about his daddy and the family. We told him all the stories we could remember. He always wanted to know more.”

I wanted to know all about the pivotal day when my father took his first flight; the jobs he held; how Oliver felt when his son decided not to go to medical school; and the day those government men showed up in the shoe-repair shop to tell Oliver his son had been “lost” while flying a routine weather-reconnaissance mission.

They told me about the day when the pilot came home after returning from the Soviet Union and helped a newsman get his car out of the mud. “Francis was trying to keep his distance from the press, but what was he going to do?” Walton recalled. “It had rained a bunch and the road got muddy. The man needed help. Naturally, Francis got out there and helped him push his car out of the mud. That’s the kind of guy he was.”

I learned that Dad used to run track and liked to compete with his hands sticking straight out, as opposed to in a fist; that he sometimes hopped the rails to get back to Pound; and that he had been inducted into the local Masonic lodge, convinced by his childhood friend Jack Goff that it would be good for career advancement.

Walton told me about the day when he and Francis drove a truck off a mountain road on a hairpin turn, an accident which very nearly ended in disaster. He took me to the scene and walked me through the mishap.

“Gary wanted to know all there was to know… like it was all one big mystery,” Goff said.

One of the memories I held close from my childhood was how Dad and I always stopped for milkshakes at Robo’s, a little drive-in with a walk-up window and picnic tables on the road between Pound and the home place. I was happy to see the little restaurant still open in the early ’90s. Pulling over for a shake or perhaps a chilidog would remain one of my regular rituals every time I returned, well into the twenty-first century.

At a meeting concerning POW/MIA affairs inside a hotel at Pentagon City in 1995, I stood up from my seat in the audience and introduced myself. Murmurs rumbled across the room. Is that really HIS son?

Fighting through nervousness, I told the crowd I was trying to find out all I could about my father and that I would appreciate any help. This led to a series of introductions, which enabled me to start maneuvering through the bureaucracy to learn the still-hidden truths.

Around this time, I heard about an upcoming conference concerning the U-2 in Bodo, Norway, where Dad was supposed to land on May 1, 1960. Not having much money, I bartered my way into the event, agreeing to set up an exhibit of U-2 artifacts, including a piece of the plane, fragments of the crashed helicopter, and a rug Dad had woven in prison, in exchange for having my airfare and hotel accommodations covered. The exhibit remained in Norway for six months and later was displayed at the National Reconnaissance Office, Central Intelligence Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency headquarters. It has been traveling the world for more than two decades (and is currently on long-term display at the Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum near Omaha, Nebraska).

One part of the trip was especially memorable: Meeting Sergei Khrushchev, son of the late Soviet leader.

In September 1991, the younger Khrushchev started a one-year contract as a visiting professor at Brown University’s Institute for International Studies. Three months later, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, his permanent position back home disappeared. He decided to stay in the United States, eventually becoming a proud American citizen. Nothing reflected the end of the Cold War quite as powerfully as Khrushchev’s son happily pursuing his own version of the American dream as an instructor at an Ivy League university, as well as a lecturer at the Naval War College.

Invited to the Bodo conference to speak about his father and the Soviet side of the Cold War, Sergei was introduced to a young man who looked familiar. “I thought he looked Bulgarian,” Khrushchev recalled. “My father never liked Bulgarians.”

In time, I would learn many of the hidden details of the Soviet side on the day my father was shot down, some of it directly from the premier’s son. “Everybody knew our missile technology was getting better, including the Americans,” said Sergei, who was employed as a high-ranking missile engineer at the time. “Of course the CIA knew it was only a matter of time.”

On May 1, 1960, Sergei heard the news of the latest incursion from his father at the breakfast table. They lived in the same house. “I was very upset and asked my father what would happen next,” he recalled. “He thought this a stupid question. ‘Of course we will try to shoot it down….’”

He later learned from this father that some of the people who greeted the American pilot when he tumbled from the sky asked him if he was Bulgarian. “So when I see this young man who looks Bulgarian, I was not surprised to hear he was Gary Powers,” Sergei said. “He looked a lot like his father.”

At first, Sergei was skeptical of me. But Khrushchev was quickly disarmed by the son of his onetime Cold War adversary. He could see I was sincere and only wanted to know the truth.

“I found that he was a good and honest person who was strongly interested in preserving the memory of his father,” he said. “I appreciate and respect such people.”

That day was the start of a wonderful friendship between a young American and an aging Russian.

After speaking about my father’s ill-fated flight, I invited questions from the audience at the Bodo conference. A Norwegian man stood up and started heckling me, telling me how a Norwegian spy had planted a bomb in the tail section of the U-2 before Dad took off from Pakistan. This was one of the many conspiracy theories that colored the incident in the sort of hazy mythology so often associated with the Kennedy assassination.

Politely but forcefully, I began to refute the charge.

The man did not think much of my answer. He kept insisting that I was engaged in some sort of cover-up.

“You can’t always believe everything you read in the press!” I finally said.

And the room exploded in applause.

A feeling of deep satisfaction swept over me. It was an important milepost in my journey to combat the misinformation about my father.

As part of my process of discovery, I developed a deep interest in the Cold War, which began to fade into the history books as the old Soviet Union splintered into fourteen different independent countries, leaving a much smaller and less powerful Russia, and the nations of the old Eastern bloc embraced freedom for the first time in more than four decades.

In 1996, John C. Welch and I founded The Cold War Museum. At first it was little more than an idea and my traveling U-2 Incident exhibit, as I began working through various roadblocks, including fund-raising, artifact collection, and the search for a permanent physical location.

“In a way, I am honoring my father,” I told reporters as the project began to gather momentum. “But I want the museum to honor all of the men and women who died for American freedom during the Cold War.”¹

One of the first people I recruited to help with the effort was Sergei Khrushchev, who joined the advisory board of directors and helped make sure it reflected both sides of the conflict.

“It is important that we remember,” Khrushchev said.

Sergei and I often spoke on the same panel. One time, Mom was in the audience, and she turned to my friends Jon Teperson and Bob Kallos during the program. “His daddy put Gary’s daddy in jail.”

While pursuing a career in public administration—including serving as the executive director of several different nonprofit organizations and chambers of commerce—and eventually marrying and starting a family, I remained committed to learning the truth about my father. I filed Freedom of Information Act requests and began lecturing about the U-2 Incident across the country and beyond, emerging as an expert on the subject and a vigorous defender of my father’s memory.

My search for knowledge led to a memorable trip to a free and capitalist Russia in June 1997. As part of a so-called spy tour, organized by former intelligence officials on both sides, with a group of other Americans, I drove by Lubyanka Prison and the KGB headquarters and visited safe houses, drop sites, and other once-clandestine points of interest around Moscow.

The various once-unimagined changes roiling the onetime evil empire, now abuzz with capitalist activity, could be seen in something very personal: The KGB museum exhibit featuring artifacts from Dad’s fateful mission, including his .22-caliber pistol with silencer and the poison-tipped pin Dad took on his mission. I learned that other items from the U-2 were being displayed at the Border Guard Museum, including items from his survival kit: a book of matches, a saw, a canteen, a compass, and a shaving kit. The display included a large stack of rubles, which had been sewn into Dad’s jacket all those years ago, and a pack of Kent cigarettes. (In Soviet lore, Kent became “the cigarette of spies,” because the pack was found on the spy pilot.)

Especially excited to see wreckage from the plane, I was intrigued to see a plaque claiming, in Russian, that the ejection seat was rigged with an explosive that would have killed the pilot. I knew that there was an explosive charge under the seat—it’s what was used to blast it out. But to kill the pilot? This sounded like Soviet propaganda to me.

Still, as I began to learn about every detail of the aircraft, I would always remember a private conversation with high-altitude specialist Tom Bowen. After the pilot was shown the charge and told it was set to explode seventy seconds after the buttons were pushed, Bowen said, “he would have no way of knowing if it had been reset to zero.”

I would always wonder if Dad had decided not to use the ejection seat because he was concerned it would explode instantaneously, or because he would have severed his legs had he used the ejection seat. This was yet another mystery I would never be able to solve.

With the help of Jim Connell, whom I met during the POW/MIA meeting, I wrangled my way into Vladimir Prison, which required a three-hour drive from Moscow.

Walking into the still-open penitentiary, the commandant greeted me graciously and escorted me to the cell my father had once occupied. We exchanged gifts. I stepped into the small space, which had been freshly painted for my visit, and smiled as Connell snapped a photograph.

I asked for a few minutes alone, and carefully studied the walls, trying to imagine how it felt for Dad to look out from behind those bars and wonder if he would ever get to go home. It was hard to believe I was actually standing there.

Something stirred in me that day, while standing in my father’s footsteps. It was a moment I would never forget.

In 1997, after a decade of learning everything I could about my father’s story—and the peculiarities of the federal government’s bureaucracy—I began to seek for him a measure of vindication.

The effort started with a letter:

Several weeks later, a reply arrived from James D. Johnston, executive secretary of the Military Service Review Board, stating that DoD Directive 1348 limits the issue of the POW Medal to “those taken prisoner by foreign armed forces that are hostile to the United States, under circumstances which the Secretary concerned finds to have been comparable to those under which persons have generally been held captive by enemy armed forces during periods of armed conflict.”³

“The Cold War is not one of the periods noted in the directive,” Johnston wrote.

Johnston left open the possibility of an exception, but I began to understand the unique circumstances weighing against my father. Not only was his clandestine service treated differently, but combatants in the Cold War, the most important conflict of the previous four decades, were being denied the honors reserved for “shooting” wars such as Korea and Vietnam, which many historians considered battles of the larger Cold War.

I traded several letters with the Air Force pushing my father’s case, but it took a flurry of once-secret documents to move the ball.

For all I had learned about my father’s brush with history, several questions remained unanswered.

My father always said he had been hit at maximum altitude, but I knew that several key figures in Washington doubted his story, including CIA director John McCone. My father felt so betrayed by McCone that when he was finally awarded the Intelligence Star, his initial inclination was to tell the CIA boss to “shove it.”

Mom was able to calm him down, and he eventually made the trip and graciously accepted the medal.

Caught between my admiration for my father and my determination to consider all of the evidence, I was left unable to offer any definitive evidence to refute the notion that he had descended to a lower altitude.

Until 1998.

With the Cold War fading in the rear-view mirror, my mother and I attended a declassification conference at Fort McNair, home of the National War College in Washington, DC. At this event, thousands of pages of once-classified secrets concerning the Cold War were finally exposed to the public. For us, it was a moment fraught with excitement.

Flipping through a book containing various letters and files, there it was: a document definitively stating that Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 was disabled at 70,500 feet.⁴

That proved that Dad had been telling the truth all along.

Other evidence pointed to the likelihood that as many as eight different surface-to-air missiles exploded in the vicinity of the aircraft, none of them landing a direct hit.

Nearly four decades after the U-2 Incident, it was clear that Washington knew the aircraft was more vulnerable to Soviet missiles than it was willing to acknowledge at the time. By refusing to definitively refute the potential of a flame-out or an intentional descent, Washington protected its secrets at the expense of the man who spent twenty-one months locked up by the KGB.

Reading through the large cache of released documents, I located other pages showing the U-2 was a joint operation of the CIA and the Air Force, which was just the evidence we needed to push the Pentagon on the question of whether or not to award my father a POW Medal.

Equally troubling to the family was the way the government had allowed the misinformation to linger concerning the poison pin. Only after the Cold War ended were many of my dad’s former colleagues free to discuss the device. I sought out a long list of pilots and CIA officials, who shared my frustration that Dad had been branded a traitor by some.

“That pin was only there if you thought you couldn’t take what they were doing to you,” said Tony Bevacqua, his onetime roommate. “No way was he expected to use it. Frank had a hard time when he got back, and one of the reasons was because too many people thought it was his duty to kill himself. And that’s baloney.”

Even with demonstrable evidence that he was never under any orders to commit suicide, I often dealt with people who believed he should have sacrificed his life to deprive the Soviets of a Cold War trophy.

While appearing on Oliver North’s Fox News Channel broadcast, I was confronted by a caller who insisted Dad was a traitor because he didn’t use the pin.

“Well, I’m glad he didn’t, because I wouldn’t be here if he had,” I said with a chuckle, before calmly explaining the facts.

Armed with the declassified documents, I kept flooding the Pentagon with paperwork, including a letter supporting the award from retired General John A. Shaud, the executive director of the Air Force Association. Shaud, who had successfully petitioned for the POW Medals to be bestowed on Colonels John McKone and Bruce Olmstead, the only survivors of the RB-47 shoot-down, who were imprisoned at Lubyanka at the same as my father, urged the Air Force to look beyond the U-2 pilot’s CIA employment and treat him as a member of the armed forces.

Like the Berlin Wall, the American government’s official antipathy toward Francis Gary Powers began to crumble.

In announcing the Air Force’s decision in a letter dated November 22,1999, Staff Judge Advocate Colonel R. Philip Deavel said, “We believe there is substantial evidence in the record to support the applicant’s request that the AFBCMR [Air Force Board of Correction of Military Records] characterize his father’s service with the CIA as ‘military’ service.”⁵ This determination cleared the way for my dad to receive the POW Medal.

Forty-five years after President Eisenhower insisted the overflights be conducted exclusively by civilian pilots, the distinction was understood as a necessary conceit to avoid violations of airspace that might be interpreted as overt acts of war. Only in the most technical terms could the military establishment argue that my father was not a prisoner of war, especially given his previous Air Force service and the Air Force’s decision to posthumously promote him to captain—although no one in the Powers family knew about this until his military record was officially updated in 2000.

Once the decision to award my father the POW Medal was made and the wheels were set in motion, I began talking with one of my new friends, Colonel Buz Carpenter, a former wing commander at Beale Air Force Base, to see if it was possible for me to get a ride in a U-2. Carpenter sold the flight to the brass at the Pentagon, including General Mike Ryan, the Air Force Chief of Staff. “[Ryan] thought it was a great idea… [to] gather some good national press coverage,” Carpenter recalled.

On May 1, 2000, the fortieth anniversary of my father’s shoot-down, I strapped on a yellow pressure suit and stepped into the back seat of a U-2 trainer piloted by Colonel Brian Anderson, who quickly headed for the edge of space. Reaching an altitude of 72,123 feet on a beautiful, blue-sky day, we flew for more than three hours, high above San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.

I was able to see the curvature of the earth and the pitch-black sky above. It was exhilarating, awesome, wonderful. And after a while, it was a little boring.

No one was firing missiles at us.

It was yet another way for me to try to understand my father’s journey on a very personal level.

After we touched down and taxied to the reviewing stand, a contingent of officials recognized my father with the POW Medal as well as the Distinguished Flying Cross, the National Defense Service Medal, and the CIA Director’s Medal.

It was a wonderful show of support, with the Air Force and the agency publicly acknowledging my father’s role in helping win the Cold War. I would never forget the look of satisfaction on my mother’s face.

When Dad was inducted into the 2000 class of the Kentucky Aviation Hall of Fame, the emcee said, “Our next enshrine endured much in the service of his country, not the least of which was the misunderstanding of the American people.”⁶

Friend Bob Gilliland, who nominated him, called Powers one of “the most famous pilot ever to go aloft.”⁷

The honor gratified Mom and me, but we still chafed at the periodic insults to his memory.

Despite the lingering bitterness caused by the Smithsonian Institution’s snub of the Powers family in 1986, we donated a large number of Dad’s items to the National Air and Space Museum in 1995. When the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center opened in 2003, adjacent to Dulles International Airport, displaying several of those items, the Powers family was once again excluded. Two different officials, including the director, General Jack Dailey, told me that tickets to the grand opening were limited to financial donors, and there were no seats available for the family of an iconic aviator.

Not to be denied, I worked the phones and found a way into the event, as an aide to Congressman Tom Davis, a Republican from Virginia.

Once the festivities began, and a long list of artifact donors and the family members of prominent pilots were recognized—everyone, it seemed, except the Powers family—I was surrounded, in the back of the hangar, by a sea of empty seats.

It was yet another painful blow. It was hard not to see it as a direct insult not only to my father but also to the Powers family.

After I traded letters with the director of the National Air and Space Museum, my mom fired off her own message to Dailey. “I am again hurt by the lack of respect afforded my husband and his family… especially after our family’s artifact donations that you so proudly display at both facilities,” she said.⁸

Out of this unfortunate experience, we eventually developed a good working relationship with the Smithsonian. It makes me proud to see Dad honored among all those important figures in the history of aviation.