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

^{Chapter Eight} THE LAST ECHO

On the morning of June 14, 2012, I walked into the Pentagon feeling the full weight of my family’s complicated history. It had not been easy living in the shadow of all those doubts. But I was not easily deterred by long odds or setbacks.

In the years after founding The Cold War Museum and becoming its first full-time executive director, I faced a series of formidable obstacles. While working full-time as the president and CEO for the Vienna-Tysons Corner Chamber of Commerce to support my family, I put in an additional 20–40 hours per week to promote the museum to civic clubs, military officials, and media outlets. I used my traveling U-2 Incident exhibit as a catalyst for a permanent museum, while searching and negotiating for artifacts, pitching for governmental and corporate funds, and spearheading an oral-history project involving Fairfax County public-school students.

“The whole point of The Cold War Museum was to educate future generations in what that time period was all about,” I told the media.¹

Embracing the concept, Virginia social studies teacher Patti Winch said, “It’s hard for our students today to understand the Cold War. I don’t think they connect with the fear factor.”²

In 2006, after I had raised enough money to work for the museum full-time, the nonprofit entered into a partnership agreement with the Fairfax County Park Authority to build a permanent museum on the site of an old Nike missile-launch facility in Lorton, Virginia. We began signing up sponsors, but the agreement ultimately fell apart in 2009, when Fairfax County Park Authority walked away from the negotiating table after the museum had lined up donors who had pledged to write checks to get the facility up and running.

The donors wanted to see the lease signed first, and the park authority wanted to see the money in the bank. It was a catch-22, with neither side wanting to take the first step.

Local politicians and community leaders developed great hopes for the museum, which they envisioned as a significant tourist draw.

“I’m very disheartened,” said Irma Clifton, the president of the Lorton Heritage Society.³ “I think it was the perfect opportunity to tell the story of that part of our history where it actually happened.”

The disintegration of the deal was a crushing blow. My failure was plastered all over the front page of the Washington Post.⁴

Thirteen years of my life had been invested in making this museum a reality. And we got so close. Then we were shot down. Seems to run in the family.

But then my telephone started to ring. That’s when I learned the truth behind the hackneyed PR phrase “There’s no such thing as bad press.”

Alerted by the news story, representatives from several other northern Virginia localities called to express interest in creating a home for the museum. My board and I eventually secured a deal with the Vint Hill Economic Development Authority in Fauquier County, which provided a facility suitable for renovation and very favorable terms.

With funding sources drying up in the wake of the severe recession, I resigned from my staff position, to preserve the organization’s finite resources. I became Founder and Chairman Emeritus and turned the operation over to the volunteers. No one was prouder than me to watch the new leadership, chaired by John Welch, negotiate the final hurdles of turning my dream into a reality.

Utilizing a facility once used by the NSA, CIA, and US Army Security Agency, The Cold War Museum opened in 2011 at what used to be known in intelligence circles as Vint Hill Farms Station, featuring an estimated $3 million in rare artifacts—including but not limited to a Stasi prison door; the US Postal Service mailbox used by spy Aldrich Ames to contact his Soviet handlers; a prisoner’s outfit worn by a member of the captured USS Pueblo; a sailor’s uniform from a USS Liberty crewmember; and the largest known collection of civil defense memorabilia in the United States. The frequent tours of schoolchildren and history buffs validated my original vision, preserving and teaching about the milestone events of the epic clash between East and West.

By this point in my life, I was a family man with mounting responsibilities, learning to balance my personal life with the powerful urge to educate the world about my father and the Cold War.

Though I started out as a young man who always heard the voice of his mother ringing in his head, telling him to be skeptical of other peoples’ motives, I endeavored to embrace a certain amount of vulnerability. But my scars ran deep. I remained very guarded. Truthfully, I always felt like I had to hold something back, until I met Jennifer.

The beautiful daughter of a business associate, Jennifer Webber, came into my life in late 1995. She could sense that the business-like vibe I was projecting was clearly a defensive mechanism to keep people at a distance. On one of our first dates, she said, only half joking, “I don’t know whether to call you ‘Gary’ or ‘Mr. Powers.’” This was also because she was ten years younger. Had she called me Mr. Powers when we first met, I would probably not be writing about her now.

Jennifer remembers learning about Francis Gary Powers from her older brother, Bo, and feeling sorry for his parents. When she later studied the U-2 Incident in school, she never learned that he had survived the shoot-down.

When she was twenty, her mother asked, “Do you know who Francis Gary Powers is?”

Aware of the historical figure but still unsure of herself, she said no.

It turned out that her mother, Binnie, who served on the Downtown Fairfax Coalition’s Festival of Lights and Carols committee, knew the pilot’s son, who was the executive director of the coalition at the time.

“I couldn’t wrap my head around the son’s age, thinking his father died in 1960,” she said.

Sometime after this, during an event at the Old Town Hall, I noticed this beautiful blond standing next to my friend Binnie, who just happened to be Binnie’s daughter. I was immediately smitten, and one thing led to another.

Soon Jen became very knowledgeable about the pilot and the U-2 Incident.

On her first trip to my condo, she noticed a picture of the U-2 inscribed by Kelly Johnson. She looked at the date next to the signature. It was the day she was born.

“Must have been fate,” she said with a laugh, many years later.

Jen quickly grasped the significance of her future husband’s enduring relationship with his late father.

“Gary was deprived of something most of us take for granted,” Jennifer said. “The impact that loss has had on his life is hard to overstate. But when you add the fact that he didn’t know the truth about this controversial figure…. Gary is the kind of person who needs to know the truth. Otherwise it would have haunted him for the rest of his life.”

Through the years, Jennifer has indulged my determination to chase every conceivable lead and press my father’s case. We often planned family trips around speaking engagements, air shows, media interviews, conventions, and meetings with Dad’s friends and colleagues. She tried to understand why I put so much of my heart and soul into the effort, sometimes worried that my quest was developing into an unhealthy obsession.

“Every time he achieves one goal to honor his father, there is another one waiting in the wings,” she said. “Sometimes I would like to see him put the same effort that he puts toward his father’s memory to his family at home. But I have also never been in Gary’s shoes. I have never been told my father was a traitor or a coward, so I can’t say his ‘obsession’ is anything other than normal.”

I don’t need anybody to tell me I’m a lucky man. Jen’s support and understanding through the years has been incredible. I can’t imagine my life without her.

Even before we learned that we were going to have a son, I had given the issue of names serious thought. As with so many things in my life, the choice was fundamentally shaped by the realization that the world viewed my father through a distorted lens.

My mother was adamant: She wanted us to name the boy Francis Gary Powers III. She had her reasons, and I understood them. She wanted her son to make a statement to the world. I liked the idea of Francis Gary Powers III, but did I really want to burden my son with all the misinformation associated with the name?

In the end, the decision turned partially on a piece of advice offered by Gregg Anderson during our trip to Moscow in 1990. “If you name him after your father, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons,” Gregg said. “But if you’re naming him after yourself for your own accomplishments, then you may be doing it for the right reasons.”

By the time our little boy arrived on July 2, 2002, I had earned my master of public administration degree from George Mason University, was managing the Vienna-Tysons Corner Regional Chamber of Commerce, and had founded The Cold War Museum.

In my mind, naming him Francis Gary Powers III was not the act of a man defiantly shaking his fist at the world. It was, instead, a symbol of how I was well on my way to transcending my father’s lingering shadow and establishing my own legacy.

To us and his friends, our son headed into his teenage years known as Trey. In the years ahead, he will have the opportunity to choose how he presents himself to the world. In time, I hope the name will become less of a burden and more a source of acknowledged pride.

Even as I pursued my father’s story with an insatiable desire to know more and spread the truth, I spent many of those years as the primary caregiver to Trey—making sure he did his homework and handling many of the household chores—while Jen worked a full-time job in the legal profession. “If he had a lecture or had to go out of town to set up the exhibit, Gary was the one who arranged for someone to get Trey on or off the bus,” Jen said.

Because they understood how important the quest was to me—and because I often involved them in the process—my wife and son never felt neglected. “If anything, we have grown because of it,” Jen said. “What his journey has taught me is to never give up. Every time a door was shut in Gary’s face, he would open another door. I don’t have that perseverance. I don’t think many people do. It’s a trait I really admire in Gary.”

On May 1, 2010, the fiftieth anniversary of the U-2 Incident, I was back in Moscow, telling an audience of soldiers and cadets at the Central Armed Forces Museum: “In order to understand the world today you must understand how we got here, and we got here through the Cold War.”⁵

Describing myself as “walking, living, and breathing Cold War history,”⁶ I give at least four dozen presentations a year—sometimes accompanied by the exhibit—telling my father’s story and how it fit into the larger conflict.

“A lot of people have heard of Francis Gary Powers and know he was shot down, because there was quite a furor over it,” said Adam Smith, the director of the Experimental Aviation Association’s Air Venture Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where the I drew a big crowd in 2002.⁷ “But if you ask people what else they know about it, they don’t know.”

Refuting the conventional wisdom about Francis Gary Powers and the moment that defined him became a central part of my life.

The crowds who showed up for my speeches enjoyed hearing about the little boy who once asked, while being tucked into bed: “Dad, how high were you flying?”

The answer hit them like a punch line: “Not high enough! Or I would not have been shot down.”

“Gary, I can’t tell you how high I was flying,” the father then said. “It’s a secret.”

Especially in the wake of the 1998 Declassification Conference and my various other efforts to learn the truth, the people who attended my lectures were let in on the secrets of altitude and other once-classified details, pulling back the veil of the fast-fading Cold War.

Sometimes I encountered young people who expected me to talk about U2, the Irish rock band fronted by Bono.

Standing before groups large and small, I attacked the myth of the self-destruct button and poison-tipped pin.

Questioned by well-intentioned people who believed the false news they had read in the press or had been told during a time of inconvenient truths, I explained the reality about the self-destruct buttons.

“I have seen Gary handle the misperception about his father with dignity and grace,” Jen said. “He has never yelled or shown anger toward anyone who believed the misinformation circulating in the public. He would simply state the facts and move on.”

It took years and years of seemingly disparate events, bouncing off each other, for the federal government to begin casting a new eye on my father’s story. It took years and years of accumulated knowledge, allowing me to know the right questions to ask and the right buttons to push. It took a very supportive wife who loved me and understood. Sometimes, it took me becoming a pain in the ass.

“It was pretty inspirational to watch,” said my friend Bob Kallos. “Very methodically, Gary attacked these assumptions about his dad and proved them to be false.”

My friends and family often wondered why I was pushing so hard to vindicate my father.

“Gary was absolutely driven on the subject [and] stuck with it a lot longer than most people would have,” said his friend Chris Means.

Every time someone pushed back against the facts and insisted that my father should have committed suicide, or suggested that he spilled his guts to the Russians, I was forced to confront the doubts that had shadowed my entire life. It mattered not that I knew the truth. It mattered not that I believed with every fiber of my being that my father was a hero who did his best in very difficult circumstances. One uninformed person who bought into those myths gave them an enduring power over my father’s story. I was determined to reclaim that power.

Knowing how my father suffered—while in captivity, and after his ambivalent repatriation—filled me with a powerful resolve. I felt a sense of duty to set the record straight.

In 2010, I read a magazine article that mentioned that RB-47 crew members John McKone and Bruce Olmstead had been awarded the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest honor. Naturally, I was happy for the colonels, who had been held captive at Lubyanka at the same time as my father. They were personal friends.

I had first met McKone and Olmstead in Omaha, Nebraska, at the newly opened SAC Museum in September 1998, during one of the first public displays of the U-2 Incident exhibit. We were all part of a panel discussion on Cold War reconnaissance.

But something about the wording of the citation really pissed me off. It noted that McKone and Olmstead had not been subjected to a show trial. This struck me as another slap at my father. That wording and reference did not need to be in the official award’s citation. But it goes to show how the misinformation, rumors, and speculation continued to negatively influence Dad’s reputation.

Now I had a new mission.

First I consulted with Buz Carpenter, who advised me on how to navigate through the bureaucracy. After I gathered the necessary materials, including a supporting letter from Congressman Eric Cantor and the head of the Air Force Association, Buz told me: “I think you have enough of a case to go for it.” So I submitted a detailed application, including this cover letter:

Truthfully, I thought, after the POW Medal and the others Dad received in 2000, we were done. I never imagined any additional honors from the government. I knew this was a much bigger deal.

For months, paperwork shuttled back and forth between me, various military officials, and Congressman Cantor’s office. In recommending the honor up the chain of command, Lieutenant Colonel Cheryl Beineke, Deputy Director of the Secretary of the Air Force Personnel Council, concluded: “Due to the clandestine and sensitive nature of the overflight operations that Powers was engaged in, global political tensions of the day, and other ongoing negotiations, no medals were presented when Powers was released and returned to the United States.”⁹

After being forced to repeatedly make the case for Dad to receive the POW Medal, I expected resistance from the Air Force. So I was rendered virtually speechless on December 15, 2011, when I went to my mailbox and tore open the latest letter from the Air Force.

Not only was the honor nearly a half a century in the making, but it would not have been possible if I had not vigorously argued a decade earlier for Washington to consider my father’s time with the CIA as part of his military service. This bureaucratic achievement was the foundation on which the Silver Star was bestowed.

It was the best Christmas present of my life.

Many young people suffer the loss of a parent. The tragedy hits us all differently, and, one way or another, we all try to cope. My search to find meaning in my father’s life also served a deeper purpose. It was my way of dealing with the unfinished business Francis Gary Powers left behind on the first day of August in 1977.

Assembling the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle became a kind of therapy. I wasn’t just seeking redemption for my father. I was also seeking a measure of peace for myself.

My sister, Dee, observed my journey from a unique perspective.

Especially after she moved out at age eighteen to pursue a career in the military, Dee felt distanced from me. “For a long time, I think our mother made sure we weren’t friends,” she said. “I can’t really explain why. But fortunately we became closer through the years and eventually got to where we have a good relationship.”

She understood what a triumphant moment the Silver Star was for me. “I think Gary wandered without a voice for a while,” she said. “But he found that voice in making sure our dad was remembered the way he should have been. It made me very happy to watch him find that inner peace.”

My private battle to recast our father’s place in the history books culminated inside the Pentagon’s ornate Hall of Heroes, where a small group of relatives and friends gathered alongside various high-ranking officials of the military and intelligence establishment.

“Never seen so much brass in my life,” said Bob Kallos, who made the trip from Philadelphia with his twelve-year-old daughter. “It was pretty intimidating and humbling.”

Chris Conrad watched closely as I moved through the crowd, greeting the invited guests, before the program began. “I remember being so proud of Gary, not just for this incredible accomplishment, which would not have happened without him pushing for it, …but also to see this guy who had once been kind of awkward and unsure of himself mature into this very polished guy who’s confident and quite a good public speaker,” recalled Conrad, who flew in from California. “Several of his closest friends were there. We all have busy schedules, but we wanted to be there for Gary. We all understood what a profoundly wonderful moment this was for him.”

Former U-2 pilot Carl Overstreet wished his old friend Frank could be there to see the big fuss.

As part of my effort to learn about my dad, I had gotten to know Carl and his wife, Elizabeth. “Carl thought very highly of [Frank] and he was able to tell Gary about his dad,” Elizabeth said. “Carl always said he was a good guy, a good pilot, and a hero.”

Seated in the front row, Jen fretted about nine-year-old Trey, who was about to play an important role in the ceremony. “I was worried that he would have stage fright and would be intimidated by all the cameras,” she said.

After speaking for a few minutes about Francis Gary Powers’s service to his country, General Norman Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, presented the box containing the medal to the grandchildren the pilot never got to know: Dee’s grown daughter, Lindsey, and Francis Gary Powers III, who impressed everyone with his poise and manners.

“I was just so proud,” Jan Powers Melvin said. “So many emotions pouring over me in that special room, which most people never get to see. I just wish Francis could have been there.”

All those years after my father returned home amid such ambivalence, the citation acknowledged that he was “interrogated, harassed, and endured unmentionable hardships on a continuous basis by numerous top Soviet Secret Police interrogation teams,” while “resisting all Soviet efforts through cajolery, trickery and threats of death,” and exhibiting “indomitable spirit, exceptional loyalty, and continuous heroic actions.”¹¹

Welling up with emotion, I felt a satisfaction I had been pursuing for much of my adult life. My father was now vindicated. Finally. “It’s never too late to set the record straight,” I told the packed auditorium. “Even if it takes fifty years.”

Closure comes in many forms. Sometimes it washes over you when you experience a moment that exceeds your wildest expectations. Vindication is especially sweet when it fills up a hole in your heart.

“To see Gary’s triumph on behalf of his dad was just so moving and inspirational,” said my friend Joe Patterson.

The Silver Star was an admission that Washington had treated Francis Gary Powers unfairly, that it had left a patriot out in the cold for far too long. It was a concession that the Cold War was a real war fought by men who made great sacrifices and sometimes got caught up in situations that forced the country to debate the meaning of heroism.

“These events,” wrote Adam J. Herbert in Air Force magazine, “are reminders that sometimes justice comes slowly.”¹²

More than twenty-two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Francis Gary Powers officially became an American hero in the eyes of the military establishment, the delayed recognition felt like something even more profound: The last fading echo of the Cold War.