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

^{Chapter One} THE RESTLESS HEART

One morning in the early 1940s, Oliver Powers loaded up his family in his pickup truck and plotted a course for the state line. With his wife, Ida, seated next to him and their children hunkered down in the open-air truck bed, Oliver carefully traversed the unforgiving dirt roads out of the isolated hollow where they lived, near the coal-mining company town of Harmon, Virginia. They were headed for a picnic in neighboring West Virginia, unable to imagine how a seemingly routine outing would profoundly shape the family’s story.

Deeply rooted in a hardscrabble corner of Appalachia, far from the prosperity of the industrial age, the Powers clan lived in several different locations through the years, including an old family farmhouse adjacent to a dairy in the picturesque hills near the town of Pound, where Oliver’s ancestors had once struggled to make ends meet working the land. “You could sell your produce, your milk, hogs, but to [find anybody to] sell it to, you had to cross that mountain on foot,” said lifelong resident Jack Goff, pointing toward the nearby border with Kentucky. “’Cause there wasn’t any road.” The narrow, steep trail, known as the Buffalo Trace, once was used by Native American tribes who followed the Buffalo herds on their seasonal migration from the fertile grazing lands of the Ohio Valley through Virginia before settling for the winter in North Carolina. Even after the first road was built to connect the hollow to the outside world, the trail remained a source of adventure for the area’s children.

After the first of the coal mines opened in 1913, in the nearby company town of Jenkins, Kentucky, James Powers, Oliver’s father, worked building houses for the miners, simple little wood-frame structures typically including four or five small rooms sealed by an outer shell of canvas. Coal-fired stoves heated the rustic domiciles—the precious rocks purchased, like most other necessities of life, at the nearby company-owned store. The surging demand for coal produced thousands of jobs across the area, paying as much as $7 per day, good money during the years of the Great Depression and World War II. In the context of that time and place, coal mining equaled opportunity beyond farming, even as it also represented a trap that swallowed many lives whole.

Oliver landed his first mine job in his late teens. It was difficult work, with danger forever lurking in the sweet mountain air, peril beyond the gradual debilitation of all that coal dust accumulating in the lungs. When two pieces of heavy equipment collided underground, violently slamming him against a wall, he was lucky to escape with his life. “There wasn’t room for his pelvis to turn over,” said Goff, whose life was closely entangled with the Powers family. “It sort of crushed him, and he didn’t walk straight after that.”

Hardened by the mining life, frustrated by his circumstances, Oliver could be “gruff and loud,” recalled his daughter, Jan Powers Melvin, born while her father served a hitch in the US Army. She was six months old when she was introduced to Oliver for the first time; the baby girl immediately started bawling in apparent fright. “We knew he loved us, but he wasn’t the type of man to easily show affection.” Still, as a grown man with a houseful of kids, he remained remarkably deferential to his own father, demonstrated by his habit of hiding his lit cigarette whenever a disapproving James walked into the room.

Like most mine wives, Ida, who was slightly heavyset and usually trying to lose weight, took pride in her toughness in the face of all those daily hardships. But she could be very loving. Deeply religious, she made sure the family regularly attended services at the Church of Christ, which required a significant commute when they lived in Harmon. A good neighbor who was always eager to help, she was usually the first one to show up at someone’s house when a new baby was on the way.

At various times, especially during the Depression, the mines shut down or cut back on personnel, leaving Oliver without a way to adequately provide for his family. On occasion he would run some moonshine, but eventually he opened a shoe-repair shop, first as a side business and then as his full-time occupation, escaping the mining life for good. He dreamed of a better life for his children, especially his only son.

Francis Gary Powers, born on August 17, 1929, at the hospital in the nearby community of Burdine, Kentucky, just two months before Wall Street crashed, grew up knowing how it felt to go to bed hungry. He saw the desperation in his parents’ eyes, unable to help. Years later, he remarked about how the mining life “made people like my mother and father old before their time.”¹

Shaped by parents who engendered in him a strong sense of right and wrong and left him free to roam the surrounding countryside, Francis grew up empowered by a sense of gathering independence, hunting, fishing, swimming, and spelunking in the distant hills. Sometimes he hiked to a favorite spot, the top of a high cliff overlooking the surrounding valley, and let his thoughts drift to faraway places, beyond the overarching mines, which he saw “poisoning everything.”² Doted on by his five sisters, he became, by his own estimation, “something of a loner.”³ If he was not outside doing something physical, he could often be found in his room reading, especially books dealing with history.

Young Francis could be an irritating brother, such as the times when Jan, two years younger and shorter, endured his childish picking, victimized by his much longer arms. Sometimes she tried to “smack” him, but he was always able to keep her at arm’s length. And he could also be their protector. One day when they were very young, Jan, Jean, and Francis were walking through a nearby pasture. They didn’t see the bull until he started chasing them. “Scared the daylights out of us,” Jan said. The Powers kids ran all the way home, with Francis pulling Jan forcefully by the hand, up onto the cement steps of their little house, just ahead of the rampaging animal. Once they reached the safety of a closed door, they could look out the window and see the mad cow snorting ominously but harmlessly on those cement steps. “That was a close call we’d never forget,” Jan said.

Without extra money for luxuries such as vacations, the children recognized their day trip to West Virginia early in World War II as a rare treat. Several hours into their adventure, in Princeton, they happened upon a county fair, where a pilot was offering airplane rides in a little Piper Cub for the princely sum of two dollars and fifty cents. Oliver looked at Francis. He could see the gleam in his fourteen-year-old son’s eyes.

Three-quarters of a century later, Joan, relaxing in her modest house several miles from the old farm on the outskirts of Pound, remembered the pivotal moment like it had happened that very morning. Her eyes brightened at the way her father indulged her brother. “Anything Francis wanted,” the elderly lady said with a girlish laugh, “Oliver was going to get it for him.” She paused and smiled. “You know how it was. He was the only son.”

Working steadily, the patriarch of the clan felt good about his ability to splurge on his boy, who soared through the clouds for several loops around the surrounding countryside, never to be the same.

“There was a lady pilot doing the flying and she must’ve liked Francis, because she kept him up there longer than he had paid for,” Joan said. “I guess she could see how much he liked it. Well, I never will forget. He’s standing at the back of the truck with the biggest grin on his face and says, ‘I left my heart up there.’ I was only 9 or 10 and I didn’t quite understand. I thought he had fallen in love with that lady pilot!”

The experience struck a nerve deep inside Francis.

“It was quite a thrill,” he recalled many years later. “I was so nervous, just shaking all over, because it was such a thrill to me.”⁴

What Oliver could not have guessed then was that the flight would alter not just his son, but American history.

During the final year of the war, Oliver landed a good-paying job in a defense plant in Detroit. The father and his son moved first, until he could send for Ida and the girls, having secured two small adjoining apartments in an area near the industrial center of River Rouge. The wide-eyed country folks felt like strangers in a foreign land, encountering skyscrapers, streetcars, and the bustle of urban life. For the first time, the Powers family owned an icebox, with daily deliveries of ice to fill it, which made them feel prosperous. Thrown into a big-city melting pot, they became acquainted with people from vastly different backgrounds.

On his way home from school, Francis encountered a large bunch of white boys beating up on one small African American child. “He took the black boy’s part [and] started helping him fight the rest of ’em,” Jan recalled. Relating the incident to his sister, Francis said, “It just wasn’t fair for all those big boys to be picking on one little boy, no matter what his skin color was.”

Not long after the Japanese surrendered, the Powers family moved back to the farm, where Francis played left guard on the Grundy High School football team and joined his best friend, Jack Goff—who would one day marry his sister Jean—in various adventures. As younger boys, they had sent off some box tops from their corn flakes and formed a Junior Airplane Spotters club, carefully watching the distant skies and learning to tell the difference between the various American military planes of the day, such as the P-51 Mustang and the P-47 Thunderbolt. This activity remained a favorite pastime after the war, along with picking wild strawberries—“The cattle grazed those hills, but they’d leave the strawberries alone,” Jack recalled—and exploring caves. They got to know the game warden, who helped them locate new caves to explore; the boys delighted in the pulse-pounding excitement of crawling through the dark, not knowing what they would find or how far they could go before the walls became too narrow and they would have to turn back.

As a young man, Francis cut a handsome figure, attracting a steady stream of girlfriends. When he sometimes worked cobbling shoes for his father, business tended to pick up from the young ladies. “My sister and her friends were a little older than me,” recalled Liz Boyd, the daughter of a coal miner, “and they took their shoes in all the time just so they could see him. He was quite a good-looking man.”

Francis developed a reputation as a pool shark, according to his buddy Jack, who later owned a pool room next to Oliver’s shoe shop and was something of a pool shark himself. Francis worked as a lifeguard at the local swimming pool, and he earned good money one summer by helping dig a train tunnel for the coal company. But like many sons of coal miners, he was driven by one especially powerful urge: to escape.

Determined that his son would transcend the dead-end life that had ensnared him, Oliver began planning for Francis’s future when he was still a young boy. He was going to become a doctor. After all, doctors earned good money. They didn’t have to spend their days in a big black hole, filling their lungs with soot. They didn’t have to struggle for everything. To Oliver, it was that simple.

At first, Francis dutifully bought into his father’s grand plan, which led him to East Tennessee’s Milligan College, located about 100 miles south, where he pursued a premed curriculum in the years immediately after World War II. Two or three times during the school year, he took the bus home or jumped a train car, usually hitchhiking part of the way. To help pay for his education, he worked a series of jobs, even accepting part-time employment—against Oliver’s wishes—in the same mine where his father toiled for decades.

One summer he landed a job on a crew building a tipple, a large structure used for loading the extracted coal into railroad cars. “Best job I ever had in those days, in terms of [earning] money,” he said.⁵ The work was grueling and long: ten hours a day, seven days a week.

Francis was working toward something, but not toward the life his father wanted for him.

“I had been talked into [becoming a doctor] by my dad,” he said. “He wanted me to be a doctor [and I] was an obedient son. But I soon realized, I was not doctor material…. Didn’t think I was cut out for it.”⁶

Although he graduated from Milligan on schedule in 1950, Francis rebelled against his father by turning his back on medicine, enlisting in the US Air Force after the Korean War broke out. Oliver was deeply disappointed, but his boy was determined to follow his heart into the wild blue yonder.

After basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, Francis was assigned to duty as a photo technician, which allowed him to take the second flight of his life. Boarding the Douglas DC-3 to Denver, he grabbed one of the window seats in the first row, so he could look out over the wing. Several months later, he was accepted into the Aviation Cadet program and methodically worked his way through the various stages required to become a fighter pilot. An attack of appendicitis delayed his training for several months, causing him to miss combat in Korea. He graduated from the flight program just before the armistice was signed in 1953. Only later would it become clear that the illness had played a large role in making him available for a very special assignment.

By the time he arrived at Turner Air Force Base in Albany, Georgia, in July 1953, Francis had stopped calling himself Francis, in all but official matters. Most of his friends outside rural Virginia now knew him as Frank, which he thought sounded more manly, and Frank Powers quickly distinguished himself flying the F-84 Thunderjet, a once cutting-edge plane headed toward obsolescence.

Developed by Republic Aviation, the F-84 was one of the earliest American jet fighters, featuring an Allison J35 turbojet engine and capable of exceeding 600 miles per hour. The aircraft played a large role in the Korean War, particularly as a tactical bomber, but it had proven no match in air-to-air combat against the Soviet Union’s revolutionary, swept-wing MiG-15, which was eventually countered by a US Air Force game changer, North American Aviation’s swept-wing F-86 Sabre.

When Powers reported for duty with the 508th Strategic Fighter Wing, part of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), the Pentagon was busy developing a new use for the latest version of the Thunderjet: dropping nuclear bombs.

Eight years after the top secret Manhattan Project successfully harnessed the power of the atom, leading to President Harry Truman’s fateful decision to order the dropping of the world’s first two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which swiftly ended World War II, the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union colored every aspect of American defense and foreign policy. The Cold War represented a new brand of tension and risk. Never before in the history of the world had two powerful nations, after spending years stockpiling weapons and perfecting delivery systems, been capable of destroying each other in a matter of minutes. All across America, public-school teachers empowered by Civil Defense authorities regularly led students through so-called duck and cover drills, which became as ubiquitous as poodle skirts and ducktails. Beyond the harsh reality that such defensive maneuvers would have proven useless in a direct hit from a thermonuclear blast, the routine reflected the palpable anxiety infusing the otherwise-placid fifties: Someday, the communists might decide to push the button and ignite World War III.

Nowhere was the philosophical and military standoff of the Cold War more routinely evident than in the divided city of Berlin, Germany.

Since being carved up by the victorious nations of World War II, the onetime Nazi capital had served as the tense frontier between East and West. When the Soviets blockaded highway and rail traffic into free West Berlin in 1948–1949, in an attempt to force the United States, Great Britain, and France to withdraw, the Allies mounted a massive resupply effort to become known as the Berlin Airlift. It was the first test of Western resolve in the face of Soviet aggression, and the Soviets eventually blinked.

By the mid-1950s, with a large contingent of US and Soviet forces permanently stationed on opposite sides of the border, creating a powder keg between superpowers waiting for a struck match, the contrast between the zones was stark: freedom and prosperity on one side, tyranny and poverty on the other. Each year, thousands of East Germans fled communism by slipping across the border, forced to escape with only what they could carry. The Soviet-backed East German government began to consider remedies to stop this mass exodus.

Like many Americans who understood what the city represented, Francis Gary Powers dreamed of someday seeing Berlin.

While preparing for his role in the unthinkable, which included detailed training about the handling of nuclear weapons, briefings about US strategy in the case of war, and instructions on where to report in case of a high-threat alert, Powers participated in survival training at two different bases. He learned how to use a parachute, subsist on limited rations for an extended period, and resist brainwashing from the enemy. He believed in being prepared but hoped he would never have to use any of his newly acquired knowledge.

Like Powers, Ohio native Tony Bevacqua was determined to become a pilot. The Air Force initially turned him down, because he had attained only a high-school diploma, causing him to start out as an enlisted man, painting insignias on T-6s and B-25s. When the supply/demand curve turned in his favor, producing a temporary relaxation of the rules, Bevacqua quickly moved through Aviation Cadet training, eventually winding up at Turner, where he shared a four-bedroom house about two miles from the front gate with three other pilots: Wes Upchurch, Vic Milam, and Frank Powers.

Tony considered Frank “a very good pilot” who was “very precise and detail oriented.” He especially admired the man’s abilities on the gunnery range, where he won several competitions while utilizing the F-84’s .50-caliber guns in steep dives.

Over beers at the officer’s club, the two friends talked about women and sports and their shared appreciation for flying fast airplanes and driving fast cars. They laughed about the unsuspecting airliners they frequently lined up on, as part of their routine attack simulations.

“Frank was a personable guy and fun to be around,” Bevacqua said. “By the time I got there, he was spending a lot of time with Barbara.”

About a month after arriving at Turner, a cashier at the post-exchange took a shine to Frank and introduced him to her daughter, who worked as a cashier at a nearby Marine base. Beautiful and full of life, eighteen-year-old Barbara Gay Moore was Frank’s kind of girl. They hit it off immediately. The romance quickly turned serious, and Frank put a ring on her finger, but he became increasingly troubled by her erratic behavior and excessive drinking.

“I’d go on these trips and I’d find out she’s gone out with other men,” Powers confided many years later. “She wouldn’t wear the ring. I was quite suspicious and rightfully so.”⁷

When he was assigned for some temporary duty at Eglin Air Force Base, the massive testing facility along the Gulf Coast in northwest Florida, Barbara agreed to drive down to meet him for the Fourth of July weekend. When the appointed time arrived, she didn’t show up. Without any way to contact her, Barbara’s fiancé was at once concerned and mistrustful. She eventually showed up two days later—“an entire day and night unaccounted for.”⁸ They argued and she made up some story.

Frank was not the type to share too much, but Bevacqua could see his friend wrestling with a dilemma.

“She was a handful, and their relationship was pretty rocky,” Bevacqua said. “But Frank clearly loved her and thought he could make it work.”

After several broken engagements, the couple eventually decided to marry as quickly as possible. Because Barbara wanted her brother to preside over the ceremony, they hastily drove to the small town of Newnan, located about 150 miles north of Albany, Georgia, where Jack Moore was the pastor of Lovejoy Memorial United Methodist Church. The preacher hustled to make the necessary arrangements, including engaging the services of local photographer Joe Norman and asking a friend for a rather big favor.

“I got a call from Jack, who said his sister was marrying this fellow later in the day,” recalled Johnny Estep, who owned a local concrete business and served in the National Guard with the preacher. “It all happened in a hurry and he needed a best man, because he didn’t know anybody in town. Wasn’t any more complicated than that.”

When the small wedding party convened in the living room of the Methodist parsonage, located five blocks east of the courthouse square at 129 East Broad Street, Estep shook hands with the groom, whom he had never met, and wished him well. It was April 2, 1955. No members of the Powers family were in attendance. The ceremony was over in a matter of minutes, after which Mr. and Mrs. Francis Gary Powers rushed off to their honeymoon.⁹

“Never realized I was part of history until many years later,” Estep said in 2015.

Scheduled to complete his four-year hitch in the Air Force toward the end of 1955, First Lieutenant Powers began making inquiries with several major airlines, seduced by the thought of flying a Douglas DC-6 or a Lockheed C-121 Super Constellation to exotic locales. Now that sounded like a great way to make a living. But none of the carriers showed any interest in hiring him, so he extended his commission indefinitely, energized by the opportunity to keep flying and happy to be bringing home more than four hundred dollars per month. It sure beat shoveling coal.

Several weeks after his buddy Frank told him he was planning to make a career of the Air Force, Bevacqua arrived at their house one night and noticed that Frank’s bedroom was empty. All of his belongings were suddenly gone. Usually, if a pilot was reassigned, he would be given time for a rollicking send-off at the officer’s club and would leave a forwarding address for his mail. But Frank had not said a word to anybody.

“He just disappeared.”